#and failure means brain damage and bills; which are the last things I need

[medicinemane]

I really need to stop living; I need to blow my brains out or at least pick another riskier option

#like I've said; I don't like gambling; so any option that's less than a 100% kill is a risk #and you could say a gun isn't a 100% kill; but I'll tell you... well no; I'll skip the methodology to improve success rates #and I'll just say I'm 50 miles from the nearest town and the fire department isn't gonna be up to dealing with this #even if I fuck it up I will 100% die from a bullet to the head #where as hanging shit can snap of I could resuscitate or something; there's risks of not going far enough #and failure means brain damage and bills; which are the last things I need #similarly a lot of poisons are more likely to just fuck up the stomach bad for life but not kill #there's only one I have high faith in right now which I just haven't been able to bother ordering #(no there's others I have high faith in; but they don't sell cyanide and I'm not up to synthesizing it) #but the real point is I need to die; and I've looked into it time and time again and... there's only so many viable options #and hanging has a high success rate; but it has failure points and huge risks if you fail #poisons are a very bad idea; don't even consider them; except for one I'm not sharing that looks like it would work #but most won't; you'll literally just hurt yourself #so... you see why I keep coming back to gun; and like most things that's expensive and 50 miles away #but I really can't go on living #fucking parasite that I am

[scripttorture]

I'm writing a human character in sci-fi setting who has been betrayed by his friend and is then kidnapped and phycologically tortured by the friend to the point after he escapes he has severe PTSD. I'm struggling to write it though as I'm not sure what kind of mental torture he could be put through without going over the top. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

I’m going to start off with a possibly obvious point: kidnapping is traumatic. If the main thing you want from this sub-plot is to give a character PTSD you don’t need to go any further then that. Not everyone who is kidnapped will develop PTSD but it’s a realistic outcome.

 So…. Phycology is the study of algae, I’m assuming that’s not what’s meant here. But if it is then please correct me and I will happily spend some time reading up on algae to help you out. (That is not sarcasm, teach me about algae.) :)

 I am guessing that this is a misspelling of ‘psychologically’ and this is someone new to the blog who hasn’t heard The Talk about ‘psychological torture’ yet.

 So going forward: Anon it’s OK to make mistakes. I’m here because I understand how hard it is to find good quality information on torture. And because I understand how much misinformation is popularised in both fictional and allegedly-factual media.

 I strongly advise that you don’t use the phrase ‘psychological torture’ in your writing.

 Torture isn’t psychological. There’s nothing clever or psychological about hitting someone’s feet with a stick.

 And the phrase ‘psychological torture’ has been used for years by torture apologists. They use it as a way to dismiss survivors and belittle their experience. They do that by declaring that some types of torture are ‘just’ psychological; using this term to suggest particular tortures don’t cause physical harm and that survivors are faking their responses.

 This is bullshit. Don’t buy into it. Don’t support it.

 Torture is physical abuse and physical harm. The lasting psychological symptoms and effects are due to underlying changes in the structure of the brain which happen in response to extreme pain and stress.

 O’Mara, the neuroscientist who wrote about torture, likened it to brain damage. He also went so far as to argue that it’s deliberately inflicted organ failure. And you know what, I’m not a neuroscientist, so I’m not gonna argue with that assessment.

 I don’t know what you’re picturing when you say ‘psychological torture’. You haven’t given me a time frame for how long this character is held or information on the kind of culture this fictional world has. Which makes it hard for me to suggest specific things.

 What I can do is give you an idea of what torture looks like now and what sort of effects you’d expect in survivors. You can then consider whether torture is right for your story.

 Most torture nowadays is ‘clean’. Now different researchers use different terms for this (I use Rejali’s term) but what it essentially means is: a form of physical abuse that is extremely unlikely to leave obvious physical marks on the victim’s body.

 Lest you get the idea that is represents ‘advancement’ most of the clean torture techniques currently used are hundreds of years old. Some of them are thousands of years old.

 There’s been quite a bit of debate in the field about why clean torture is currently so common and why so many organisations have abandoned scarring torture. You can read more about that over here. Or if you feel you have a wealth of time on your hands you can try tackling all 800 pages of Rejali’s Torture and Democracy (highly recommended, also very large).

 The theory Rejali puts forward is that the shift is about evidence. Obvious physical injuries make it easier to build up cases against torturers.

 And a lack of obvious physical injuries can be used to discredit survivors.

 These are the sort of torture techniques that get labelled ‘psychological’ as a way to dismiss them: the ones that are being used around the world today.

 If you’re wondering what sort of thing I’m talking about things like sleep deprivation, beatings (yes this can be done without leaving obvious marks), near-drowning, forcing someone to exercise until they collapse, Tasers.

 I have a post here on typical torture practices in different countries in the modern era.

 While the physical effects of clean tortures are hard to definitively prove we’re still taking about incredibly dangerous things.

 Tasers, used according to the instructions, leave no mark on the skin. They can also cause heart attacks, seizures (in vulnerable individuals) and often cause death by falling injuries. Forced exercise, beatings and stress positions all cause kidney failure. In the case of stress positions that’s after the swelling in extremities that gets to the point of popping the skin open in massive ulcers.

 Sleep deprivation causes a whole slew of interestingly awful physical and psychological effects before (according to studies in mice) leading to death from multiple organ failure as the microbes in the gut take over the entire body.

 What I’m trying to say here is that if you’re looking for something dignified, without the vomit and pus and shit, then torture probably doesn’t fit the bill.

 And clean tortures can still cause physically disabling injuries.

 Drowning and choking tortures (such as water boarding) can cause brain damage. Incorrectly applied restraints can lead to a limb needing to be amputated.

 On top of all this are the long term psychological effects which I have a post on here. Memory problems are discussed in more detail here.

 PTSD is a possible symptom but it’s not guaranteed. The truth is that while we know the possible symptoms different individual survivors develop different symptoms and we don’t know why.

 If you’ve thought about it and you want to use PTSD because it adds something to your story then by all means do so. But don’t feel that it is your only option.

 Survivors do recover. They are not ‘broken’ and unable to live or enjoy life. They’re mentally ill and often disabled and recovery is a process of learning to live with their conditions.

 Wrapping this up: think about what you’re writing.

 I am not saying that you shouldn’t write torture. I am not saying that you should. I’m asking that you, and every other writer who comes here, consider what you’re committing to.

 If you don’t want a character to be dealing with multiple complex mental health problems for the rest of every story you use them in, it’s probably not a good fit.

 If you want something that doesn’t have even a chance of causing lasting physical damage, torture is probably not a good fit.

 Picture where the story is going. If you think the narrative could be the same without torture then you’re probably not capturing the scale of the impact torture has.

 I have a post on common inaccurate tropes here. I have a post on researching torture here. I have a list of sources over here. I also have a lot of asks tagged as sci fi.

 Consider why you want to write torture in this story. What is it adding to your narrative? What is it doing?

 If the main thing you want is this character to have PTSD afterwards that is possible with kidnapping alone. Physical attacks make PTSD more likely but they’re not necessary for its development.

 Kidnap and imprisonment is betrayal enough. It is reason enough for all the big, powerful emotions you want to put into this relationship. Ask yourself if torture really does add any more to that.

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #torture apologia #torture does not work #torture survivors are not broken #torture is not safe #clean torture #scarring torture #modern torture #writing torture #writing survivors #ptsd #effects of torture #sci fi ask #educate me about algae

[andiandyandee]

We Are Going to Be Friends Pt. 5

I finally finished this stupid chapter! And I have to apologize because it is not a happy one. (Not the saddest either, though. That’s reserved to the final chapter. Anyone who has read my other works in this AU knows what’s coming there.)

 Words: 2921

Tag List: @datfearlessfangirl @cas-is-a-hunter @princemesscharming @illogicalthinking (Let me know if you want tagged!

Here’s the last part if you missed it  and here’s the whole series on ao3

Okay, Here’s the Fic

     When Logan picked himself off the ground, he could tell by the black dots swimming in his vision something was very wrong. He carefully cleaned up the broken glass, ignoring the way his hands shook, and made his way outside. It had somehow gotten dark since he had last been out. He knew if he went to his room he would go to sleep, and he needed to stay awake until his brother got home. He made it to the end of his parent’s yard, to the staircase that led to the sidewalk. His bag sat next to him on the steps, but his homework was all but forgotten. He was mostly focusing on his breathing, actively trying to remain conscious. He did not notice the loud pair of teenagers wandering past his house, which was not uncommon anyway, Logan hadn’t realized it before, but Remus and Roman’s friend group had always been wandering around the town, and plenty of the neighbors complained about how loud they were, but most of the noise was just the twins, whose voices carried without them even trying. He did not notice the way they slowed to a stop and stared at him, calling out his name, trying to get his attention. He did not hear the whispered,

      “Is that Logan?” or the more panicked,

     “What the hell happened to him?” 

     When the twins made it to Logan, he was coherent enough to glare at them. He was not able to do much more than that. He did have enough of his parents' DNA in him to swing at Remus when he grabbed Logan’s arm, apparently. The glass embedded in Logan’s hand cut Remus’ jaw, but the punch itself didn’t have much power behind it. All it really managed to do was cause Logan to groan in pain. 

      “Jesus, Logan. What the hell is going on?” Roman was looking quickly between the two bleeding teenagers. Remus looked shocked more than hurt, and Logan looked hurt more than angry. 

      “Good news, little brother! We no longer have the same face!” Remus was looking at his reflection in his cell phone screen. “This is totally going to scar.” 

      “Rem. Need you to focus, buddy.” Roman was more than a little panicked. Logan was looking kind of grey, his eyes glassy and his brow shining with sweat. “What do we do?” Remus seemed to refocus when he heard Roman’s tone.

      “Oh! Uh, we should probably call someone, right? Is this his house? Maybe get his parents.” Logan shook his head violently at that. 

     “No no no I’m… I’m sorry plea..se. don’t send me back to the… them.” His words were slurred, and he was trying to move away from the brothers. 

      “Woah, hold on there nerdy wolverine.” Remus coaxed Logan back into a sitting position. “Nobody is going to make you go anywhere, but you’re gonna pass out if we don’t get your hand looked at. And your face, too. Did you try to go swimming in a bar trash can or something? You stink!” Roman gently smacked his brother’s arm. “Oh, sorry.”

      “What Remus means to say is you are bleeding and smell like beer, and need stitches probably. We need to know what happened, or who to call.” 

      “You don’t… you don’t need to call anyone. I’m... I… I’ll be fine until L.. til L gets off work. Go back to… go back to being farther away than this.” Logan was leaning heavily against Remus, who laughed in a way that was definitely more out of fear than amusement. 

      “How about I sit with you until L gets back, and Ro runs home to grab some first aid stuff?” Roman looked like he wanted to protest, but Remus ignored him. “What do you think we’d need to help you, Logan?” 

      “Tw...eezers? And water.” Logan nodded like that was obvious. “Maybe a… maybe a light? And bandaids.” Roman nodded, backing away about ten feet before turning and booking it around the corner. 

      “So, Three Days Glass- oh god that was awful sorry- You want to tell me what happened here?” 

      “I… went swimming in… a bar trash can,” Logan joked weakly. Remus was fully supporting his weight at this point.

      “So we aren’t going to talk about it then?” Logan was now staring at Remus’ face with mild curiosity.

      “I think you’re bleeding.” Remus laughed loudly at that.

      “Yeah, some asshole punched me with glass in his hand.” Logan nodded solemnly

      “I’ll fight them.” Roman was heading back towards them now, a first aid kit and a large sports bottle in his arms. “Your brother is.. Fast” Logan mumbled. “He doesn’t like me.” Remus looked over at the younger kid. 

      “What makes you think that?” Logan went to answer, but he was cut off by Roman’s loud voice.

      “Okay Logan, Do you want me to start with your face or hands?”

      “Actually, Ro, I think I should be the one to do this.” Remus gently took the supplies from Roman’s hands. “I’m better with blood than you are.” Roman’s eyes widened, but he nodded and flipped on the light instead, shining it at Logan’s cut face.  With the new light, the brothers could see the bruise forming on the side opposite the glass, but neither mentioned it. Logan talked Remus through the best way to remove the glass, explaining how to clean out the cuts with the water, the squeeze top on the sports bottle was very good at that, to get any small pieces out. Remus promptly ignored his brother, who was mumbling quietly about how much blood there was. 

      “We should call a doctor, Remus, this isn’t like when you come back from the woods with scrapes from trees and rocks, glass is serious” Roman was barely coherent. “We should call Dad, at least.” 

      “No.” Remus shot back without looking up from where he was not pulling glass from Logan’s hand. “He said not to call anyone, Roman. Just shine the damned light on his hand so I don’t fuck anything up.” Roman mumbled on ‘okay’ and shined the light back on Logan’s hand. “That big one probably needs stitches, but the rest aren’t as bad as they look. He’s probably like this more from the pain and shock than actual blood loss.” Remus muttered. Mostly to himself. “The hands are made up of thirty-four muscles, twenty-nine bones, three major nerves, and two major arteries, with around 2,500 nerve receptors per square centimeter in the hand” He shook his head. “Need to focus, focus” Logan looked up at Remus curiously. “ Glass injuries are exceptionally dangerous because small fragments of the glass can be missed, causing infections that can spread from the skin to the blood to the heart and brain, causing major organ damage and failure, eventually leading to-”

      “Did you know Mars has almost the same amount of landmass as Earth?” Logan asked Remus, who immediately cut off from his spiraling thoughts to look at him curiously.

      “Mars is way smaller than Earth,” Remus argued, still carefully cleaning each of the smaller cuts, most of which were on the palm of Logan’s hand, avoiding the biggest one, which was firmly set in between his knuckles.

     “That’s true. Mars... Mars only has 15% of Earth’s volume, but since... 70% of Earth is covered in water... They have about the same land.” Remus hummed at that. “Did you know that there have been signs of liquid water on Mars?” Roman looked at Logan incredulously. 

      “Specs, I appreciate a good martian lecture as much as the next guy, but why are we having it now? Aren’t there more important things to be talking about?” Logan ignored him, still focusing on Remus.

      “We know Mars has water in the form of ice, but because of the extreme temperatures, scientists assume the water is either incred..” He drew in a shaky breath, “incredibly salty or is otherwise high in something that prevents it from freezing. Its temperatures range from -153 to 20 °C with surface temperatures from -87 to -5 °C.” Remus had moved on to the largest injury in the hand. His voice wavered a little when he called out,

      “Roman, can you come here?” Roman moved closer, seeing the injury up close for the first time.��

      “Holy shit, Rem there is no way-” 

      “I know, Ro. What do I-” Logan finally looked at his hand properly. The largest glass shard, about an inch and a half and jagged, and still bleeding noticeably. The swing he had taken at Remus had probably set it much further into his hand than the rest. 

      “It’s going to hurt when it is removed.” Logan nodded, as if steeling himself to a resolution. 

      “Lo I don’t think I can pull that out. I don’t think I could get a good enough grip with these.” Remus held up the tweezers. 

      “No, I don’t imagine you could. Thank you for your assistance, Remus, Roman.” He nodded to each of the twins in turn. “Allow me to compensate you for the bandages.” Logan used his good hand to pull his wallet out of the bookbag next to him. 

      “What? Logan you don’t have to pay us for bandaids.” Remus looked shocked. “We’re your friends. We wanted to help. Come on, I’ll call Dad and he can take us to the ER. They’ll be able to get that big piece out and make sure there are no other bits we can’t see.” Logan recoiled from Remus’ hand on his arm and held out a twenty-dollar bill.

      “I appreciate your help, but we are not friends.” Both twins looked at him with identical looks of confusion.  “I have no interest in any companionship. Please, take the money.” Roman rolled his eyes and took the money, setting it down on the ground between them. 

      “Logan, I don’t know what makes you think we’re going to take that bullshit as an answer, but we aren’t and there’s no way we’re just going to take your money and leave you bleeding on the sidewalk, either.” Roman insisted.

