#as a hyper productive person i have extreme guilt

[15-blade]

Sometimes you just have to have a bad grumpy weekend. Right? There’s nothing wrong, I’m just grumpy. I don’t want to clean, I don’t want to cook, I don’t want to go to the store. I just want to be a blanket monster and scroll social media. Let other people do things and say things and have feelings. My cats are fully in support of this at least.

#angst #grump #as a hyper productive person i have extreme guilt #bad weekend #emotional exhaustion

[its-an-inxp-again]

Heart fixes in enneatypes 5

Introduction

Hey guys! This is a general masterpost for cores 5 about their heart fixes! Sadly, online descriptions regarding your fixes are always very very poor, so here I'm trying to imagine how core's and 2nd fix' fears and strategies interact with each other. Basically, here are 3 subtypes of 5, classified based on the way they deal with the Feeling/Self-Image Triad.

I think that classifying types based on their 2nd fix makes sense, more so than classifying them by their 3rd fix, since it has mostly such a weak component in your general personality/in your daily priorities. Plus, 5s, being withdrawn types, are most likely to be gut lasts: so their 2nd fix is most likely to be from the Heart Center. Hence this post.

To be honest with you all, this can turn out to be more theoretical than practical (and I mean, as enneatype descriptions tend to be) since I don't actually have many in real life examples and I'm not entirely sure about my own heart fix, so yeah, take all of this with a grain of salt and feel free to criticize my descriptions (honestly it'd be helpful). I just wanted to try to give a more in depth analysis since fixes are a really interesting concept but there's so little information online...

Disclaimer: in order to make this work better one should compare themselves with other ennea5 in their life, possibly with a different heart fix than you. Comparing oneself to 5s online or in fiction can be more,,, eh (you don't see them acting in ther day-to-day life, and fictional characters are meant to be seen by the public in a certain way). I don’t know about comparing yourself to other types who seem to have a different fix than you... (like, say, comparing yourself to who is probably a 6 with a 4fix to understand how a 4fix would look like) it may work or it may not, I guess

5-2:

Uncertainty about the future and the world's dangers is faced by withdrawing. Fear of being worthless is faced by trying to earn validation and attention.

Double Rejection Triad

Obviously, the problems that come from the rejection triad are very present here - they have different strategies to deal with this feeling of rejection, and that is by ignoring their own needs, be that by retreating entirely or by attending to others' needs (they shift according to the circumstances).

Exposing their needs to someone not only feels embarassing and threatening, but it may also cause guilt

Hypersensitivity

According to Naranjo, 5s are hypersensitive, specifically when it comes to other people's demands. "In other words, a great sensitivity to interference goes hand-in hand with an over-docility, in virtue of which the individual interferes all too easily with her own spontaneity, with her preferences, and with acting in a way coherent with her needs in the presence of others. Also, in light of this over-docility (understandable as a by-product of a strong repressed love need) we can understand the particular emphasis in aloneness in ennea-type V. To the extent that the relationship entails alienation from one’s own preferences and authentic expression there arises an implicit stress and the need to recover from it: a need to find oneself again in aloneness.". It seems obvious to me that all of this would be heavily present in the 5-2 individual. He most likely feels highly obliged to attend to other people's or authorities' demands. Let's say, easily guilt-tripped (they won't necessarily act immediately on that guilt though).

This means they have an extreme need to withdraw after a social meeting: they will try to meet other people's needs but they can soon get too tired and retreat again.

It's more difficult for them not to care (as other 5s may do) not only or really about other people's opinions, but about other people's needs and emotions. and maybe they also don't relate that much to 5 descriptions where their need to have a stoic and hyper-rational attitude is emphasized, but of course this is not necessarily the case. (Naranjo does say in his description that 5s oscillate between insensitivity and hypersensitivity, and it seems to me that a 5-2 would easily tend more towards the hypersensitive side. Still, insensitivity is the way 5s deal with hypersensitivity itself, so they may switch to insensitive mode sometimes, otherwise they would burn out or something)

Depeding on their wing/iv, they may help others even when they don't really feel like it - usually, if they feel acting on their 2 strategies would require too much energy/that it's not worth it they'll just let it go. Core needs and strategies are a priority of course. (something similiar may happen to 3-fixers, although their goals are different).

Knowledge in the service of others

Uses their knowledge to help people.

Probably more comfortable helping in a practical/informative way rather than emotionally

They may be very self-conscious about their comforting abilities though (feeling they're never doing enough to show that they care): they may have consciouly learned how to improve in this area and how to improve their Emotional Intelligence in general

Still, surely has excellent cognitive empathy

Simply put, their desire to be competent can traslate into a desire to be competent from an emotional/helper point of view.

"Fear of being useless", as you see in some 5 descriptions - oh boy.

