So, the season of Christmas-Themed anxiety dreams has begun
[Written the morning of 28 November, 2023]
Don't remember much, if any, of the connecting "plot points" of the dream, but it was escalating into anxiety around holiday decorations, and people coming into the house and filling the place with all manner of pre-lit artificial Christmas trees.
Some of them were life-sized, and proper dark green. Some of them were entirely white, with fiber optic lights at the ends of their "needles." Some of them small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Some of them were animatronic, and rotated on their stands. Some of the trees were stationary, but the ornaments on them were animated puppets, that writhed about the branches like snakes.
I remember acknowledging out loud that many were very clever, and might even qualify as sculptural works of art. But they just weren't my style.
When there wasn't enough room to fit more trees on the floor, some were hung upside down from the ceiling.
And then, there was someone hanging faces/masks of Santa Claus on my walls.
All this was interrupted when someone noticed that there was a delivery truck being pulled by a pair of Belgian Draft horses
[ID from alt text: A pair of grey Belgian Draft horses in harness pulling a carriage. Description ends]
I took the opportunity of the distraction to leave the house and follow them, until I came to a largish herd of semi-feral horses, and just sat quietly and watched them, until some got curious enough to come up and snuffle me.
After a while, I felt decompressed enough to venture back to the house.
I've been extremely afraid of dreaming lately. And I'm not just afraid of bad dreams, I'm afraid of any dreams. I've had a lot of anxiety about dreams in the past, because I often have hyper realistic dreams that I struggle to wake up from. I also struggle with derealization when I'm awake.
I'm planning to talk to my therapist about this, because it's gotten so bad lately. However, I'm also hoping there's some sort of witchy thing I could do to help. I love the idea of dreamcatchers, but I know those are heavily appropriated. I'm going to do more research and see if there's something similar out there that is not appropriated or maybe buy an authentic one? I'd really like to make my own, but I want to do it right.
I'm also going to start keeping a dream journal and see if that helps. I'll update if I find anything helpful!
Been having a lot of anxiety dreams, but this one stuck with me. I was being chased by a crowd with lanterns for being trans; their mantra was "[???], Locate, Immolate", and threw oil to set me on fire.
Not my best work imo, but it gets the idea across so :T
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Controversial Opinion but one thing that I learned in the last few months of 2023 was to not accommodate my social anxiety at any cost. If you're someone like me, whose social anxiety is caused by fear of messing up and just not being used to socializing, then this is for you. Do not indulge or adapt to your anxiety, instead just do it. I know it seems ridiculous, but really you have to just expose yourself to what you're anxious and scared of, which in this case is socializing or basically doing anything publicly.
Exposure=Knowledge=practice=confidence=less anxiety because once you're exposed to your fear, it'll get easier. Sure, it may takes weeks, months and maybe even years, but you will eventually gain confidence and get better at it. For instance, let's say you suck at doing pull ups. But you practice it for 30 days and eventually you will see improvements. It's the same thing with social behavior, you won't get better at it if you don't participate in socializing. You have to show up, even if it's just for 5 minutes, even if it's just walking to the grocery shop. You need little steps to achieve confidence and fuck social anxiety up. If your anxiety is telling you not to do it because you'll look dumb or ugly or whatever, it's lying to you. You need to do it anyways. Literally cannot explain this enough, do it anyways, even if you're bad at it, even if you don't know how to do it. Do it anyways.
☀️ why is buying little things in public so hard? like the cashier lady doesn’t care in the slightest that I’ve purchased bread and a teether blanket but I feel like I am being judged through my soul and she knows what I am
Poor Outer, I only realized after starting this, that his birthday is on the same day as Ink, which is why his nonexistent ass is in the end…awkwardly.
So I'm at the Battle of Helm's Deep but for whatever reason I was tasked with making a chocolate raspberry cheesecake.
The catch? It had to be vegan.
Why? They wanted to launch it into the Uruk-hai army.
They figured Uruk-hai love chocolate raspberry cheesecake so they'd start eating it, but then get really really depressed that it was vegan, so they'd just turn around and leave.
Do you know how hard it is to make cheesecake in Middle Earth? Especially during a battle when they don't really have supplies? And then they hit you with vegan??
Like, they've breached the walls and I'm trying to figure out what to do and things are dire. And I'm looking at Theoden and Aragorn as they're explaining this vegan cheesecake plan and going "you're shitting me" and Aragorn very seriously responds "we shit you not".
The thing is? It worked. How did they know Uruk-hai love chocolate raspberry cheesecake?
Also I'm pretty sure I made the crust out of lembas.