      “Yeah! We’re trauma bonded now!” Remus replied, slightly too enthusiastically. Logan stood, ignoring the wave of nausea and vertigo that threatened to send him crashing back to the ground. 

      “No. I am not interested in being friends. Remus, make sure you take your medication when you get home, I believe you’re becoming manic.” Remus flushed red. “Have a good evening, gentlemen.” Logan grabbed his bag and went back to his parents’ house, avoiding the front door and walking around to the back yard. He could hear the twins arguing, but he ignored them in favor of searching the shed for the tool kit he knew was there but had never been used. It only took him a few minutes to find the pliers, still in their plastic packaging. His hands were still shaking, his head was pounding, and his heart was beating much too quickly as he pulled the package open with his teeth. It took another ten minutes and several failed attempts before he pulled the glass out. It took another forty-five minutes for L to find him, leaning against the workbench, eyes red and breaths coming in short, rattling sobs. 

      It took until Monday for him to leave his bed, his brother assuring him that he had let the school know he had been ‘mugged’ and had needed a few days to recover. But time passed, as it most always does, and Monday came, leaving Logan to walk into the high school with his chin held high, back perfectly straight, glasses sitting perfectly even, as if the deep purple bruise, which now had yellows and greens, was not there. As if his right hand, not his dominant hand, thankfully, wasn’t tightly bandaged. As if he wasn’t still far too pale. He wasn’t speaking much, only a few words here and there since Wednesday night. L was worried, but it wasn’t uncommon for Logan to go silent for a few days, and even up to a week, at a time, so he mostly let it go. 

      Logan didn’t bother saying goodbye to his brother as he turned into the freshman hallway. He saw his locker, which had several “Get well” cards taped to it. Small towns meant everyone knew everything. Or at the very least, they thought they knew everything. He didn’t bother to read them, pulling them down from the door and setting them on the top shelf. He hung up his jacket, leaving him in his navy blue dress shirt, his sleeves rolled halfway up and the top two buttons undone, showing just the collar of his t-shirt underneath it. Several of Remus and Roman’s friends tried to stop and talk to him as he made his way to homeroom, but he pretended to not notice. He brushed past every one of them, pointedly ignoring those who tried talking to him in classes, pretending like they weren’t waving him to their groups now that the first semester projects had begun. He spoke only when spoken to by a teacher, otherwise keeping his jaw clenched tightly closed. 

      By the time his English class had come around, most of the group had stopped trying to catch his attention. Remus looked at him as he walked in, giving him a ghost of a smile before looking back to Roman, who was facing away from the door. Logan didn’t acknowledge he saw it, stepping past them and sitting in his seat without saying a word. He ignored the way Roman’s eyes bored into him. He ignored the way his eyes burned and his throat tightened when Remus asked how his hand was. He took notes, didn’t answer any questions he wasn’t specifically asked, and pretended as if the Sanders twins weren’t both not so subtly trying to get his attention. When the bell rang, he flinched, only a little, as he did at most loud noises now. 

      ‘Trauma bonded’ Remus had joked, not realizing that there actually was genuine trauma. This had not been the first time his mother had lost her temper, no, but this was the first, and last, though Logan didn’t know that, time that she had caused actual physical damage. It had broken something in Logan, some sense of security he hadn’t even known he had. 

      When she had come to his room the next morning to apologize, panicked apologies had torn their way from his throat. They both were in shock, him lowering himself to be as small as possible, her trying her best to not scare him more. 

      By Sunday, Logan had managed to bite back any visible emotional response to her. He had done this by shoving down every visible emotional reaction he made. He had wondered if it was healthy to be quite so good at keeping his emotions swallowed down. 

      Now, Monday, his face was completely passive. Not even an eyebrow raise gave away what he was feeling. When he came into the lunchroom, there were many eyes on him, several people whispering about how anyone who talked to him said he sounded like a ‘robot’. His responses to ‘are you okay?’ ranged from ‘there will be no permanent damage’ to ‘yes, I am quite well, excuse me.’ but all answers were given in the same flat, bored tone. He went through the hot lunch line, getting what he suspected was supposed to be a chicken sandwich but looked more like a beige hockey puck. He sat at an empty table towards the front of the lunchroom, not far from the Sanders twin’s table, ignoring his brother, who had waved him over. He was sitting, picking at his food and listening to music when someone sat down next to him. He did not take his headphones off, refusing to even look to see who they were. He knew it was not L, so he suspected it was one of the people who had attempted to make ‘friends’ on his first day. If they tried to talk to him, he didn’t notice. They didn’t touch him and sat at least one seat away. When the lunch period was over, they got up and left before Logan had even taken his headphones off. 

      The rest of the day went similarly, him ignoring Elliot and Kai other than to discuss the lab they had been given.  The next week went exactly the same. He still didn’t look to see who sat with him at lunch, still didn’t speak to the twins, still answered questions with replies that sounded like they were written by an AI. Any answers to teachers' questions regarding class were answered as if he were reading them from the textbook. 

      Two weeks passed, nothing changed much. Remus stopped smiling at him, even a little when he entered English class. Whoever had been sitting with him at lunch apparently decided it wasn’t worth it. Teachers called on him to answer questions only when nobody else seemed to have an answer, knowing he would give them a flat, incredibly accurate explanation even if his hand wasn’t raised, which it never was. 

     By the end of the first semester, as far as anyone could tell, Logan Starr had no emotions. Even L had eventually given up on trying to get through to the younger teen. Logan told himself he wanted that. It was better to be alone. Emotions were unnecessary. Friends were unnecessary. Happiness was unnecessary. And frankly, Logan told himself, he was unnecessary too.

#logan sanders #roman sanders #remus sanders #sympathetic remus #punk au #high school #eventual logince #angst #tw blood #Logan is a punk #and is traumatized #child abuse #yikes okay i'm sorry #i'll make it up to you #hopefully #welcome to apathetic logan #he sticks around fro a while

[lovelyirony]

Hello friend! I'm in a mood and just feel like reading something sad. Could you pretty please maybe write some sad winteriron? Maybe something to do with terminal illness but it's up to you!

Being human means that there are many things that could happen to you and you can’t help it. 

Like cancer. 

Or being hit by a bus. 

Maybe a heart condition that you didn’t know about until you were thirty-two, had weird chest pains, and then found you didn’t have genetic testing done and neither parent told you about any extensive medical history because they both were estranged from the family. 

Okay. That was specific. 

But Tony was laying in a hospital bed and the doctors told him that he wouldn’t live past forty and he would die of heart failure. 

He feels like he should be hit harder by this. He only has eight years left to live. He shouldn’t be in his kitchen making eggs, he should probably be hysterically calling Rhodey and Pepper and Happy and asking them about funeral arrangements and what he’s going to do and quite possibly if spending the extra money to get the executive suite at the fancy hotel in Switzerland is worth it. 

Except he doesn’t want to. 

Death is a messy process. Not for him, they assured him of that. But everyone asks you questions and your loved ones. You have to figure out where to bury someone if they didn’t do it beforehand. Sometimes you have debates about cremation. Other times about how much you want to spend on a casket. 

He really doesn’t want to look at Rhodey or Pepper or Happy when they talk about that because he knows that their faces will break into tears and he will see the tear tracks when they go home to their houses and cry some more. 

Nonsense. 

If he can hide it, then he will. He doesn’t want to be a bother, it would be...unfortunate. 

Besides. He’s lonely at the top, and there’s no climbing back down the mountain. He won’t pull a Scrooge and get visited by three ghosts. 

So he lives. 

He pulls some risky moves, but nothing that makes Pepper have the “are you up to something serious that could potentially cause my midlife crisis to go off-schedule” talk. 

Again. 

He donates more money to charities and helps people pay off medical bills and walks around New York late at night to wonder why he’s going to die in eight or maybe even seven years instead of the proposed twenty to thirty. (What? He wasn’t going to be too generous, he knew himself.) 

Tony wonders sometimes if he will meet someone and they will make him want to live so much more than he can. It will be like those romantic dramas with rainfall and hair plastered to foreheads and passionate kisses that leave some of the older women teary-eyed and wishing that their husband would do something like that. 

But he’s a genius, so he knows statistics like the back of his hand. 

There will be no one. 

Eight turns into seven. He celebrates by getting absolutely slammed on New Year’s Eve and wakes up to the shittiest radio station blaring. He’s pretty sure they’re playing Maroon 5, which fucking ugh. 

New Year, new resolutions. He doesn’t bother to make one. 

“Why not? You usually make a joke one,” Rhodey says. 

“We are all going to die,” Tony answers. “Why make a resolution if I don’t want to? If I were to die in a year, it wouldn’t really matter.” 

“Okay Lord Byron,” Rhodey says, rolling his eyes. “You want Hot Topic giftcards for your birthday? Huh?” 

Tony laughs. 

Rhodey always knows how to make him laugh. 

Tony doesn’t know how he’s going to make Rhodey laugh when he’s dead. So that’s a breaking point where he stares at the wall and starts to write random memories down, like the time they snuck up onto a hotel’s roof to see the city wake up and the wind chapped their lips and Tony swore that he’d never leave Rhodey. 

Except he is. 

And he realizes that he needs to let Pepper and Rhodey and Happy know that he loves them a lot. So he starts the letters. 

He writes a letter to Pepper to remind her about how much she regrets getting light blue nail polish every single time she gets a manicure, and she should never get it. (Yes, even for a wedding she’s in, get something, anything other than that.) 

He writes a letter to Happy that is basically just wondering about how they can troll asshole celebrities that they know. He doesn’t know, but maybe he will find some dirt so that if Happy ever falls on dire times, he will have some extra cash flow coming in. Not that Tony would let that happen, but say Happy ever did. Maybe someone stole his bank information. Who knows what will happen in seven or six years. 

Summer still sucks. He thinks maybe he’ll like it more, now that he knows that his heart is going to quit. But it still smells like piss and garbage on the streets of New York, people are still blasting shitty music and riding bikes too dangerously, and he still feels gross by two p.m. when he goes outside to face the world. 

Not even the treat of shaved ice helps this. 

“At least I won’t have to face another one in seven years,” Tony murmurs. “Thank god for that.” 

Seven turns into six. 

It’s around this time when an attractive redhead shows up at his office, bends down a bit lower than necessary, and Tony gets the feeling that SHIELD should really train their agents a bit better if they want something out of him. 

He organizes a meeting with Fury, walks in, and states that they cannot afford him. 

“You know that your help would be particularly useful,” Fury says. 

“For you to get what?” He asks. “Don’t bullshit me with some answer about compassion. Peggy Carter was kind, but she wasn’t a damned saint.” 

“There are new...developments.” 

Like the fact that they’ve found Captain America. And Bucky Barnes didn’t fall off into a random ravine, so the four different conspiracy theory documentary videos that Tony watched last year were about five hours of wasted time. 

They need somewhere to stay. Fury wants Tony to foot the bill. 

“What, can’t ask the government for funding?” Tony asks. “I’m sure if they can up the budget for military every year, that covers Cap and his old pal. Hell, I bet they’ll even open up the champagne fridges.” 

“They don’t know about it.” 

“And why would that be? Because you’d rather have idols to yourself?” 

It’s a low-blow. But Tony agrees to take them in. He just doesn’t want to see them, notably because his father was a bit of a Captain America fan, Tony had had a crush on the former sharpshooter when he was a younger guy, and it was all kinds of messed up. 

But he gives them their own little apartment, one of his safehouses. 

“This ain’t little,” Steve mutters to himself, unpacking a box of plates. Natasha has been nice enough to show them around and tell them about the changes she finds relevant. She forced them to listen to what she called ‘the goddess of pop’ in the car, and Bucky nearly clawed out the stereo after “Toxic” came on. 

“Fuckin’ palace,” Bucky mutters. “Who’s is this?” 

“A man in high places,” Natasha answers. “He doesn’t want to be known. Doesn’t exactly play well with others.” 

She leaves them be, and there’s so much that has changed. Steve is still looking for any sign of the past he can find in Bucky, and Bucky...

He’s not who he used to be. He doesn’t remember half the shit that Steve does. Perks of having your brain so fried up that you can barely remember your middle name. 

They eat together in silence. 

“I guess...I guess we have to figure out who we really are,” Steve says. “Because you’re not who I remember, and I’m not...I guess I’m not either.” 

Bucky nods. 

“Do you reckon we’ll like going out dancing?” 

The answer is a strong no, although Steve has to say the drinks have improved a hell of a lot more. He likes the ones that come with the small paper umbrellas. He doesn’t know where they get them, but it gives him an idea for an art project. 

Tony doesn’t hear much about the wonder boys. He doesn’t want to, not really. Natasha just says they’re getting more and more adjusted and she has evidence of Steve Rogers going clubbing. 

“Oh my god,” Tony groans. “Romanoff, do not.” 

“It’s funny.” 

“I don’t wanna know.” 

“What, you jealous that you’re not dancing with him?” 

“Hardly. Blonde and beefy isn’t my type.” 

“Then what is?” 

“Classified.” Tony answered. “Now, is there anything else you want SHIELD to suck out of me?” 

“Well, my manicure funding is getting rather low...” 

Tony snorts, but points towards the door. 

His chest hurts. It’s been happening. He’s actually gotten used to it. In a way, he’s more concerned when it doesn’t hurt. He went to another specialist. They say his death sentence is signed, even if they don’t word it like that. Here’s how it is usually worded: 

“I have a colleague who works at insert-clinic/hospital-here...I can refer you to Dr. So-and-So?” 

They can. But it’s another list of referrals of so-and-so’s and clinics and appointments at the most inopportune times. 

All for nothing, because Tony knows that he can’t be fixed. The human body sometimes works like a machine. But it’s not one. It’d be like Tony calling a dog a wolf. Similar, but no one wants to bring a wolf into their house as a pet. 

He gets a phone call from someone named Deputy Director Hill. 

-

He needs a new arm. 

Barnes needs a new arm. Of course he does. Tony should’ve expected that, of course. Hydra isn’t exactly known for revolutionizing prosthetics or being particularly kind to their projects that they work on. So Tony automatically has a one-up. 

He gets Barnes to come to this mechanic garage, surrounded by old tin signs and vintage cars that cost more than most of the monthly rent of penthouses in New York. 

Bucky does a double-take. 

“Howard?” 

“I hope not,” Tony answers. “Hop up on the chair for me, please. I’m getting you a new arm.” 

“This is fine,” Barnes automatically spouts. Tony can see the damage from here, and can even point out that the arm’s reaction time is probably the worst it has been currently. 

“If you want to stick to your Great Depression ideals, then by all means be my guest and go bitch in a grocery store about prices,” Tony responds dryly. “But if you want an arm that’s gonna be actually good, then sit.” 

So he does. 

Tony looks incredibly similar to his father. But there’s something different about him. Something softer, almost. Bucky didn’t know Howard nearly as well as others did, but he knew that Tony wasn’t his father. 

“How are you adjusting to the city?” Tony asks. 

"Still the shithole we all know and love,” Bucky swears. “I think the rats got bigger.” 

“They did. It’s amusing and horrifying at the same time. You ride the subway yet?” 

“Yes and I’ve come to terms with it. Lots of new things to learn about it.” 

Barnes’ visits become more frequent. They talk about New York stuff. Tony tells him all about the fun events that have happened that he missed while he was doing time as an icicle. 

It’s nice, talking to him. Tony finally has someone who understands fatalistic humor and doesn’t respond with 

“That’s scary, Tony.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Bucky just says “cheers” and decides to tell Tony about the time he nearly died in 1992 because he lost his footing on the Eiffel Tower. 

Tony laughs, and laughs harder than he thought he had in a long time. 

-

Six turns into five. 

Bucky gets closer, and they have...something. He’s not sure what it is yet, but he knows that they go on breakfast dates most of the time and he knows the coffee orders by heart. 

“I think you’ve found someone,” Pepper says, teasing. “Look at you.” 

“Yeah, look at me,” Tony murmurs. 