Vibes, wings and mistypings

At a party they would keep in the background but probably try to show somehow to the host that they're grateful for being invited, even in non-verbal ways (depends on their energy levels)

The one emotion they're more comfortable expressing (not necessarily feeling: in fact, they may not even feel it) is contentment ("I don't need anything, don't worry") or care ("what can I do to help you?")

5w4 emphasizes empathy but 5w6 emphasizes sociability

They probably mistyped as a 9 at some point, especially if they're female/afab.

Def can look like soc 5

To sum up

How 2 strategies are used to cope with 5-ish fears:

Hiding own needs = also means avoiding exposing oneself and feeeling vulnerable

Knowing what to do for others = feeling competent, capable but especially in control (again, rejection triad types need to feel in control). Taking care of others creates the illusion of taking care of one's own most vulnerable side, in a way controlling it.

2 strategies are used to face and placate one's own super-ego. According to Naranjo, 5s have a very strong super-ego (again, hypersensitivity + probably because to the super-ego the 5 individual still has "too many needs") so doing good may be a way to satisfy it.

2 strategies are used as a way to feel close to others/satisfy a deep and repressed love need without needing to show their vulnerable side directly, but rather from a position of power

How 5 strategies are used to cope with 2-ish fears:

Helping in a practical and informed way

Repressing own needs and emotions

5 pushes to control oneself, especially one's own needs

5 hypersensitivity probably helps at better recognizing other people's needs

Qualities that 2 brings to 5 (that is, in which ways 2 can help overcoming 5-like challenges):

Availability; does not ignore external expectations and demands as much

Is able to show their warmer and tender side (many 5s feel exposed by doing this), even though this still isn't the same as being vulnerable

Have less of a fear of intimacy, even though it depends on one's health levels (an unhealthy 2 is not really that open to intimacy as it may seem)

Higher Emotional Intelligence

Greater Social and Empathy Skills

More inclined to be more out there than other 5s, and especially is more open when it comes to relationships; less disillusioned, less skeptical, less cynic. more likely to believe that human relationships are indeed worth it. or at least, that's what they may tell themselves.

Challenges that 2 brings to 5:

Again, hiding own needs, vulnerability and failures

Fears disappointing people

May need to feel in control all the time, to the point of exhaustion: 5 already wants to be in control of their own mental states and emotions all the time, 2 adds up other people's ones. Need to unwind, especially mentally

They often feel deeply rejected, may try to deny it

May not be easy to express anger (they may have an 8fix, but its strategies are left last, so 5-2 are more likely to prevail), and for this very reason when they blow up, they blow up hard. Not only do 2-like frustrations make them explode, but 5 also represses their emotions a lot so they may be overwhelming when they finally get to the surface.

#enneagram #enneagram 2 #enneagram 5 #tritypes #5 tritypes #enneagram tritypes #tritypes descriptions #heart fix #2fix #enneagram heart fix #enneatype 5 #typology #typology tumblr #personality types

[lokemikaze]

Zuka Rant: Part 2 (2016 Yuki - Don Juan)

okay so. for some reason, the gang in the zuka server decided they wanted to torture me, and introduced me to the 2016 yukigumi don juan. i thought i was prepared, but uhhh apparently not - i didn’t expect this amount of pAIN D: i’m legit gonna spend the next week crying about this

if you don’t already know, don juan is a “womanizer” trash man who brings shame upon his family and doesn’t appreciate the people who love him - until he meets maria, who he for some reason falls head over heels for and ends up dying for. that is not the main focus of this essay, though; my wish is to expand upon my thoughts about don juan’s relation to mental illness. please note that this will touch upon heavy themes, including Bad Coping Mechanisms. i’ll say it again:

TRIGGER WARNING FOR DARK THEMES LIKE alcoholism and self-harm

so. where to start. perhaps i should first make a disclaimer and say that while i am quite Experienced with mental illness, i am by no means an expert, and everything i write here will be my own personal opinions and over-analysis. i also know nothing about the history of this musical etc., i went into this blindly and got punched by the pain

when we first meet juan (played by the amazing daimon, who does such a good job), he is at a bar, surrounded by women. he smiles his gorgeous little smile, and dear gods we’re all taken by this utter trash man. he pushes the ones who love him away in favour of having yet another fling as he empties another bottle. does this seem healthy? nah fam, this is a textbook example of actual self-harm - he may not even realise it himself, but the way he is dealing with his inner struggles is to drown it in alcohol and s*x. it is harmful to both body and mind, yet he uses it to push away the harsh reality and ignore his own emotions

there’s a very touching scene where we get to see young don juan with his mother as she dies. i think this is perhaps where some of his struggles started - he seemed to be struggling slightly even before this, but this is of course a moment that deeply affects him. he throws away his cross necklace, cursing god, and from then we can only imagine the path he took to get to the present. there is a very big chance he hasn’t actually dealt with the grief and trauma from seeing his mother die, and has instead repressed it. for years. and you know what we say about repressing emotions? uhh yeah it’s not good