He has five years left. That’s plenty of time to date someone and break up, right? 

Except. 

It’s...wonderful to date Bucky. They go all over, have fun trying the shittiest restaurants in town, and even get Steve to get out more and socialize with the group. 

They date and celebrate holidays together and have fun candles and--

Five turns into four. 

“Not that bad,” Tony whispers to himself when he’s getting ready for bed. 

“What’s not bad?” Bucky asks. 

“Nothing, sweetheart,” Tony says. “Just got a new toothpaste.” 

They watch It’s a Wonderful Life and Tony can’t really focus, not when he’s thinking about the fact that he still hasn’t picked out a design for his urn. 

Not when he realizes that he needs to break up with Bucky and make it a whole big scene so that no one will talk to him. It has to be about two years before the date, he thinks. 

He goes to another Dr. So-and-So. They say he might actually have one more year, but who knows. 

He doesn’t. 

But he wakes up with Bucky every day and they make breakfast, and he thinks that maybe he could tell him? Maybe? 

The words get stuck in his mouth. 

He can’t. 

He meets with his lawyer for the will. 

“Why making sudden changes?” 

“Just like to shake things up,” Tony says with a smile. “Never know what’s going to happen, right?” 

“You are right about that,” the lawyer says. He’s a bit uncomfortable. Tony Stark looks at him like he knows that his life is short and that something else will come up. But it’s not the lawyer’s job to ask if things really are okay, and it’s not like Tony would tell him anyway. 

So he makes the changes to the will. 

Tony looks at Bucky as he’s napping, face so peaceful. 

He can’t ruin that. 

#lovelyirony writes #for some reason tumblr never lets me put in a 'read more' link until like after i've done all this shit so here's to hoping this works #winteriron #:( #hope this fits the sad theme anon #tony stark #bucky barnes #rhodey #pepper potts #happy hogan #steve rogers

[j0x06ber]

Stream of Consciousness #1

Thirteen years ago I was ten. At the time I was a seventy five pound, bright eyed little boy. I had big plans for my life. I was going to do well in school, go to college and begin a career writing fiction novels. I looked up to the likes of Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. Easily scared, I recall when I was six or seven, I slept in the spare room on the second story of my grandmothers house.

One night, my parents had left for the night and I was in bed. The darkness of the room was overwhelming. It felt as though tendrils were reaching up the bunk bed I slept in from all sides. Waiting for me to fall asleep. A delusion of my young mind to be sure, but it felt real at the time. I could almost see them, swaying back and fourth and snaking their way up the wall. What really scared me though was the fire alarm. It looked like like an evil red eye and it would blink as it watched me. As I stared at it and attempted to slow my breathing I could have sworn I saw teeth forming around the edges of the alarm, slowly creating a distorted and twisted grin around the eye and in a fit of fear, I ran out of the room.

Afraid I would get in trouble with the babysitter, I snuck down to the second landing that lead to the entry way, and curled up on the off-white carpet. I was just out of her sight, but close enough to the light and noise from the living room to bring me at least a bit of comfort. I watched the swinging chair my baby brother was in and listened to the soft clicking as it swayed back and fourth. Eventually I fell asleep and was found on the staircase. My family still has pictures of me huddled up the corner against the rafter and wall. Like a scared puppy.

This was a reoccurring theme throughout my life. I would regularly wake up and see stuff in the night. Even into my early teens, I would wake up and see the figure of a man standing outside of my room, or tapping at the window. I would hear disturbing whistling coming from the streets and manic howls. I was always scared.

This followed me throughout my life. The fear is no longer a result of the figments of my imagination, but rather something tangible. I no longer fear the figures in the night. They’ve long since stopped appearing to me. I fear my life direction at this point. I fear the people around me. I fear failure and the thought of having to live a whole life alone and in perpetual destitute.

When I was ten my brother was hit by a car. I was a bright student and had caught the attention of my teachers that year, and they had extended the offer to send me to The Tech Academy. My parents, ecstatic at the thought of their son attending what amounts to summer school at San Jose University didn’t so much as blink before signing me up, and that summer I began attending a course on robotics and hydroelectric power.

On the last day of summer, I returned home from San Jose to the flashing lights and sirens of an ambulance and police cars. On the grass in the front yard my youngest brothers bike was sat out, mangled. The bike was essentially bent in half; the tires and handlebars twisted. He had been riding his bike without a helmet, and in a dare with the neighbors kid, attempted to ride across a busy street that was at the end of our road. For context, we lived on the outskirts of town near a mushroom farm. Because there weren’t police actively patrolling this area and there was almost never traffic, people would drive down this road faster than they would the freeway. One such woman was doing eighty when my brother attempted to ride across the street. She slammed on the breaks, but it was too little too late, and hit him as he attempted to recross the road.

He would spend the next year in a coma at the hospital. The doctors repeatedly told us it was unlikely he would ever come out of it, and that even if he did, with the damage to his brain he would probably spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state. My parents decided to foot the bill though and hold out hope. In the end it paid off for them. He began to display movement in his fingers, and in the following months he was able to lift his head and move his arms.

He essentially had to start from scratch at 6 years old. He needed to relearn how to walk and talk. It would take years of physical therapy before he was, for the most part, functional again.

My parents weren’t around then. The issues I already had with depression and social anxiety would get worse during this period of time; as I stopped talking to people at school to avoid conversations related to my brothers accident and opted instead to spend most nights alone in my room, working on school projects or reading.

As time went on my feelings of detachment from the people and world around me would continue to worsen. It was no longer a case of just not wanting to talk. Instead it felt as though an impenetrable wall had been constructed between myself and everyone around me. I couldn’t relate to anyone, I didn’t know what to say in casual conversation, and the very act of speaking to others evoked a fight or flight response. If you are familiar with the borderlands series, my response to social interactions was similar, albeit less exaggerated, to that of  Patricia Tannis. During this time I also regularly felt like I wasn’t in control of my body or actions. Everything I did felt like it was being done by an outside force, and I was just a spectator to it all. Despite all of this, there were people that refused to give up on me and they would go on to become close friends throughout high school and part of college.

Everything came to a head during my senior year. My friends were all distant and I felt it would be best if I transferred schools. I decided to take online courses to finish my final year. This was when I met Stephanie. She would be my anchor to reality, my best friend, and for a while, my girlfriend. Come graduation I experienced a psychotic break and began hearing/remembering conversations that never happened and people shouting my name. As my mental state deteriorated suicide stopped being a distant thought and became an appealing means of escaping. A permanent exit from what felt like some sort of an extended nightmare sequence straight of a David Lynch film.

June 8th I drove to an abandoned parking lot and parked under a tree illuminated orange by the streetlights just twenty feet away and grabbed out a benchmade knife I kept in the center console of my dingy orange ford. I started slashing everything I could My wrists, my arm, my shoulders, my chest, legs. Everything but my throat. I fully intended to kill myself that night. I sat there, globs of blood dripping off my arm onto cracked pavement and the side of the my seat.

I didn’t die that night. My typing this as proof. The bleeding stopped, at which point I was too light headed, weak, and scared to finish the job. Instead I fell asleep, woke up the next morning, put on my jacket, and drove home. Eventually my family found out what I had attempted to do. It was summer and I couldn’t wear my jacket all the time. Eventually they saw a couple, and demanded to see them all. Most of them weren’t too bad, but the ones on my wrist and chest were deep, with the cut on my sternum going all the way down to the bone. I carry hideous scars now as a reminder and have to be conscious of what I wear so as not to make the people around me uncomfortable. and I was hospitalized for the first time.

Stephanie was a sweetheart and everyday would drive three towns over where I was being kept to visit. Bringing healing stones, snacks, and much needed company. If you’re not familiar with wards, they are lonely and often times scary places. You have a routine of therapy, but outside that, there’s nothing to do but walk the halls, and when the clock hits 8, it’s lights out and you have to go to your shared room. I had been roomed with a violent schizophrenic that never acknowledged me when I tried to speak to him.

During my time there I was diagnosed with Bipolar and agraphobia. For the next three years I would be subjected to a number of heavy duty anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, and mood stabilizers. In tandem they dulled everything. I felt like a zombie. I no longer had emotional range and was tired all the time.

I started college a month after release. It was at this point I found out that the college funds my grandparents had been setting aside to put us through college had been used to pay my brothers hospital and therapy bills all those years ago. No one had told me this, and throughout school my parents discouraged me working, stating that my job was to focus on school and extra-curricular activities. I began working three jobs to pay for my courses, but after two years of this, my car broke down and I ended up shelling out five grand to repair the engine, only to have the transmission break soon after, leaving me no mode of transportation. Stephanie moved away to start her dream job as a forest ranger.

This was probably for the best. She was a sweet girl and I was bad news. I broke up with her shortly after getting the news that she was moving, and ended up reconnecting and getting into a relationship with Leilani. Leilani was also a very nice girl and supported me in more ways than she should have. We had similar issues, and she was able to understand what was going on with me better than most people, but our relationship was short lived. I isolate and cut off contact with everyone when I have a depressive episode. I was under the impression it would be better for everyone if I dissapeared when this happened. That I shouldn’t burden my friends with my own personal shit. It’s what I was taught growing up, to man up and deal with the problem. Don’t make it someone elses. During one of these episodes, she found someone else, and we fell out of contact. I remember the last thing she sent me was “Please don’t cut me out again”.

Shortly afterwards I was hospitalized once more. I had been out of college for a year and was working on paying for a new car and getting the debt I’d been accumulating through medicine costs and therapy when this happened. I was slapped with almost ten thousand dollars worth of debt, and that leads to today.

I will soon be twenty four. My friends and those that supported me for so long are gone. They have been for years. I’m living at my parents and am working a dead-end job as a QA engineer. I wont pretend like none of this is my fault. I’m self aware enough to know my own actions have lead me to this point. I should have dealt with my problems rather than trying to bury them. I should have accepted the help and support my friends had offered. I should have, in general, been a better person. I’m hoping that somehow, typing this all out, I can make peace with everything leading me to this point. If not that, to at least make sense of it.

#stream of conscience #writing

[internaljiujitsu]

RAGE INSIDE YOUR MACHINE: How Your Brain Makes You Mad

“The best way to control your anger is to control your body.” — Jiu Jitsu Master Rickson Gracie to Edward Norton (as Dr. Bruce Banner) in the 2008 film, The Incredible Hulk.

Bill Bixby terrified me. He’s the actor who played Dr. David Bruce Banner on the 70’s tv show, The Incredible Hulk. Bixby was a harmless looking guy, but when he’d flash those white pupils — signaling the surge in hormones that were about to transform him — I’d shit myself. The transition from man to monster, the anticipation of the horror that awaited, the build up to the inevitable carnage and destruction scared me to death. When the mild mannered scientist changed into his green alter ego, his brow widened, skin turned bright green and clothes tore from the out of control growth of his freakish muscles (while his pants always ended up making the perfect pair of shorts). Frightening.

I’d hide behind the couch whenever someone pissed Dr. Banner off. My older brother and sister thought it was hilarious, but I dreaded that moment. It reminded me that we lived with our own version of the Hulk.

My father, a giant in my eyes, would go from doting dad to terror inducing tormentor in a flash. He was the scariest monster I knew — I’d hide under desks and fake Illnesses when I knew he was angry. Given the choice, I would have taken my chances with Dr. Banner or the devil himself over my dad’s fury.

I thought I had inherited my father’s anger. Certainly, genetics played a part, but rage had also been programmed into me — to deal with a loud voice with a louder one. To conquer violence with violence. To shout down dissent in my own defense.

I worked my entire life to overcome what I and those around me deemed an anger management issue. It wasn’t frequent, but it was more intense than anyone was used to seeing. Level ten anger for a level four problem. The kind of anger that makes people of all ages want to hide under desks or behind couches.

Was I just mimicking what I’d learned as a kid? Did the build up I felt that led to the eventual eruption signify a flaw in my makeup or morality? Was I just an angry, abusive asshole at heart? All the therapy, books and lectures hadn’t helped. I still didn’t have control!

I’ve spent three decades searching for the source and solution for the anxiety and depression that made so many of my days miserable. I never examined the anger itself. The intense, rage filled outbursts I experienced were how everyone expressed anger in our home. I just happened to be the most intense of us all. I thought level ten anger was normal.

But it never felt good afterwards — I’d be exhausted. Not the good kind of exhausted, like after a grueling workout or savage sex. More like when Banner was just waking up, clothes shredded but somehow still on him, despite the fact that he was several times larger in his agitated state — fearful that he may have done some irreparable damage. I’d be groggy, sometimes in tears, breathing hard, wondering how my temper had gotten away from me again.

I ruined more than one Thanksgiving, pooped on plenty of parties and played the role of Debbie Downer on more occasions than I care to remember. Sure, the triggers were there, but my reactions were so unbelievably over the top that I was too embarrassed to go back and apologize — even though I always wanted to. Worst of all, the people I lost it on were often the ones I loved the most.

In my fits of anger, I became the meanest version of my father. Eyes bulging from his skull (partially because of his chronic thyroid condition), neck and forehead veins threatening to burst, a primal snarl through clenched teeth. Then, a voice louder than the horn on a battleship — violent hatred punctuating every decibel.

I’d punch walls or bash my own head against the nearest hard surface when I got angry. I’ve broken furniture, thrown appliances and crushed wine glasses in my hand at restaurants. The rage would only last for about twenty minutes — three or four episodes a year. The rest of the time, I was a tree hugging hippy at heart who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

That’s why it killed me so much each time I lost control. I wanted to be kind, and I knew what it felt like to be around someone scary. It sucked. Being on edge, walking on eggshells to avoid the explosions. Constant tension.

Some of my jiu jitsu buddies once nicknamed me “Buddha” because I appeared to be meditating when I sparred. They said that it seemed like I could take a nap in the middle of a match. On the days when I felt at peace, I conquered my internal demons by being calm in the face of physical conflict. In real life, when anxiety would hit, the reverse was true. Facing no real threat, fear would grip my body, and I would either whither away or explode to defend myself from an imaginary adversary.

My reactions were over the top because I felt so vulnerable. It always seemed that my mom was afraid I’d get hurt as a kid. I remember stories about how my family almost lost me as a baby or how my aunt saved me from certain death somehow. I felt weak and fragile. Seeing violence break out nearly every day on the streets of my childhood neighborhood only made the fear more real. Whether in a classroom, on the bus or in the bedroom I shared with my volatile older brother, I always had to be on my toes.

It’s no accident that I became a champion bodybuilder and martial artist. Though I wanted to focus on academics, I knew I couldn’t just rely on my mind. I needed to look strong. I needed to be confident in a fight. I didn’t want to be bothered and I didn’t want to be scared anymore. Back then, I didn’t know that it’s normal to be afraid before a fight. I thought there was something wrong with me because of it, so I worked to make that feeling go away.

But the extreme, explosive anger I exhibited as a 113 pound thirteen year old boy was the same I expressed in my twenties. I had grown into a 250 pound ball of muscle by then, and my devastating bite could be even worse than my terrifying bark. On the inside I was the same fragile person I had always been. To anyone that saw me angry, I was a scary beast.

So, like Dr. Banner seeking out Rickson Gracie to calm his inner beast, I sought peace through activity and non-activity. I gained more control over the outbursts. But when I began having episodes on days that I stuck to my rituals and felt good, I knew there had to be more to my anger than self-control. Until then, I had only addressed the depression and anxiety that I experienced since childhood. I had never looked at the anger directly, or at how it made me feel about myself.

Uncontrollable anger was the source of a lot of my shame. Self-control was always what I was after — the freedom to not be a slave to emotion. The power to never instill the kind of fear in another person that my father instilled in me. When I failed to control my anger, it was as if I devolved into my genetic predecessor — morphing into my father despite my best efforts — as if I didn’t have a choice. All the hard work of a lifetime would be gone in a burst of rage.

The realization that this anger persists under the surface inspired me to examine it beyond my triggers, or the deeply personal meanings I’ve attached to them. Rather than only experiencing and then lamenting these explosive outbursts, I wanted to understand why they happened. To do so would take being honest with myself about the circumstances surrounding triggering episodes, as well as a firmer grasp of the general causes of anger. This process has helped me to step outside my anger for the first time, depersonalizing the rage and allowing me to observe it from a distance.

I could finally understand how incredibly out of proportion my reactions were once I reexamined the triggers with my rational mind. This was aided by the fact that my latest episode took place in a hotel room covered in mirrors. I was forced to watch myself go through the entire thing. I had never seen my face — my eyes — at level ten anger. I think I may have scared myself straight.

Observing yourself in an explosive anger episode will either drive you deep into a depressive hole or kick you in the ass to figure out why you can’t seem to keep yourself together. This time, I berated myself for a day before deciding to figure out what was going on in my head, so that I can fix it.

GETTING IN YOUR OWN HEAD

The shameful hangover that persists after an episode of explosive rage will only go away when failure to self-regulate isn’t simply labeled a lack of discipline. Subconsciously reprogramming limiting beliefs that have kept you stuck in negative patterns is critical for change, but so is identifying the physiological markers of anger that serve to prep you for confrontation. Knowing that there is more happening in your head than meets the eye gives you an enormous advantage in correcting emotional disregulation. Only then can you train yourself to recognize when you need to course adjust , shutting down your body’s irrational reaction before it gets out of hand.

While traditional therapy and behavioral modification may be key in recovery, ignoring the chemical component of explosive anger is discounting the twisted scaffolding on which the ego is built. Brain function is the invisible variable that turns some of us from Jekyll to Hyde — Banner to Hulk.

There are two parts of your noggin that are key in processing anger:

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex has connections to both the prefrontal cortex (reasoning) and the limbic system (emotion).

The Amygdala — made up of almond shaped clusters inside the temporal lobes — is also a part of the limbic system, which governs emotion.

An inactive Anterior Cingulate Cortex or an overactive Amygdala can both lead to poor decision making and antisocial behavior .

The Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) regulates rational cognitive function. This area of the brain affects decision making, empathy, impulse control, and reward anticipation. It connects your emotions to your actions and intercedes by considering the repercussions when your lizard brain wants to impulsively lash out at someone or something.

According to leading ADHD researcher Dr. Russel Barkley, clinical professor of psychiatry at the VCU Medical Center, the ACC does nothing in ADHD brains. There is no stopping to self-regulate the emotional state — no holding you back from making decisions that could be detrimental to a future you’re incapable of imagining.

Because ADHD is a failure of the inhibition system, Barkley says it’s critical to decouple events from responses. This can only happen when you stop and engage the prefrontal cortex to devise rational responses to triggers. Acting on impulse can be disastrous.

What Barkley describes as a “nearsightedness in time” leaves those with ADHD blind to the future. Unable to anticipate the consequences of their actions and incapable of self-regulation, they often impulsively act out against their own long term self interest. This can sometimes have severe financial, social and legal consequences.

Barkley suggests designing “prosthetic environments” to elicit behavior modification and assist in self-regulation. By externalizing pieces of information with hand written or electronic notes and reminders, envisioning future events and the sequence in which they should take place becomes easier.

In their book, Nudge, Nobel prize winning economist Richard H. Thaler and Cass R Sunstein describe the vast number of ways our decisions can be influenced by subtle suggestions. Strategically placing reminders to curtail or reinforce behavior, building in immediate rewards and consequences, and manually problem solving whenever possible can prop up executive function and lead to better decision making and fewer outbursts.

While the ACC takes into account consequences, the amygdala is a group of structures in the brain that process strong emotions, particularly fear — provoking an automatic fight or flight response. Amygdala hijack (a term coined by psychologist Daniel Goleman) occurs when the amygdala disables the frontal lobes (which govern reason and higher level cognition) and limits some unessential functions in order to prepare the body for conflict. Stress hormones flood your system, pupils dilate, heart races, blood vessels constrict and pressure rises. While being on high alert is helpful when facing life or death situations, putting your body through the emotional ringer on a regular basis due to everyday stress will break you down mentally and physically.

Setting off this chemical dance are the triggers that sit atop the surface of your mind like land mines hastily planted by everyone you’ve ever known — buried under all the shit you only think you remember. The stories you tell yourself set off a tingling sensation when someone reminds you of what you don’t want to be. Your thoughts travel and the feeling in your body transports you to a different time and place. The explosions go off, cortisol and adrenaline flood your system and you react as if you are there again.

Individuals with Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) exhibit repeated, explosive, sudden episodes of rage that are drastically out of proportion to the trigger. These outbursts can manifest as verbal or physical abuse, destruction of property or personal harm. A study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology looked at brain scans of patients with IED. Researchers found that the white matter connecting the frontal lobe (decision making, emotion, understanding consequences) and the parietal lobe (language and sensory input) had less integrity and density than in healthy brains or those with other psychiatric disorders.

With what is essentially the wiring between these two regions of the brain damaged, communication becomes limited. Unable to take in all the information available, you only hear the things that confirm the irrational notions of your lizard brain. Everything becomes an attack. You are looking for the insult that will reinforce the shitty way you feel about yourself. Acting as if everyone is out to get you will miraculously make people want to stay away.

In her book, The Upside of Anger, Dr. Kelly McGonigal argues that it’s our own interpretation of stress that turns it negative. McGonigal says that if we view stress as our body’s way of preparing us for whatever comes next, a rapid pulse can mean excitement instead of fear. McGonigal’s research shows that this shift in perspective leads to physiological changes. Blood vessels no longer violently constrict when the heart pumps faster. However, the organ itself is still fed more nutrients, making it stronger. As in the physical stress put on your body when you exercise, as long as you do not overtrain, the increased demand over time creates greater capacity. According to Dr. McGonigal, a heart pumping vigorously while blood vessels stay relaxed, “looks like what happens in moments of joy, or courage.”

Meditation is an invaluable tool for transforming your reaction to stress. Dedicating time every day to practicing stillness is the best training for both recognizing the onset of symptoms (by learning to notice subtle changes in your internal state) and shutting down a reaction before any negative physiological effects take hold by instantly being still. Building my meditation muscles before figuring out what was wrong with my wiring helped me find the quiet space between trigger and reaction to perceive my anger differently.

If you see anger as an alarm signaling that some potentially nasty shit is being released into your body, you may pump the breaks when you feel yourself losing control. Doing otherwise is knowingly poisoning yourself. Once you realize what’s happening inside you when you are triggered, you’ll be able to direct the process through conscious attention. The feelings won’t trigger irrational action, but thoughtful consideration. Not only of the steps to take next, but of the source of your emotional response — thereby allowing you to choose to react differently.

When the flutter in your chest and butterflies in your stomach signify fear to your mind, your body will act afraid and your thoughts will race. The bells and whistles that go off under your skin will take on new meaning if you train your body to sit still when your mind wants to sprint. With a little knowledge and a lot of discipline, you can, in the words of the late Ted Cassidy, “control the raging spirit that dwells within.”

#mind #body #mentalhealth #anger #angermanagement #mindfulness #meditation #awareness #brain #change #behaviormodification #ied #adhd #relationships #selfimprovement #personalgrowth

[webmixtressissa]

So Saturday evening, some shit went down. I had a bit of a meltdown and nuked my friendship with Maria because I thought it was “the right thing to do,” which more and more I’m starting to realize is a narcissistic viewpoint.

So sometimes I’ll have a meltdown over certain unpredictable triggers. This is mostly my own damn fault because I haven’t made a serious enough effort to seek mental help and open up to my friends. When living with Maria, oftentimes I’ll “offer” to leave partially because I have a serious guilt about living with her and when I’m in that state of mind, I have this faux-”selflessness” where I narcissistically assume that me leaving/dying will contribute to solving Maria’s problems. Obviously this is demonstrable false but it feels so logical at the time. This is compounded by the fact that I have terrible communication skills (partially because my concern over being abusive leads me to feel like I can’t open up without seeming emotionally manipulative, which ironically seems to lead to actual emotional manipulation as I attempt to solve all mine and Maria's problems in the most mentally fucked up ways possible).

So me and Maria had this friend who was a lot closer to her than to me. He comes off quite often as being condescending towards me, and whenever he talks about being a furry, he oftentimes comes painfully close to saying that his being a furry and the negativity that brings is somehow equivalent to, say, the oppression felt by being trans or gay or what have you. I’ve tried to be accommodating as best I can, despite these annoyances, and most of the time we got along fine. He has this painfully annoying inability to deal with any sort of conflict, and very often tends to do that “I’m a centrist so I’m morally superior” thing.

So he posts that markiplier video (you know the one) which is the stupidest thing to have a fight about, but he’s very self righteous about it. I offer one reply to his video (saying that everyone is not deserving of respect and that calling people out for shitty behavior is not dehumanizing as is said in the video) and he replies with a tweet heavily implying that his being a furry is in any way comparable to being a jew (or alternatively, if he was being sarcastic, implying that “death to all jews” is an acceptable joke).

So I don’t respond back because I don’t want to make this worse, and Maria says she’s not coming home and is going to sleep in her car because she wanted to be alone. Now, the reasonable thing to do would be to offer to go sleep at a friend’s house so that she could be alone in her apartment, or to accept her decision, but I’m already super off-kilter and rather than explaining what I am upset and stressed out about, I tell her I’m moving out.

You see, this friend just bought a huge house but only him and his wife live there. It seemed obvious to me that the only reason they’d get a house that big is to house Maria since they are helping with her bills currently and will be helping her pay for college soon. As I don’t think I could stand living in the same house as this guy, I’ve been panicking silently about what I’m going to do if/when the time comes. Of course, I don’t tell Maria any of this because I’m terrible at communicating (I was scared that expressing my fears would be seen as trying to manipulate Maria into denying the friend’s potential offer even though such an offer is objectively in her best interest) even though we’ve had multiple conversations after various breakdowns about this same communication issue.

So here I am, feeling backed up against the wall because I feel like I’ve nuked the relationship with this mutual friend and increasingly worried that if I stick around I may fuck up Maria’s friendship with him. My mind is already telling me I’m a shitty person when Maria says she’s not coming home for the night, so my brain instantly goes to “God, you’re so terrible that she’s afraid to come home because of you,” instead of the much more realistic “She just wants to be alone, this is a normal thing Maria does.”

So of course, thinking I’m an abuser (but being blind to the actual abusive things I’m doing) I decide it’s time to kill myself, as I almost always do when I’m having a breakdown, and knowing my last experience with attempting suicide, I know I can’t convince myself to jump over the ledge to my death, so I decide that if there is nothing to come back to, I’ll have to reason to hesitate (this is stupid for multiple reasons, the prime one being that self-preservation doesn’t fucking work like that). So I say some shitty things and pack a bag of basically nothing (I’m not intending to stay alive for long after all) and leave. The next day, I try to kill myself and discover my self preservation is as strong as ever.

So I’m freaking out about what I’m going to do. I’ve had some breakdowns where I left to go kill myself, but never this serious. Mistake #473 was messaging Maria to ask her if I could get my meds (when what I really wanted was to talk to her and try to calmly explain myself, because even in crisis I don’t realize it’s probably a good idea to be crystal fucking clear about what’s going on), but of course, I get there and Maria leaves to avoid me (a good fucking idea on her part, as my brain was swimming with “I have an amazing idea that will make everything better!” because I’m still high on adrenaline from the attempt to propel myself over the edge of a parking garage roof and thus was probably not in the best condition to calmly explain myself) and I just panic and grab the pills (all my pills, even the ones I don’t actually need just because whenever I face the slightest obstacle and I’m not in my right mind, I go straight to suicide and overdosing seems like a good idea, right?) and leave, not thinking to grab any clothes because I’m still thinking that things are gonna work out all right or I’m going to die. I sit down across the street because I’m exhausted from walking. I get the “great” idea to leave a note on Maria’s door trying to briefly explain myself and offer to talk at a place down the street (as my phone is dead at this point and the charger I took is non-functional), “trying” to respect her boundaries by not confronting her at or near her apartment. Of course, trying to fit a bunch of complex feelings on an index card with a sharpie while still fucked up is not possible so I write the stupidest thing ever and leave it.

A few hours later, I walk and see the note hasn’t been taken, so I leave a note on her car that I’m going to a friend’s house to charge my phone. I get the phone charged after much difficulty and message her, and she tells me to not talk to her again. My head starts spinning and I start crying and after trying and failing to sleep because I’m disassociating hard, not able to tell what is read and my perception of time gets all fucked up. In desperation, I message Maria (despite telling her I would respect her wishes and not contact her again) hoping for some grounding in reality and  of course I just blather a bunch of desperate bullshit, prompting her to rightfully block me. I start trying to down a bunch of pills but fail because ever since my last overdose, I can’t get down even single pills easily at all, my body pretty violently rejects them.

That was the point that I message Meghan and we did a call. Hearing her voice helped bring me back to reality and think slightly more reasonable, instead of living in my night-terror-lite state for the rest of the night.

Overall, I think Maria was totally in the right here to cut me off the way she did. We’ve had numerous conversations about my tendency to fly off the handle and my failure to communicate and I obviously haven’t taken those conversations to heart. I also have refused to commit to seeking therapy and anti-depressants and allowed my anxiety to keep myself from getting better. If I could do this over, I think moving out while trying to seek therapy would have been a damn good idea anyways, and it would have given us both some time to ourselves and a chance to unwind.

Of course, my mind is swimming with “what-ifs” but none of that matters when the damage has been done. It becomes clear to me that my attempts to “Sacrifice” myself (I.E suicide) are narcissistic in nature. In reality, my death would mean nothing but grief for those close to me, and not some mystical way to solve everyone’s problems as if I’m that important. It would seem that my attempts to try to be as different as possible from my family have led me to being much more like them than I could ever be comfortable with. I’ve abused those close to me thinking I was doing right by them without ever caring to ask them what they wanted. Brain Maria was for some reason much more trustworthy than real-life, best friend Maria and that behavior is what cost me almost everything I cared about.

It’s beginning to look like if I want to live, I’ll need to move back with my parents if they’re willing. It terrifies me, but they’re my best chance at getting on disability and finally being self-sufficient. I just hope that if it does turn out with me getting approved for disability however long in the future that it will have been worth losing Maria over. This wasn’t just one mistake, this was a long series of mistakes and ignorant decisions that led to this outcome, and pretty much every single one is my fault. If I don’t learn from them then I won’t ever get better, no matter how much help I’m given

[findanattorney]

Steps To Take If You’re Injured During A Protest

You have the constitutional right to participate in a peaceful protest. But unfortunately, there are times when a peaceful demonstration turns rowdy and results in casualty usually as a result of the violent conduct of vandals or excessive use of force by the police. 

If you or your loved one ever got injured during a protest, then you want to read this article to the end to know what you can do to seek redress and pursue compensation from the perpetrators to recover your injuries and damages. 

The legal route to take if you can prove that someone was responsible for your injuries is to file a lawsuit against the responsible party. Filing a personal injury lawsuit or human right violation claim, depending on the nature of your case, is necessary to ensure that you don’t have to bear the cost of treating the injuries you never caused. 

Who Can You Hold Responsible for Injuries During a Protest? 

Depending on the circumstances surrounding your case, you can possibly hold someone or a group responsible for injuries you sustained during a protest. The following are common causes of injuries during a protested and the right action you can take to pursue compensation: 

Premises Liability 

If you fell and broke your legs or arms due to a wet floor or broken rail, you might be able to file a premises liability claim against the owner or manager of the property. There’s a just ground for filing this type of lawsuit especially if you can prove that the owner failed to take necessary safety measures to prevent this injury. 

Although the injury occurred during a protest, the standard criteria for premises liability could still apply. To recover a fair compensation to cover your medical bills and other losses, you need to engage the service of an experienced personal injury lawyer. Different states have different rules and time limits for victims of personal injuries to seek redress. Get in touch with a lawyer in your area to know your options, and best way to maximize compensation. 