so as i see it, the juan we meet at the beginning of this musical is a broken man who does not want to acknowledge that he is broken. he shows obvious signs of depression (i.e. pushing people away, losing interest in i.e. the women he desire), and he spends his days (unconsciously?) self-harming. he hides behind a smiling mask, when in reality he is filled with so much anger and grief, and probably - judging by his reactions later - is really out of touch with his emotions, unable to grasp any of them. it is, in fact, Sad Boie Hours

then, the ghost appears. or is it a ghost? i see this as a figment of juan’s mind - perhaps a hallucination? he clearly believes what he’s seeing is real, but nobody else can see what he sees. he is distressed by this (obviously), and reacts violently bc that’s the only way he knows to act. we can see him slowly losing his grip on reality, unable to make out the difference. as someone who has at several points in my life had hallucinations, i can confirm that the way he is acting is indeed very realistic for someone in that situation. not to mention that he’s haunted by guilt and trauma and all those emotions he has pushed down for so long. he loses some of the control he has over himself due to the extreme mental anguish he is going through.

then, he meets maria. it is love at first sight. he sees her, and talks to her, and cannot grasp - what is this feeling? why does it hurt, why does it feel like everything is changing? he finally has something that feels light in his life, something that ‘sparks joy’. maria gives him what no one else have been able to - a positive feeling that shines through the darkness of his struggles. he swears to change for her, to abandon his old ways and start a new and better life, and this is where i need to rant a bit about the costumes

as i said in my previous essay, i am a Costume Nerd, and i was a lot more pleased with the costumes of this production than in 2009 zukabeth (still salty). there aren’t many costume changes, but there doesn’t need to be. juan’s first outfit is such a Vibe, and i absolutely love it - and it’s completely full-on black. only black. however, after he meets maria and pledges to change, his costume also changes. he now has not only really pretty sparkle, but *white*. his all-black has adapted to include touches of white. there are of course multiple meanings that could be read into this, but what does it mean judging from the mental health viewpoint? well, black is often associated with depression and dark thoughts (hence the name *dark* thoughts), while white is associated with purity, joy and hope. my theory is that juan’s previously hopeless existence now has hope, something he wants to live for, someone he loves and cherishes and who keeps him going. there is light at the end of the dark tunnel, so to say.

then, maria’s fiance comes back from war and confronts juan. they agree upon a duel, and juan has what seems to be a panic attack. all of a sudden, the fragile happiness he created with maria is broken, and everything comes flooding back - including his hallucination ghost. in a following scene, he is seen with his (absolutely gay) friend, who tries to convince him to Not Do This. the ghost follows, and we see that juan is once again losing his grip on reality, lashing out and refusing to listen to reason. when the duel scene arrives, juan’s costume is back to the full black. his hope is gone, and he has reverted back into the anguished man he was.

in the beginning of the duel, juan fights mercilessly, wounding his enemy several times, each time getting more and more out of control. he sees this man as the obstacle between himself and the hope he tried to cling on to, and now that he has had a taste of happiness, he wants it back. he aims to kill, and gets angry when his target won’t. stop. getting. up!! this is when the good old hallucination ghost once again appears, telling him that he is only procrastinating the inevitable, that if he wins, he will lose anyway due to the sin of killing another man. you can *see* the moment when juan’s last grip on reality shatters, and from then on out there’s no hope of it ending well. he has given up hope, he has given in to the darkness, he has accepted as a fact that there is no good outcome for him. if he lives on, he will be plagued by his own struggles, unable to find a way out of the deep dark hole his mind has plunged him into. and so, he does the only thing that seems logical, and basically throws himself at his enemy’s blade. he states that this way, maybe he can live on in the love between himself and maria. my belief is that it was a simple way to commit s*icide that didn’t involve him having to actually do it himself. it makes it seem ‘accidental’, and lays the blame on someone else. 

and so, don juan dies. a painful, harsh death that absolutely punched my heart and wrenched the sobs from my throat (thanks for enabling my hyper empathy, daimon, well done). he dies with little else than the vague hope that maybe, he can die with love, and that something good will come from it all. a man who got too little time, made too many bad decisions, and had too many issues that he should’ve gotten help with ages ago goddammit. it is questionable if he was fully aware of his decision, being fully lost to his own mind by then, but what is unquestionable is that he suffered a lot. his entire life was filled with suffering, hidden behind a cocky smile. 

if you’ve read all the way here, thank you for considering what i had to say. i hope i remembered everything i wanted to say. i have no way to conclude this, other than to say “thanks, i hate this” to the sadists who threw me into this. it is a heartwrenching story that i honestly can relate to a little too much to (no, i am not a murderer nor a womanizer), and i felt don juan’s pain on a deep level. have i read way too much into it all? probably. then again, that’s the beauty of fiction - we all have our own experiences which affect the impression it leaves us with. and to me, takarazuka’s don juan isn’t about a cocky bastard who got too full of himself - it’s about a young man so filled with pain that it led to his demise.