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Police Brutality 

Law enforcement agents like police are meant to protect people and their property. But things can get really messy during protests. On several occasions, police use of excessive force or violent acts have led to injuries, deaths, and civil rights violations that shouldn’t have happened if caution was observed. 

Injuries may occur in the process of the police trying to break up or disperse the demonstrators. Recent protests in the United States featured some horrible scenes where police were using what they term “nonlethal” or “less-lethal” weapons such as batons, pepper balls and sprays, tear gas, rubber bullets or bean bag rounds. 

Common injuries arising from police brutality include broken bones, internal bleeding, head injuries, concussions, traumatic brain injuries, shortness of breath, bruising and spike in blood pressure from tear gas. 

If you ever get injured in the process of police’s use of force to restrict your right to protest, then you may file a lawsuit against the responsible party. However, taking on the police in a lawsuit is never a walk in the park. This is because law enforcement agents are government employees who enjoy some level of “qualified immunity” from certain lawsuits. Meanwhile, this doesn’t mean that they cannot be held liable. To get justice, you need an experienced police brutality attorney on your side. 

Assault by Another Person 

Sometimes, a protest can become rowdy as a result of misunderstanding among demonstrators. The rowdiness could also arise from disagreement with a counter-protester. In the event that you’re assaulted by another person, it is a criminal matter which you can file a lawsuit to address. However, if your injuries were as a result of the negligent or carefree conduct of another individual, then you might have grounds for a personal injury case. 

Either way, the important thing is to hold the responsible person liable and get the fair compensation to cover your medical bills and other damages such as lost wages. In some cases, you can hold more than one person liable for your injury. For example, if you were assaulted by someone during a protest, and there were no security personnel on ground to rescue you, you can pursue a claim against the responsible person as well as the organizer of the protest for their failure to maintain a safe environment. 

Likewise, it is possible to file a claim against the city or state authorities if you were assaulted on public property. However, you must be able to prove that the city or state was negligent and failed to provide adequate security. 

Should You Rely on Your Health Insurance Provider for Compensation? 

You’re likely going to face issues with your health insurers if you try to file a claim for your injuries. For one, most insurance policies do not cover injuries sustained during a riot. In cases where your insurance policy covers it, insurance companies can be dubious and you cannot trust them to provide just and fair compensation. 

Insurance companies are for-profit organizations that mainly care about their bottom lines. They will use various tactics to minimize your compensation. The only person you can trust to fight for you is your lawyer. 

Conclusion 

Take the following steps if you ever got injured in a protest: 

Take a proper note of how the incident transpired 

Involve the authority, i.e. the police 

Get the identity and contact information of the responsible person, including their insurance information 

Exchange contacts with eyewitnesses at the scene of the incident 

Get immediate medical treatment 

Contact a lawyer to commence the process of pursuing compensation 

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from Find an attorney https://findanattorney.net/steps-to-take-if-youre-injured-during-a-protest/

[thedeadshotnetwork]

10 things you need to know today: November 10, 2017 1. A woman told The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 years old and Moore, now 70, was a 32-year-old prosecutor. The woman, Leigh Corfman, said Moore kissed and fondled her, and "guided her hand to touch him over his underwear." Three other women said Moore started inappropriate relationships with them when they were 16 to 18. Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice, called the allegations "completely false" and "a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party." The White House said President Trump believes a "mere allegation" shouldn't be allowed to "destroy [Moore's] life," but that he should "step aside" if the accusations are true . 2. Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled their tax plan, which differed from the House version on some key points. Like their House counterparts, whose revised bill was approved by the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, Senate Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, but they want to delay the reduction until 2019. Stocks, which have been boosted by anticipation of corporate breaks, dropped Thursday and headed for another fall Friday due to investors' concerns over the Senate's proposed delay. Supporters of the legislation also worried that the differences between the House and Senate bills on such issues as whether to keep deductions for state and local taxes could threaten efforts to pass the overhaul quickly. 3. President Trump said at a regional summit in Vietnam on Thursday that the U.S. "will not tolerate" trade abuses, saying only countries that "follow the rules" will get U.S. business. Trump said that the U.S. had removed trade barriers to let foreign goods into the U.S., but many countries have not reciprocated by opening their markets. "We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore," the president said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Danang. "I am always going to put America first, the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first." Despite speculation of a possible one-on-one meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the White House said "scheduling conflicts" would prevent a meeting. 4. President Trump's former security chief, Keith Schiller, privately testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he refused a Russian offer to send five women to Trump's hotel room during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, CNN reported Thursday, citing several sources with direct knowledge of the testimony. Schiller, a longtime Trump confidant, reportedly said he assumed the offer was a joke, and that he and Trump laughed it off. Committee members brought up the matter because of a controversial dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, working on opposition research funded by Democrats during last year's presidential campaign. Steele concluded that Russia had dirt on Trump, including salacious details of an alleged encounter with prostitutes in Moscow. 5. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday suggested that the U.S. is pushing for the disqualification of Russian athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics in an attempt to interfere in Russia's presidential campaign. Putin noted that the Olympics start in February in PyeongChang, South Korea, and Russia's election is in March. "There are very strong suspicions that all that is done because someone needs to create an atmosphere of discontent among sports fans and athletes over the state's alleged involvement in violations and responsibility for it," Putin said, adding that the U.S. might be trying to "create problems in the Russian presidential election in response to our alleged interference in theirs." 6. Pastor Frank Pomeroy, leader of the Texas church where a gunman murdered 26 people on Sunday, told leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention that the building would be demolished. The pastor said the church was "too stark of a reminder" of the massacre, in which his own teenaged daughter was killed, said a spokesman for the national church. The decision won't be final until surviving congregation members are consulted. Charlene Uhl, whose 16-year-old daughter Haley Krueger was killed, agreed that the building should be torn down, saying as she visited a row of white crosses placed on the property that there should be a church, "but not here." Other sites of some other mass shootings, such as Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, also have been demolished. 7. A juror excused from Sen. Bob Menendez's (D-N.J.) bribery trial said she would have found him "not guilty on every charge." The former juror, Evelyn Arroyo-Maultsby, said she believed the government was "railroading him," and she predicted the jurors would be unable to resolve disagreements on the case. "It's a hung jury right now," she said after she was dismissed Thursday at the end of the third day of deliberations. The judge replaced Arroyo-Maultsby to keep a promise that she would be able to make a trip planned earlier. Prosecutors accuse Menendez of doing business favors for Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen in exchange for lavish gifts and campaign contributions. Menendez and Melgen deny it, saying they are just close friends. 8. One-time New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who hanged himself in prison in April while serving a life sentence for murder, suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) ever observed in a person his age, Boston University researchers revealed at a medical conference on Thursday. The researchers said the damage would have significantly affected his thinking and judgment. Doctors found that Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE, never before seen in a brain younger than 46 years old. The finding was expected to fuel renewed debate in football's concussion crisis, and heighten concerns over the possibility of injuries to young players. 9. A major Puerto Rico power line repaired by the tiny Montana company Whitefish Energy failed on Thursday, leaving more than 80 percent of the island, including parts of San Juan and other major cities, without electricity, two months after Hurricane Maria. The failure of the line early Thursday knocked out 25 percent of the U.S. Caribbean island territory's power generation, which had been restored to 43 percent capacity, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said. Whitefish, which lost its contract after critics questioned its qualifications, denied that the new problems "have anything to do with the repairs Whitefish Energy performed," spokesperson Brandon Smulyan said. 10. Five women told The New York Times in an article published Thursday that comedian Louis C.K. either asked to masturbate in front of them or in fact did it , without permission. Comedian Rebecca Corry said C.K. asked to pleasure himself in front of her while they were on set for a TV pilot in 2005, but she declined. Comedic duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov said that in 2002, they went to hang out with C.K. in a hotel room and, before they removed their winter coats, C.K. asked them if he could take out his penis. The women thought he was joking, but then "he really did it. ... He proceeded to take all of his clothes off ... and started masturbating." When reached for comment, C.K.'s publicist told the Times that the comedian "would not answer any questions." November 10, 2017 at 01:04PM

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[jeroldlockettus]

“How Much Brain Damage Do I Have?”

John Urschel of the Baltimore Ravens was the only player in the N.F.L. simultaneously getting a Ph.D. in math at M.I.T. But after a new study came out linking football to brain damage, he abruptly retired. (Photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “‘How Much Brain Damage Do I Have?’” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

John Urschel was the only player in the N.F.L. simultaneously getting a math Ph.D. at M.I.T. But after a new study came out linking football to brain damage, he abruptly retired. Here’s the inside story — and a look at how we make decisions in the face of risk versus uncertainty.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

*      *      *

Andrew LO: Why is it the case that we have billionaires? Why should they exist?

The economist Andrew Lo is a finance professor at M.I.T.

LO: That’s a very strange concept for an economist because we usually think that markets are reasonably competitive. If it’s reasonably competitive, then no one person should be able to make billions and billions of dollars.

Hmh. That is an interesting idea, isn’t it? You could imagine market failures producing billionaires — like monopolies or cronyism. But yes — if markets are “reasonably competitive,” why do we have billionaires? Andrew Lo is not the first economist to consider this riddle. In fact, if you went back 100 years, an economist named Frank Knight had a notion …

LO: And he came up with that notion to try to explain the difference between ordinary businesses that would make a reasonable living versus these incredible captains of industry — the Andrew Mellons and, at that time, the incredible wealth that was generated by a relatively small number of entrepreneurs. These are people that, in today’s dollars, would be multi-billionaires.

Now, we all know the conventional wisdom — that the big rewards in life go to the people willing to take big risks, right? Frank Knight saw it a bit differently.

LO: He realized that the way you make a huge amount of money is not to take on risk. The reason is because risk, by its definition, is the kind of randomness that you can quantify. And if you can quantify it, so can everybody else. You can’t really outsmart other people because they can calculate just as well as you can.

So using probability and statistics, you can calculate risk. And because the odds of a given risk can be calculated, that risk can also be priced.

LO: Exactly. A good example is the insurance industry.

So risk is the stuff of actuarial tables. Taking on risk might make you a good living. But it wouldn’t have made you a multi-billionaire. To do that, Frank Knight argued, you had to take on something else entirely: uncertainty.

LO: For example, if you create an entirely new industry that didn’t exist before, there’s no way to calculate what the odds are. When Bill Gates started up Microsoft, we didn’t have a huge PC and software industry. He created that. He couldn’t sit down and calculate what the odds [were]. Knight came up with this idea that the way you really make money, the way innovation really occurs in the economy, is through taking on uncertainty, not taking on risk.

Okay, is that clear? Does the distinction between risk and uncertainty make sense to you? Maybe we could use an example …

LO: The difference was highlighted in a really neat experiment that was done in the 1960s by an economist by the name of Daniel Ellsberg. Most people remember Ellsberg not because of his economics, but because he was the fellow who released the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s.

NEWS CLIP:… detailing secret Washington events; events behind President Johnson’s decision to wage secret war against Vietnam in early …

NEWS CLIP:… Daniel Ellsberg, an M.I.T. senior research associate, surrendered to federal authorities in Boston …

NEWS CLIP:… to begin with, how did you get the papers?

NEWS CLIP: Well, I can’t discuss …

LO: But before he did that, he actually did some really pioneering work in economics. The experiment goes like this: imagine if I have an urn. In this urn, I’ve got 100 balls and 50 of the balls are colored red and 50 of them are colored black. And you and I are going to play a game where you pick a color, red or black. Don’t tell me what it is, but write it down on a piece of paper. Then I’m going to draw a ball out of this urn. If the color of the ball that I draw is the color you wrote down, I’m going to pay you $10,000.

And if it’s not, I’m going to pay you nothing.

Now the question is: how much would you be willing to pay to play that game?

LO: When most people think about the odds, they come up with an answer of about $5,000, because that’s the expected value. That’s the probability of getting the ball of your color multiplied by the odds of winning. That’s an example of risk. You know what the odds are.

But now …

LO: But now, suppose I change the game slightly and I have another urn. In this urn I’ve got 100 balls, but I’m not going to tell you what the proportion of red or black is. It could be 100 percent black. It could be 100 percent red or 50-50, 75-25 and so on. Now the question is, “If we play the exact same game, where you write down the color of your choice, and I pick a ball from this second urn, what would you pay to play this game with me?”

In this case, most people would pay much, much less than $5,000 …

LO: … much, much less than $5,000. This is an example of uncertainty. You don’t know the odds, and so therefore you’re much less likely to want to play.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between risk and uncertainty.

LO: The fact that risk allows us to make these inferences while uncertainty doesn’t means that from an evolutionary perspective our brains are going to start telling us “Red alert, stay away from an uncertain environment.” Because, from an evolutionary perspective, we actually need to know what’s out there. Because what you don’t know can kill you.

John URSCHEL: How much brain damage do I have? 

Ann McKEE: The question is, “Would the risk be acceptable?”

URSCHEL: I don’t know. And it’s extremely hard to know.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: risk versus uncertainty in the real world — but a part of the real world that most of us will never get near.

URSCHEL in a previous Freakonomics Radio episode: In football, I just love running around and hitting people. It’s not a bad deal.

*      *      *

The National Football League begins its new season this week. Football is far more than just the biggest sport in America. It’s part of our calendar; part of our social fabric. Even during the off-season it makes big news. Among the three biggest stories this off-season: the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, arguably the best quarterback in history, turned forty, and is still amazingly good. The quarterback Colin Kaerpernick, meanwhile, has no team — in part, it is suspected, because he has chosen to not stand during the national anthem; it’s Kaepernick’s protest against what he calls “a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” A third big story this summer: a Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman named John Urschel, entering the prime of his career, abruptly retired. At age 26.

URSCHEL: I told the Ravens, the Ravens announced it and then all of a sudden … This was a very naïve thing of me. I was really hoping to just go out quietly.

Stephen J. DUBNER: Really? [Laughs.]

URSCHEL: Nice and quiet, like a thief in the night. “No one pay attention to me. There’s no story here. There’s nothing going on.”

DUBNER: That is naive.

URSCHEL: On July 27, I had a lot of phone calls, certainly in the hundreds of phone calls and this was, frankly, a nightmare for me. I don’t really relish being the center of attention and I’m trending on Twitter. People are writing articles and people are making guesses as to my motivations.

Why did a relatively obscure player suddenly turn into such a big story? That’s pretty simple. He quit football just two days after the publication of a study that assembled the most compelling evidence to date on the relationship between football and brain damage. And: John Urschel has a particularly compelling brain. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math from Penn State, where he also taught math while playing college football. He’s published papers in major journals — like “On the Maximal Error of Spectral Approximation of Graph Bisection,” which appeared in Linear and Multilinear Algebra. Also: he’s been working toward a Ph.D. in math at M.I.T.

URSCHEL: Yes. For the majority of my N.F.L. career, actually.

DUBNER: How did that work out? When did you do what, as a doctoral candidate, around the football season?

URSCHEL: Well, I was — I shouldn’t say “was.” I am a full time Ph.D. student at M.I.T. and I was full-time the entire time, so there wasn’t really any working around to be done.

DUBNER: But, obviously during the football season you’re not attending classes. That’s not possible right? Football’s [a] very full time job.

URSCHEL: Yes, of course. This is a natural question. I guess since I’m retired, I’m allowed to say, I was full-time, full-time. For example, last fall I took courses at M.I.T.

DUBNER: During football season.

URSCHEL: Yes. Via correspondence. I took courses which I thought were very manageable in season; areas that I was more or less familiar with previously, classes which had a textbook, which the professor followed the textbook and I would just do the assignments and then just send them in.

DUBNER: You say that you can tell me, “Now that you’re retired.” Am I to gather, then, that you didn’t tell the Ravens that you were actually full-time at M.I.T. during the football season?

URSCHEL: I did not tell anyone this. Well, except M.I.T. But I don’t think an N.F.L. team would be extremely happy to hear that I’m working towards my Ph.D. also in the fall.

DUBNER: How did a standard day work out?

URSCHEL: My schedule — to put the M.I.T. things in perspective — what I would do is, I would play the game on Sunday. Then from Sunday — suppose it’s a home game, one o’clock kickoff. I get home around 5:00, perhaps 5:30. From Sunday, 5:30 p.m. until Tuesday, say, 11:00 a.m. — when I have to go into the Ravens — all I am doing is M.I.T. coursework and math. That is all I am doing. M.I.T. accepted me as a Ph.D. student, but they don’t have part-time Ph.D. students. If I have to finish in four years, maybe five, this is just completely infeasible if I’m only working on the Ph.D. half a year.

DUBNER: Gotcha. You said that it would have been hard to do your coursework during the later part of the week. That’s because the intensity of the football week is building and you’re getting more in your brain in terms of game plans and the opponent and so on?

URSCHEL: Yes. Your focus is very much on your opponent. Wednesday and Thursday in the N.F.L. are full eight-hour, seven-to-four days, or eight-to-five days. You’re very tired at the end. You have to watch film of practice. You have to watch film of your opponent and even Friday, Saturday, you’re really preparing for the opponent. You’re really getting your mind right for those things.

DUBNER: Was the reason that you didn’t do work later in the week because you would have felt it was cheating your team, the Ravens, and maybe the fans and the league?

URSCHEL: Yes, of course. Very much so.

As we spoke, Urschel was planning to move from Baltimore to Boston, with his fiance.

URSCHEL: My fiance’s name is Louisa Thomas. She is a historical nonfiction author.

The two of them will soon be three.

URSCHEL: Yes. I’m expecting a baby girl. Her name is going to be Joanna.

We were speaking in August. In previous years, Urschel would have spent August training for the N.F.L. season, or — before that, the college or high-school football season. This time, he was on vacation, along with the rest of America.

URSCHEL: I actually didn’t even know that August was like the vacation month. This is news to me.

He and his fiance were in St. Louis for a chess vacation.

URSCHEL: Yes! Chess vacation.

Chess is a fairly new but serious passion of Urschel’s. St. Louis is the site of the Sinequefield Cup.

URSCHEL: It’s an elite chess tournament. It’s been very enjoyable for me.

He’s not nearly good enough yet to compete in this kind of tourney; he was there as a spectator.

URSCHEL: You can go up and watch them play. You can go into separate places and watch commentary. Certainly, you can grab a beer and chat with your friends about the game.

So John Urschel is just another 26-year-old, chess-spectating former N.F.L. lineman getting a Ph.D. in math at M.I.T. How did that happen?

URSCHEL: I grew up in Buffalo, New York with my mother. My father left when I was three, though I have a good relationship with him and he’s a good guy.

DUBNER: He was a surgeon, ultimately, yes?

URSCHEL: He was a thoracic surgeon. He was the chief of surgery at Harvard’s hospital in Boston, Beth Israel, before he retired.

DUBNER: He had played college football, I believe. Yes?

URSCHEL: That is correct. He played college ball at the University of Alberta initially, as an offensive lineman, and then he moved to linebacker.

DUBNER: Your mom, then, I understand, became a lawyer?

URSCHEL: Yes, that is correct.

DUBNER: What were you into and not into as a kid?

URSCHEL: As a kid I was very much into puzzles. Math puzzles, any puzzles really. I was quite into horror movies.

DUBNER: Now, what about sports as a kid?

URSCHEL: I believe when I was younger, my mom put me in indoor soccer. My mom was not quite in favor of me playing football. Actually, ever, now that I think about it. But my father was in favor of it.

In high school, Urschel was a good enough player and student to be recruited by, among others, Stanford, Princeton, and Cornell.

URSCHEL: I visit Cornell, and they show me the best time of my life. I almost commit to Cornell on the spot. Those familiar with football recruiting and how those things go … That works!

DUBNER: Can you give us some details on what was so great about this visit?

URSCHEL: Uh, no! [Laughs.] But it was a very —

DUBNER: Did it involve alcohol or other generally forbidden substances?

URSCHEL: [Pauses.] So as my story was going, it was a very enjoyable time. Tons of trips to church and Bible study. It was the best. One that I will never forget and I still have not forgotten. [Laughs.]

Urschel’s dream school — and one of his mom’s dream schools too — was Stanford. But after showing interest in Urschel, they disappeared.

URSCHEL: Penn State offers me, very late. I make a visit to Penn State. I commit on the spot. I just fell in love with the people and also it was my best option. I go home and the Monday after the weekend of my official visit to Penn State, who calls me? Jim Harbaugh.

Harbaugh was, at the time, the head coach at Stanford. He also happens to be the brother of John Harbaugh, who would become Urschel’s head coach in the N.F.L.

URSCHEL: And he says, “Listen, I’m so sorry we’ve dropped the ball on recruiting you. The person who was recruiting you quit suddenly.” They had to get things in order. He called me that Monday and offered me a scholarship on the spot and offered for me to fly out that weekend to go look at the school. I remember, because my mother was in the car with me, I had to tell him that, “I’m sorry. I just committed to Penn State this previous weekend.”

Penn State wasn’t expecting all that much from Urschel.

URSCHEL: I was the 26th out of 27 people they got for their class. I’m also undersized, I’m only about 265 at the time. I just put my head down and I worked hard. I worked hard in the weight room. I worked extremely hard to try to improve my technique as an offensive lineman. I always like to say that my math talent came fairly easily. My football talent very much less so. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of long hours.

Urschel had an outstanding college career, winning athletic and academic awards.

URSCHEL: Yes. It started to become apparent to me that I’d have a chance to play in the N.F.L.

DUBNER: Did you have any reservations? Was there ever a point where you said, “I’m thinking about a Ph.D. in math. You know what? I love football and I’m good at it but I’ll pass on that and just go straight into academia?”

URSCHEL: Didn’t even cross my mind. I was 100 percent pro-N.F.L. Just the dream of playing the sport I love at the highest level —this was a no-brainer. In hindsight, it would still be a no-brainer.

Urschel was not a superstar with the Ravens — but to be fair, very few offensive linemen are. They do the dirty work that most fans don’t pay attention to. But he had an absolute blast.

URSCHEL: The thing I really love about playing offensive line is it’s a very physical, visceral position. Every play I’m fighting with a defensive lineman or a linebacker, where they are trying to get through me to physically tackle someone and I am doing everything I can to stop them, whether in somewhat of a passive fashion or an extremely active one.

In his second year, during a pre-season practice, Urschel got a concussion.

URSCHEL: I believe I was playing left guard. I pulled right to trap out the defensive end or outside linebacker. I got a little bit more than I bargained for and I was knocked unconscious.

DUBNER: What was the treatment like for you, then?

URSCHEL: I walked off the field. Note that the Ravens did try to cart me off the field.

DUBNER: Okay.

URSCHEL: But I was being my stupid self. I walked off the field. They checked me for a concussion. They diagnosed me with a concussion and I was in concussion protocol for perhaps two weeks, I believe. I had some trouble passing this so-called “ImPACT test.” I just wasn’t quite feeling well, nor feeling myself.

DUBNER: What did you notice about your brain during this concussion-recovery period?

URSCHEL: It was tough for me to do high-level math. I really tried to. I really wanted to because there was actually a paper that I had been working on that I was really proud of because it was going to be my first, like big, solo-authored math paper. I just wanted to keep working on it to finish it. I really couldn’t because I had really hard times thinking through things and visualizing things. Thankfully I got the paper done and I was really happy to have it accepted. It all ended well. But at the time I was frustrated.

A few months before Urschel’s concussion, a promising young linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers named Chris Borland announced he was quitting the N.F.L. He was concerned about long-term brain damage. Urschel, who was friends with Borland, responded by writing an essay for The Players’ Tribune called “Why I Still Play Football.” “Playing a hitting position in the N.F.L.,” Urschel wrote, “can’t possibly help your long-term mental health. However, it’s also true that how bad such a pursuit is for you is something that, I believe, no one really knows for sure right now.”

LO: From an evolutionary perspective, we actually need to know what’s out there.

“With that said,” Urschel wrote, “Why take the risk?”

LO: Because what you don’t know can kill you.

“Objectively, I shouldn’t [take the risk],” Urschel went on. “I have a bright career ahead of me in mathematics. … But … I play because I love the game. I love hitting people.” Then, a few months later, Urschel got the concussion that left him unable to do high-level math.

DUBNER: Did you think about retiring or quitting football right then?

URSCHEL: Actually I didn’t. I didn’t actually think about it at all. I want[ed] to keep playing football. I loved the game and I was very much focused on being the best offensive lineman in the N.F.L. I could be.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: what finally changed John Urschel’s mind?

McKEE: It’s clear that there is a link and that there’s a problem in football. It’s not what any of us wanted to hear.

How did his head coach take the news that he was quitting?

URSCHEL: He even called me recently to check in on me and see how things are going at M.I.T.

And: how sympathetic has the N.F.L. been, historically, on the issue of brain health?

Alan SCHWARZ: As far as the N.F.L. goes, they’re bullies.

*      *      *

Even if you don’t follow football at all, you’ve likely heard that it has a huge problem.

SCHWARZ: It was really when guys started blowing their brains out and having their brain tissue examined for a degenerative brain disease — that’s when things started getting pretty icky.

That’s Alan Schwarz.

SCHWARZ: And I’m a journalist and author based in New York.

The brain disease is called C.T.E., or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

McKEE: It’s characterized by a deposition of a protein called tau, and that accumulates in nerve cells and other cells throughout the brain.

Ann McKee is a neuropathologist who directs the C.T.E. Center at Boston University School of Medicine.

McKEE: It starts as very focal problems or abnormalities, but then over the decades becomes a devastating neurological condition. It causes memory loss, cognitive changes, behavioral changes, like aggression, impulsivity, depression, and it can be very disabling with time.

Alan Schwarz wrote 130 articles for The New York Times about concussions or brain trauma in sports, primarily football.

SCHWARZ: There were two reasons why this blew up in football’s face, or in the N.F.L.’s face. One is players started dying and were found to have the brain disease. And then the the N.F.L. put up such a fuss saying, “Oh there’s nothing happening here, we have our scientists who have shown” — they played the perfect villain. We had something that resembled the tobacco industry.

Former players were dying young, sometimes by suicide. Older players were completely losing their faculties. And, occasionally, a current player would quit the game young, afraid of long-term brain damage.

SCHWARZ: As far as the N.F.L. goes, they’re bullies. They have been able to quash every public-relations problem in their history in the sense that  — whether it’s domestic violence recently, whether it’s steroids, whether it’s the strikes and lockouts— there are games to be played on Sunday and everyone forgets by then. But this is one public-relations crisis that they have lost.

McKEE: Well, my feelings about the sport have definitely evolved.

The brain researcher Ann McKee again.

McKEE: I was born and raised right outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. My brothers played football. In fact, I was an absolutely enormous Packer fan, and because I was raised in such a football-centric community, I have always had a terrific admiration for football players.

But then she began to study the brains of deceased players.

McKEE: At one point I could compartmentalize. I could still enjoy the games, I could watch them on Sunday on the television. But at this point I can no longer dissociate what I’m seeing under the microscope. After listening to hundreds and hundreds of stories of profound tragedy, I can’t look at the game anymore without imagining what might happen to some of those players.

One challenge in brain research is that a lot of it can only be done post-mortem.

McKEE: Being able to detect changes in the brains of living athletes, looking at structural changes after playing seasons, and also being able to detect C.T.E. is going to be absolutely a game-changer — pardon the pun — in research going forward.

But for now, researchers like McKee work with brains donated by the families of people who’ve died.

McKEE: I run a number of different brain banks. I have the Framingham Heart Study brain bank. We have the Alzheimer’s brain bank. We have an A.L.S. brain bank. We have P.T.S.D. We see that the incidence of C.T.E. in those other brain banks is extremely low. But then in this brain bank, where the criteria for inclusion was participation in football and that was the only criteria, we see a very high percentage of C.T.E. It’s impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

It’s been nearly 10 years since McKee began finding evidence of C.T.E. in the brains of deceased football players. Sometimes she’ll meet with family members after she’s done the analysis. The memory of one such visitor has stuck with her.

McKEE: Her father had died, and she came to the lab and wanted to look at the slides. She was an adult — she was 30s or 40s. I remember she looked at the brain. I explained it to her and she seemed fine with it. Then a bit later, I saw her really crouched in a corner and sobbing. I was wondering, “Why? Had I upset her? Had I [given]too much information with the brain autopsy?” It wasn’t that at all. She was so overwhelmed because she suddenly realized that her father had loved her; that his behavior of not remembering her birthday, not remembering details of her life, or seeming distant was actually part of his illness and not part of a dad who didn’t care.

SCHWARZ: Women are the heroes of all of this, in my opinion.

Alan Schwarz again.

SCHWARZ: They were the ones who really stuck up to the N.F.L. and stood up to the N.F.L. It was Sylvia Mackey, the wife of John Mackey who wrote to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to say that her husband had early dementia and she knew a lot of wives dealing with their husbands and former players and appealing to the N.F.L. to help, which started a charity for families. Linda Sanchez was the Congressperson most involved in all of this, and most caring. Gay Culverhouse, the former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is the only N.F.L. executive to come out and speak out about the issue of brain trauma among former players — happens to be a woman.

Culverhouse is no longer the only such executive, but she was the first.

SCHWARZ: Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist — these women are all football fans. They like football. They don’t want to destroy football, but they wanted to introduce some sanity, some realism about all of this and to demand from the over-testosteroned men who said, “Shut up.” And say, “You know what? I’m not going to shut up.”

Ann McKee’s latest study, co-authored with more than two dozen fellow researchers, was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in July. Just as John Urschel was getting ready to play his fourth season in the N.F.L.

URSCHEL: That is correct.

The fourth season, by the way, is typically the last season an N.F.L. player is bound by his rookie contract. Which can mean an even bigger payday the next year.

URSCHEL: Money just like showering, allegedly.

DUBNER: What did you see as your financial future within football?

URSCHEL: I don’t know … I didn’t really think about it that much. I don’t really spend money that much and I’m quite happy with my bank account. There’s nothing I really want to spend money on. I buy books, on occasion, like chess books, math books. That’s about it.

This new study was unprecedented in scope.

McKEE: This is the largest case series by far of American football players.

It included brains donated from 202 deceased former players, across all levels of the game; 111 of them had played in the N.F.L.

McKEE: And we did this very rigorous neuropathologic examination. We had defined criteria to make the diagnosis and we had a team of four neuropathologists who looked at the cases.

What did McKee and her colleagues find?

McKEE: And so, ultimately we found that, I believe, the overall was 87 percent of the football players in the series had C.T.E., and that included 99 percent of former N.F.L. players.

URSCHEL: Here’s my thing about this study — and this is something that bothers me — the big headline is like 99 percent of like N.F.L. brains they looked at had C.T.E. It was 99 percent, right?

DUBNER: Yeah, more than that — 110 out of 111.

URSCHEL: Yes. Especially to N.F.L. players that ask me my opinions about it, I said, “Listen. This number — do not like look at this like, ‘99 percent chance that I have C.T.E.’ because that is far from what this is saying.”

McKEE: Yeah. I don’t think we’re at the point where we can talk about a definitive risk estimate for an N.F.L. player. I do think the 99 percent — although we have said in every interview and we said it very clearly in that paper — that number became larger than life. But that wasn’t because of the authors of the scientific manuscript.

URSCHEL: Frankly, there is a strong case of self-selection bias there and that cannot be ignored.

DUBNER: In other words, the brains that are being donated to this bank were from families or players who suspected that they had C.T.E. or something close to that. Is that what you’re talking about?

URSCHEL: Yes. I can’t say that I know for certain that it’s self-selection bias. But my instincts tell me it’s extremely likely that it is.

McKEE: It’s not a general population of all people in the community or all football players in the community. If we had those population studies, I’m sure the risk would be lower. However, the question is, “Would the risk be acceptable?” In my opinion, this study says, “No, it would not be acceptable.”

DUBNER: I assume the timing of the study and your decision were not coincidental?

URSCHEL: No, I don’t think it was necessarily coincidental but I don’t think it was necessarily directly causal. The best, the easiest way I can explain it is that it was causal in one respect but not in the way that most people think it was. The way that it was causal is that it really reopened the dialogue within, talking to myself and also between myself and my fiance. It really opened a dialogue that I had not opened in an extremely long time.

DUBNER: Why was that? I mean, can I psychoanalyze you for one second?

URSCHEL: Yes, of course, feel free.

DUBNER: Is [it] because you loved playing football so much that even though the rational part of your brain — that maybe contained the mathematical abilities in your brain — you were able to override that or quiet it down so that you could keep doing what you wanted to do?

URSCHEL: Yes! That’s a good way to put it. This thing comes out and obviously it’s not 99 percent. Like it’s 99 percent in the study but it’s like, for me, is my chances 99 percent? I highly doubt it. Is it 0 percent? I highly doubt it. But it’s not 99 percent and the biggest thing it did was it made me say, “I should actually probably think about this again.” Not like, “This new evidence is extremely overwhelming [and changes] my opinion.” It’s more like, “This really brings something to my attention in a very real way that, quite frankly, I was more or less aware of but attempting to ignore to a degree.” In the back of my head, I had already been having these thoughts to some degree about my longevity and how long I wanted to play. The main thing that I thought about [was], “What was I most passionate about and what was I most excited about in life going forward?” When I thought about, “What are these one or two or three things?” Football, all of a sudden, was not one of these top two or three things. Football is actually actively hindering me from doing some of these things. Well, then it became a real conversation.

DUBNER: Was your fiance eager and ready for you to not only open this dialogue but to make the decision that you did?

URSCHEL: Yes. Quite ready.

DUBNER: What about your mom?

URSCHEL: Yes, she has been ready.

DUBNER: What about your dad?

URSCHEL: Not in favor. Yes. So what I did was I called John.

DUBNER: John Harbaugh, the coach.

URSCHEL: Yes.

DUBNER: Head coach.

URSCHEL: I thanked him and the Ravens, because quite frankly I thoroughly loved my time in the N.F.L., I loved my time with the Ravens. He expressed sentiments that he has the utmost respect for me. I stressed that these are mutual feelings. Yeah. John and I, we had a very positive conversation. He even called me recently to check in on me and see how things are going at M.I.T.

DUBNER: Were you concerned at all that your retiring would signal to the world that, “Holy cow, this is very startling and a very strong indictment.”

URSCHEL: Yes. This was actually a serious concern of mine. Because, yes I am retiring, I did retire. But at the same time, I love the N.F.L. I love football. I wouldn’t trade my experiences for the world. I do believe football is a great game. I didn’t want to be, for lack of a better word, I didn’t want to be perhaps fodder for certain anti-football establishments.

DUBNER: Do you think football survives long-term?

URSCHEL: Yes. Yes, of course.

SCHWARZ: I take no pleasure at all in the suggestion that I might have helped kill off football.

That, again, is Alan Schwarz, whose reporting in the New York Times highlighted the connection between football and brain damage.

SCHWARZ: I hope that football stays around and I’m very confident that it will.

DUBNER: Because why?

SCHWARZ: Because two things: N.F.L. owners are not in the business of having their $2 billion assets disappear. And the game will adapt. I’m not sure exactly how all this is going to play out, but the game — it’s a great game. It’s just played more recklessly than the market will allow.

McKEE: Because this affects a game we love, a game that defines communities, a game that is really the lifeblood for many colleges, there’s a lot of resistance to really addressing this problem in the way it should be addressed.

That’s Ann McKee.

McKEE: I just want people to be aware of this disease and I want individuals who decide to play football or continue to play football to be aware of it so that they can make as many individual changes to keep their head out of the game, to limit the amount of head impacts they experience, and make as an informed decision as they can regarding their own future.

And what is the N.F.L. doing? The league sent us a statement that read, in part, “The N.F.L. has made real strides to do everything it can to better protect players and make the game safer,” and it pointed to 47 rule changes since 2002. These include requiring more medical personnel to help diagnose head injuries; more careful treatment of players suspected of sustaining a concussion; and the prohibition of certain plays and procedures that have been deemed too risky.

McKEE: The responsible thing is to make some real changes in the game: limiting the amount of head contact, limiting practice, raising the age that children start to play football, maybe limiting playing career, and really addressing — with some strong research support — how to identify this disease in people while they’re still living and come up with treatments for it.

All that said, Ann McKee says it’s hard to know exactly what to do since the science on brain injury is still young. And since there are some surprising wrinkles — like the correlation, or lack thereof, between concussions and C.T.E.

McKEE: Repeatedly in our studies, we’ve looked at concussion and number of concussions. In none of the studies have concussions correlated with the development of C.T.E. We’ve had individuals with no reported concussions who have C.T.E., and we’ve had individuals with a number, high numbers of concussions, who don’t have C.T.E. But the one thing that seems to be holding up: it’s years of exposure to the sport and the length of playing career and the number of subconcussive hits. That is: the same impacts that lead to concussions in some people and symptoms don’t rise to the level of symptoms in others. It’s really the duration of the career — the cumulative number of what we call subconcussive hits — that seems to correlate best with the presence and severity of C.T.E.

There’s one more point about the brain — obvious, maybe, but often overlooked.

McKEE: The brain is just this marvel. It really controls our personality, our thoughts, our experiences, our emotion, even our reflexes, and our athleticism. Because that’s what the risk is here. It’s not like an arm or a knee. You’ll still be the same person even if you have difficulty moving or pain when you move. But the brain is actually your identity.

Especially if you’re the kind of person getting your Ph.D. in math at M.I.T..

URSCHEL: I’m interested in Voronoi diagrams, centroidal Voronoi tessellations, but also interested in other things. My advisor is this guy Michel Goemans, and he specializes in combinatorial optimization. I’ve been working on a lot of combinatorial optimization lately, and this is what I’ve been learning a lot about. I do have diverse interests.

DUBNER: I do want to hear what you think about the extent of any brain damage you may have done by playing all the football you’ve played.

URSCHEL: That’s a good question. How much brain damage do I have? I don’t know. And it’s extremely hard to know. While there are encouraging signs for me at the moment because I don’t have any problems currently — again, I don’t know. And I don’t know how much of an effect having played football will have on my experiences later in life. To know with certainty is a very hard thing in this area, I believe.

John Urschel always knew that playing football involved risks — as does just about anything in life. But: when risk tipped into uncertainty — well, that seems to have been his tipping point.

LO: From my own perspective I think it’s wise because doing mathematics could provide a lifetime of pleasure and success, whereas being a very successful football player can provide you with 5 to 10, maybe 15 years of success.

That, again, is Andrew Lo, who teaches finance at M.I.T. Maybe he and Urschel can be friends!

LO: If you don’t know what the odds are, you really have to say, “It’s probably not something that I’m comfortable doing.” He’s making a very human decision because we don’t know what the odds are, the potential loss both for him and for the community. It could be incredible. I mean imagine if Albert Einstein ended up being a linebacker for his football team, and we never would have gotten the theory of relativity because he got tackled during a particularly nasty game. If you don’t know what you’re giving up, if you don’t know what the odds are, it’s actually very easy to say, “You know what? I don’t think I want to play.”

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: we’re talking about talking:

John McWHORTER: I find it fascinating that there are seven thousand different ways to do what we’re doing right now.

We talk about how talking began:

McWHORTER: There are many theories as to why people started using language, and some of them are ones where you want it to be true because it’s cool.

And: if we could start over, what would that look like?

McWHORTER: The truth is that if we could start again, I don’t think anybody would wish that the situation was the way it came out.

We return to our Earth 2.0 series with a look at our modern-day Tower of Babel. That’s next time …

Maria Luisa MACIEIRA: Isso vem no próximo episódio.

Oleg IVANOV: Это будет в следующем выпуске.

Dayana MUSTAK: Episod seterusnya dalam Radio Freakonomics.

Justin CHOW: 在下一集

Anisa SILVA: Yang akan datang selanjutnya.

Rendell de KORT: Esey ta sigi proximo.

… on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam with help from Eliza Lambert. Please don’t take our fair treatment of John Urschel and the Baltimore Ravens as any sort of endorsement of the Ravens; Freakonomics Radio is firmly a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins and Brian Gutierrez; the music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra.  Special thanks to Andy Lanset, New York Public Radio’s Director of Archives. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Andrew Lo, professor of finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ann McKee, professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University.

Alan Schwarz, journalist.

John Urschel, Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at M.I.T. and former lineman for the Baltimore Ravens.

RESOURCES

“111 N.F.L. Brains. All But One Had C.T.E.,” Joe Ward, Josh Williams and Sam Manchester, The New York Times (July 25, 2017).

“Advances and Gaps in Understanding Chronic Traumatic Encephalophy: From Pugilists to American Football Players,” Gil Rabinovici (2017).

“Clinicopathological Evaluation of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Players of American Football,” Robert Cantu, Lee Goldstein, Douglas Katz, Robert Stern, Thor Stein, Ann McKee et al (2017).

“Long-term Consequences of Repetitive Brain Trauma: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy,” Robert Stern, David Riley, Daniel Daneshvar, Christopher Nowinski, Robert Cantu, Ann McKee (2011).

“Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: A Risk Factor for Neurodegeneration,” Brandon Gavett, Robert Stern, Robert Cantu, Christopher Nowinski and Ann McKee (2010).

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit by Frank Knight (Martino Fine Books, 1921).

“Why I Still Play Football,” John Urschel, The Player’s Tribune (March 18, 2015).

ETC.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew Lo (Princeton University Press, 2017).

“An Egghead’s Guide to the Super Bowl,” Freakonomics Radio (February 2, 2017).

“On the Maximal Error of Spectral Approximation of Graph Bisection,” John Urschel and Ludmil Zikatanov (2015).

The post “How Much Brain Damage Do I Have?” appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/brain-damage/

[johnchiarello]

Monday

MONDAY- 6-12-17

Malachi 2:14 Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.Malachi 2:15 And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.

MASON-

https://youtu.be/E-NpvpDLlrk

http://wp.me/a4V5qQ-BV

.The tree

.The friend

.The accusation

.Afghanistan

.Iraq

.Orlando

.Drones

 NEW- [verses- links below]

Last night I read Malachi chapter 2- and thought it interesting that it is a rebuke against leadership- for breaking the covenant with the wives of their youth.

 I really had no ‘plan’ on talking about that issue- but it has come up in the present teaching on Mark’s gospel- as well as on my ‘unplanned’ talks.

 Often times we speak on issues- and it turns out that there was a reason.

 I also gave an example [Mason] of how good people- in anger- can quickly make a sexual accusation- even against a friend they are trying to help.

I only share that example because I know the lady who said it- is actually a person who helps the homeless- like myself.

 The last few days I also posted the famous ‘rape accusation’ case in the bible.

The story of Joseph and Potiphars wife.

Now- I do not share it in a way that says ‘oh- yeah- all rape accusations are false’.

 No- I find it interesting that some women- when either scorned [for sex in the biblical example] or for other reasons- do indeed do this.

 It reminded me of the local Kingsville carpenter case that I spoke on the last few days.

I don’t think many Christians realize how God is actually giving us insight into the heart of man [or woman] by this being one of the most famous stories in scripture.

 God is not ‘being mean’ he is showing us another way iniquity works- yes- rape- child molestation- there are indeed many real cases of other forms of sin.

 But we often neglect to see why false accusation [bearing false witness] is one of the ‘big 10’ so to speak.

In society- if I hold you against your will- we call that kidnapping.

 Yet in the famous case of Michael Morton- he was ‘kidnapped’ for 25 years- by the system.

How?

 The prosecutor in the Morton case sincerely believed Morton murdered his own wife- because she did not want to have sex with him on his birthday.

 Morton's son- who was very young at the time- did visit Morton while he was in prison.

 When his son was of legal age- he began reading all the new stories about what his father ‘did’ - these stories created real anger- and hatred in Morton's son.

 That damaged him.

Over time- the truth was revealed- and Morton was released.

 The former prosecutor fought against it for a while- but after the release most viewed it as ‘well- at least the system worked in the end’.

 But the fabricated story from the prosecutor- and the publication of that false accusation- for so many years- created an evil mind in many that read it.

 The hatred and anger did have a source- it was the false words- accusations- that poisoned all who were involved.

 We often think that false testimony or accusation- is very rare.

The reason I mentioned the Joesph case- is because it shows us that sin- manifests itself in that particular way at times.

 I also talked about the ‘Jezebel’ spirit.

The cases where those in authority also have manipulated the system- to accomplish what they want.

 Now- all women in authority positions are obviously not Jezebels.

But scripture shows us some famous examples of it.

 So- even a good christian woman in the heat of an argument can simply blurt something out- that cuts to the heart of what we see in the Joesph story.

 In society- these accusations

are not rare at all.

 In the Morton case- it came out of the sinful heart of the prosecutor- who actually believed Morton's failure to ‘have sex’ caused him to murder his wife.

 Though it was all fabricated -maybe even for a good reason [I’m sure at the Beginning of the case- the prosecutor released those words of accusation- in the court- because he thought Morton ‘might’ have done it].

 Yet- the damage his false accusations caused- not only to Morton- but to his son- and many others-

 The damage was very real.

 Just as real- and bad- as if someone kidnapped your family relative- and held them illegally for 25 years.

Yes- no one gets a pass on these things- and when the accusations are known to be false from the start[Like en ex wife lying about a dad molesting their child] then that woman has committed a severe crime.

 But the system seems to look at those cases- even if the man is found not guilty- as ‘well- the mother should have never lied- but it’s over’.

 No- many of the lies in these scenarios have caused great damage- and when some of the fathers are later exonerated after many years- the mothers who made the false charges often pay no penalty at all.

 LINKS- Here are just a few quick links- I didn’t even read them-

 https://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/09/02/the-wrongfully-convicted-sex-offender/

https://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/09/02/the-wrongfully-convicted-sex-offender/

 The main point I want to make is scripture actually shows us that false accusation is not just something ‘people do’ it is one of the key ways iniquity [sin] works.

 It’s not some new- or rare thing- in the few stories in the bible about rape- it just so happens the famous accusation was made- simply because Joesph did not want to have sex with the woman.

 Out of the few cases in the history of scripture- one of the main reasons the rape charge is made- is because the man did not want to have sex with the woman.

 Because of the recent stuff I have talked about- I think some might have made- not just some wrong judgments- or that judge ‘did the best she could’.

 No- if all of the many years of damage that is going to be done [Morton’s son]- taking away the voice of the man himself- the judgment that ‘bad judging’ brings on a community- all of these things are very serious.

 And we simply don’t see it as ‘that bad’.

 If someone were to kidnap a judge- and hold that judge against their will [unjust cause] that crime is just as hideous in the eyes of God- as the imprisonment of a person wrongfully- based on false testimony-

Proverbs 19:9 - A false witness shall not be unpunished, and [he that] speaketh lies shall perish.

New International Version Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent-- the LORD detests them both. New Living Translation Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent--both are detestable to the LORD. English Standard Version He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD.

 Last [I think?] but not least-

Hopefully today you only get 1 video- I need to work on the regular teaching posts.

In the bible- wisdom is vital for leaders- judges [men or women] those in authority.

I did check up on the news today- the Comey thing- etc.

We also have the case of Bill Cosby- sexual assault.

 In his case- though I always liked Bill Cosby- it seems pretty obvious that he’s guilty.

He actually did an interview on Larry King years ago where he talks about stuff that he’s being accused of.

If I remember he even mentions it in one of his books [using drugs to make women ‘more comfortable’ with sexual advances].

 So- because of all this- he probably is guilty.

Now- in the ‘Kingsville carpenter’ case [I- like most of you- probably never want to hear it again]

Here is wisdom-

In society- the spur of the moment statement- when responding to a rape accusation ‘the only thing I can imagine is I turned her down for sex’ Is rarely ever used.

 Why?

If you had sex- then the normal excuse would be ‘it was consensual’.

 If you didn’t have sex- you would simply say ‘she’s lying’.

 But the fact that he himself put it in a way that shows you it was not thought out- means he had to be wracking in his own brain- ‘Why’?

 And as I stated above- out of all the rare cases of the accusation of rape in the bible- sure enough- that was the only reason for the false accusation.

 Now- if I’m right- something will happen.

Huh?

Will John do somet5hing?

 No- not any more than what you have seen me do the last week.

 Bring it out into the light.

That's a function of the kingdom.

 Meaning it brings God’s ‘judgment’ in.

Does God delight in judgment- justice?

 Of course- as much as he delighted in the release of the young girl who was kidnapped and held in a storage container- which I just saw on the news yesterday.

Now- we can identify more with a young girl being kidnapped-

Then the older men who might be ‘serving’ the same fate- but they might be in prison because of judges/juries who lack judgment.

 Or jurors who are not doing a good job [Like what happened in the Overton case].

 Either way- we now bring it into the light.

Not for vengeance- but for Justice.

 Whether it be for the Gaytan kid I talked about before.

Or Mr Rosas [Flash bomb case].

 Or yes- even for the actual victims of rape and incest [Like Nava’s step daughter].

In the eyes of God- just because you have a Mexican man- it’s still wrong- if it was a false accusation.

 Ok- that’s it for now-

God bless all-

 News-

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/asia/kabul-explosion-hits-diplomatic-area/index.html on the video I said 40 were killed- it was actually 90- which proves my point more.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/orlando-marks-year-anniversary-pulse-massacre/story?id=47980149

  VERSES- Exodus 23:1

Verse Concepts

"You shall not bear a false report; do not join your hand with a wicked man to be a malicious witness.

Leviticus 19:16

Verse Concepts

'You shall not go about as a slanderer among your people, and you are not to act against the life of your neighbor; I am the LORD.

Psalm 41:5-9

My enemies speak evil against me, "When will he die, and his name perish?" And when he comes to see me, he speaks falsehood; His heart gathers wickedness to itself; When he goes outside, he tells it. All who hate me whisper together against me; Against me they devise my hurt, saying, read more.

Luke 3:14

Verse Concepts

Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, "And what about us, what shall we do?" And he said to them, "Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages."

 New American Standard Bible  He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD. King James Bible He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. Holman Christian Standard Bible Acquitting the guilty and condemning the just-- both are detestable to the LORD.  International Standard Version Exonerating the wicked and condemning the righteous are both detestable to the LORD. NET Bible The one who acquits the guilty and the one who condemns the innocent--both of them are an abomination to the LORD.  New Heart English Bible He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD. Aramaic Bible in Plain English He that justifies the evil and condemns the righteous is defiled in front of Lord Jehovah. GOD'S WORD® Translation Whoever approves of wicked people and whoever condemns righteous people is disgusting to the LORD. JPS Tanakh 1917 He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the righteous, Even they both are an abomination to the LORD. New American Standard 1977  He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the righteous,              Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD. Jubilee Bible 2000 He that justifies the wicked and he that condemns the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. King James 2000 Bible He that justifies the wicked, and he that condemns the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. American King James Version He that justifies the wicked, and he that comdemns the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. American Standard Version He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the righteous, Both of them alike are an abomination to Jehovah. Douay-Rheims Bible He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, both are abominable before God.  Darby Bible Translation He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the righteous, even they both are abomination to Jehovah. English Revised Version He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD. Webster's Bible Translation He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. World English Bible He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to Yahweh. Young's Literal Translation Whoso is justifying the wicked, And condemning the righteous, Even both of these are an abomination to Jehovah.

Malachi 2:1 And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you.

Malachi 2:2 If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.

Malachi 2:3 Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it.

Malachi 2:4 And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you, that my covenant might be with Levi, saith the LORD of hosts.

Malachi 2:5 My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name.

Malachi 2:6 The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips: he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity.

Malachi 2:7 For the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts.

Malachi 2:8 But ye are departed out of the way; ye have caused many to stumble at the law; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the LORD of hosts.

Malachi 2:9 Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have been partial in the law.

Malachi 2:10 Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?

Malachi 2:11 Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god.

Malachi 2:12 The LORD will cut off the man that doeth this, the master and the scholar, out of the tabernacles of Jacob, and him that offereth an offering unto the LORD of hosts.

Malachi 2:13 And this have ye done again, covering the altar of the LORD with tears, with weeping, and with crying out, insomuch that he regardeth not the offering any more, or receiveth it with good will at your hand.

Malachi 2:14 Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.

Malachi 2:15 And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.

Malachi 2:16 For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the LORD of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously.

Malachi 2:17 Ye have wearied the LORD with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?

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#bible courts

[darkot]

I... am immensely pissed off right now.

I feel like I start every one of these entries like that, but... GOD DAMNIT!

For a year.. an entire fucking year, I had been meaning to make a Phoenix Wright painting with Edgeworth and Von Karma as the subjects and post it on December 28th, 2016--the date of the final in-game case--as an homage to the amazing game series that I fell in love with earlier that year. And I fucking missed it.

You can’t comprehend the deep seeded rage that stirs inside of me as of writing this. I just.. holy fuck, dude. I have no words.

It’s not just that, but a lot of other stuff going on that has been incredibly frustrating. I literally just realized the whole missed painting thing moments before writing this. That was just icing on the anger cake.

I worked for about 7 or so hours on the next storyboard for the film project I’m working on. Nothing inherently went bad with that, it’s just... my lack of speed is showing. I’m only billing the guy I’m working for, for 4 hours, because at some point I need to concede that it is my own lack of skill that caused it to take as long as it did. Granted, it was a very complex board. But still, it’s just.. argh.

I just finished watching the last dubbed season of One Piece last night, which was the final episodes before the time skip. Even though I already adored that show, that season was fucking astounding. I would go on to praise it further, if it wasn’t for this seething wrath that is currently dominating my mind.

The general theme towards the end of the season was that all of the main characters recognized that they needed to get stronger to tackle the challenge ahead of them: The New World. It was strangely coincidental because that’s a lot of how I’ve been thinking lately. Not that I need to get stronger in the physical sense, but.. I want to hone my skills further. I need to get better if I want to go where I want to go in the world. As of right now, I’m too weak.

Another thing that’s pissing me off: I ordered two art figures back in November, and they still haven’t arrived. Figma Archetype: He, and Figma Archetype: She. I figured that they would help a lot in drawing those story boards. But so far, they haven’t helped at all because they haven’t arrived! It is t-minus ten days until I can complain about it to the site I bought it from. I already tried emailing them to ask if they could contact the shipping company and make sure that it left Japan, to which they essentially told me to fuck off until 60 days had passed. So, I’ve been waiting.. and waiting... and waiting. And nothing. The tracking info for this type of shipping only has four entries. When it is processed in Japan, when it has left Japan, when it has arrived in Canada, and when it has been delivered.So far, it has gone through the first two.. but it apparently “left Japan” on the 16th of November. So, if the tracking info is to be believed, it has been in transit for nearly two whole months. That.. seems rather unlikely. But okay. January 15th. It’s still got time. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be delivered? I’ve been saying that to myself every day for the past eight weeks. But maybe tomorrow will ACTUALLY be the day.

Don’t even get my started about Overwatch. Again, nothing inherently bad has been going on with it. I ended today at 3070, which I’m pretty okay with. But the last match before me and my group ended really got under my skin. Or rather, somebody on the enemy team did, which I honestly don’t care to admit. 

We were on Lijiang Tower. They were playing Reaper. I was playing Reaper. I was absolutely decimating him when we 1v1′d during the match. However, they ended up winning that round, so that gave him ground to start trash talking out of saltiness. Then, during the second round, I concede that I did absolutely nothing. Their team was too coordinated for me to be effective, and he won most of our encounters. So, he pushed it further and just kept goading me and goading me. I was honestly getting really annoyed. At this point, I hadn’t said a single word to him, but he was just making this a dick measuring contest. So, I switched to Pharah. At that point, I was absolutely slaying. I started the third round with 11 kills and ended with 37. I landed two direct rockets on an enemy Pharah that I don’t even know how I hit. For the second one I had to turn around 180 degrees and aim up above me.. it was weird that I was able to instinctively predict that, that is where they would be. I just trusted myself to land the shot and got it. From the kill cam on their end though, they must have though I was using some sort of bot, haha.

We won the next two rounds, and then it was tied 2-2. At this point that guy had all but shut up because we were making a big comeback. And in the final round, I choked. Fucking hard. It was a very close game. We had 90% on the point, they had 99%. At the very end, they started to make this last push. Their Pharah came in, and she had a Mercy pocketing her. Even though I had been doing insanely well up to that point, something about that just made me.. panic. I don’t like fighting a Pharah+Mercy combo as a Pharah without a Mercy. I am confident in Pharah vs. Pharah battles. I don’t like Pharah+Mercy vs. Pharah+Mercy, but I can deal with it. But Pharah+Mercy vs. Pharah is the worst thing as the lone Pharah. That said, I definitely had a disproportionate reaction. I saw the Pharah with the Mercy beam on here, and something in my brain said “I know, I can win this encounter my ulting them. I ult, am immediately two shot and downed by the damage boosted Pharah, their team capitalizes on the pick, rest of my team goes down, and we lose.

Nobody says anything. Not even that dickhead Reaper from earlier. But I have been beating myself up about that ever since it happened three hours ago. That could have definitely been a win. Perhaps we were going to lose no matter what happened, but I more or less sealed our defeat with possibly the worst ult that I have ever done in Overwatch. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had this sense of needing to carry because the other DPS wasn’t doing a whole lot. I guess my brain went “If I die to this Pharah+Mercy, we’re done for.” Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy... god, that was stupid. I ended with 49 elims, which frankly is pretty decent. I was doing well that game. Up until the very end. But that’s just.. not good enough. I don’t settle for doing well and then messing up. It’s extremely aggravating to me. It sucks when it is somebody else who makes the mistake, but when I’M the one who throws the game, that feeling of failure is the worst..

So, mark that as another display of inadequacy today, along with how long it took me to finish that picture.

Though this hasn’t just been today, I’m having writers block when it comes to a character for that AQ3D series I’m working on. That has been bugging me for a week now. But DING DING DING, we’ve got three! That’s three areas that I’ve done shitty in lately! Do I hear four? Well, I haven’t streamed in over a month either because I still haven’t worked out the “second entity” idea.

I don’t know, man. My mind’s just feeling so polarized right now. Technically, I’m getting shit done. I finished a storyboard. I went up about 60 SR in Overwatch today. I am two lessons away from completing one of my school courses. But.. it’s just not good enough. That board shouldn’t have taken that long. I should have went up 90 SR today. I should already be done those final two lessons.

Like.. fuck, man. I.. I just want to get to a point where I’m satisfied with how I’m doing. People are right when they tell me that I’m my biggest critic. But that’s why I draw, and that’s why I play Overwatch competitively. To prove something to myself. That I can make a picture that I consider beautiful, or to reach master rank. Whenever I take on a challenge such as these, or entering an art contest (which I haven’t done in years at this point o.O), or auditioning for a voice acting role, or accepting my friend’s offer to do storyboards for the film series.. it’s to prove to myself that I can do it. That if I put my mind to it, that I can accomplish this, because my mind is great. That if I try my heart out, that I can succeed, because my heart is strong. But time and time again, I only end up disappointing myself. I always get in reach of that horizon, but always fall short. My family has always told me that I make them proud, but.. I haven’t ever managed to make myself proud.

The worst part is seeing my potential, and not reaching it. Like that 180 upwards airshot on that Pharah. That is possibly the craziest thing that I have ever done in Overwatch (I really wish I was recording/streaming, so I had it saved =/). Or the painting I did of Notch that blew up on Twitter (not in terms of skill, because that picture was god awful. But in terms of the response people had to it). Or getting 10 Twitch followers in 2 days. Sometimes, I feel like such a one hit wonder.

Aside from individual ambitions, I worry that it taints my overall dreams too. The other day, a friend on my team was going through a rough time. They were really down on themselves because of things their family was saying about them, and because of their own personal opinion of themselves. I gave a pretty long speech to them in our Discord text channel to try and lift their spirits. This, was that message: “It's not that big of a deal, Wild.. I was below 3000 just a couple days ago. Hell, I think I dipped into the 2800s last week. SR will fluctuate. Wildly, at times (hue hue). It's natural. 

You can't let your Overwatch rank be a measure of your personal skill. In-game, or out-of-game. Back in season 1, I was determined to reach top 500 because I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it. That if I really set my mind to it and tried my heart out, that I could reach that goal. What I came to realize though, was that competitive Overwatch is one of the worst things to base any sort of personal merit on. At the end of the day, it is a team game. No matter how well you do, you alone can not determine the outcome of a game. It is a collective effort made by all 6 people. This is even true when you are playing with us. Sometimes, we'll be having a bad day. But you can't let that make you think that it was your fault. You're only one man. 

Likewise, sometimes you'll be having a bad day too. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Everybody does. We can even have a bad week or a bad month. But no matter what's going on, whether it's on your end or you're having a stroke of bad luck with team mates, that still doesn't say anything about you, or what you are capable of. 

Through sheer will, you can do a lot of things. Single handedly winning a comp match is not one of them, however. That's like trying to win a football game on your own. It just doesn't work without teammates that are also on their A-game.

IRL, you aren't a failure either. You're only a failure if you give up. But we're all here. We're all trying our best each and every day, and that's all that anyone can fairly ask of you. Nobody has all of the answers and goes through life without a single bump in the road. All of us, even our predecessors, blindly walk forward and just.. try. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Or, sometimes, our best efforts at accomplishing something are slow. But that's FINE. Millions before you have gone through the same, and millions have come out of it alright. 

 "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." - Lao Tzu 

No matter what's going on, I know you're doing fine, Wild. People may judge or criticize--even those close to us--but as long as you're taking one step every day (doesn't matter if it's forward or backward), then you're doing your part. Be kind to yourself.”

I was worried that the others wouldn’t be too happy about the wall of text, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. They were all telling me how brilliant and beautiful what I wrote was. (One even said to remember them when I’m famous, which was really out of nowhere o.o) That was one of those periodic reminders that I have the ability to change minds. Something in my delivery, or the way I speak, or the way I act makes people listen to me. I’ve made bigots think critically, I’ve made the pessimistic dare to hope, I’ve made the fearful test their courage. But, in this instance, the one person who I was trying to touch with my writing, the friend who was having trouble, didn’t respond positively. It did not seem to lift their spirits much at all. Once again, another example of seeing what potential there is, and not quite meeting it.

That’s the type of thing that makes me fear that I won’t succeed in my dream of changing society for the better. It seems like, no matter what it is, I am always one step short. What if my work doesn’t touch the lives that I’m intending to? Maybe it too will fall short of achieving greatness, as its creator does.

God, Herman Tech messed me up. This is like.. a psychological scar from that experience. I see more failure in myself than I know is there in reality. I just.. want better, for myself.

In a lot of these situations, it feels like it’s me, holding myself back. That if I could let go and be more expressive in my artwork, and trust my instincts when taking shots in OW, and just.. generally be me, totally uninhibited... that I could accomplish so much more. But, for my whole life, I have put on faces for people. I adapt my personality to whoever I’m talking to, so we both have the smoothest interaction possible. At this point, after doing that for so many years, I don’t know who “totally uninhibited me” is. I have a VERY vague sense of that. But I’ve been out of touch with myself for a long time, now. I’ve developed my philosophies and thoughts, but I’m still very distant from my soul. My being. That’s a large part of the discord that I’ve felt stirring inside of me. I think too much, but I really don’t know how to do anything else.

Well, tomorrow’s another day. Maybe those figures will arrive...

#personal