#long post #zuka #takarazuka #don juan #tw: mental health #tw: dark themes #another essay #bc i cannot control myself #this show absolutely ended me #so much pain

[ebachan]

Sonic Movie Review

So, nobody is going to be surprised I’m writing a review of this movie :-D I’ve seen it the last Saturday. Since then, I’ve calmed down a bit, so I’m not going to be “clouded” by emotions (too much XD)

So without further ado, here we dash by...

I’ll divide this into three segments - The Good, “The Neutral”, “The Bad”. This is a purely personal opinion, so you are free to disagree ;-) I’m open to discussion, but have patience with me ;-) This will be spoilerific, so watch out :-)

TL: DR

The movie is worth the money for sure. There is a lot of fun, good action, top-notch CGI, the voice acting is spot on, Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik works really well, and Tom with Maddie make a great couple. All of this and more makes one heck-of-a-ride you will enjoy for the second time as well.

I hope you won’t mind the tag, but I love to read from you ;-)

@movie-robotnik-positivity @movie-sonic-positivity @movie-sonic-adopted-au @aawesomepenguin @welcome-to-green-hills @dxrkblaze @deldiztmblr​ 

THE GOOD

The design...

We all can agree this Design is extremely good and flows well. I’ll remind you, I’m one of the rare people who liked Sonic 1.0. Yes, the one who was hated by almost the whole world. I still like this design, and I would be happy to see it again in action with small adjustments.

However, this one fits better. It has cartoony vibes, vibrant colors, the details are insanely beautiful, and the eyes are pure cuteness.

Jokes...

I liked almost every joke, and if I didn’t get it, I enjoyed the reaction. I can’t speak for English since I’ve heard only Czech dub, but they did well in translating or changing the jokes to fit the scene :-)

Voice Acting...

As stated before, can’t judge it, but great job on it! Czech one just sometimes for me loses some of the emotions Ben Schwartz expressed, but it’s not so bad.

Actions Scenes...

Fast-paced and well-timed. No DBZ-like fights and all of them lead to Sonic’s evolution and show his personality in the best light.

Tom and Maddie...

As I mentioned briefly, I like them both. They are a color-mixed couple, and I love them!!! It’s not forced like with words “Emancipation” or “Women don’t need men”. While Maddie isn’t an action type, she knows how to hold her ground. Like when she was calm when facing Sonic for the first time, or how she accompanied them later in the journey. She is level-headed as not even a dozen of egg-drones made her panic.

Tom is perhaps for some boring, but I like him. He is more collected and mature, which works for some nice dynamics. He is not just an adult, but Sherif too, so he has a strong sense of justice and can’t leave helpless people and alienhogs alike alone :-) He has some great lines, and takes Sonic as an equal.

Dr. Robotnik...

Only know I know he played in The Mask (a movie I’ve seen as a kid but didn’t like that much), but I’m soooo bad with names ^_^;. So, he wasn’t the reason I watched the movie, but I knew I love him as Dr. Robotnik. He makes him less 2D-villain-from-80s and gives him a spark. He is more interesting then SatAm’s Dr. Robotnik, and more close to Boom Dr. Eggman. Yet he is also very dangerous which makes for a great balance of goofy&over-the-top&serious threat.

Music...

I find it nice. Featuring smaller names like Hyper Potion or belowed Junkie-XL is a nice bonus, and they fit well the story. Except for Dr. Robotnik’s one. His moves were more fit for Fast Rock-like music. The Where Evil Grows feels too slow but fits his character. That was the only scene that threw me a bit off.

CGI...

I generally didn’t like 3D much less not fully CGI movies, but this CGI is gorgeous and so alive!! The first half-CGI movie I enjoyed was Detective Pikachu. In this decade, we have a technology capable of making those characters come to life! I hope to see more movies like this!

Easter Eggs...

I’ve spotted a few. And perhaps one I didn’t see anybody talking about. In the Bar Fight Scene, Sonic pulls out underwear of one man attacking Tom just like The Mask did XD Don’t tell me this isn’t an Easter Egg XD You can’t talk me out of it :-D

Emotions...

While I didn’t cry (as I feared), I still felt sadness or joy with Sonic.

The Neutral

Floss...

I don’t care! It’s a simple but challenging dance. It has fast-paced vibes that fit well with Sonic. Not to mention, Sonic mimicked children to feel like he has friends or he is “in”, so if some did Floss challenge, he would do it too.

Product placement...

I’ve noticed a few, and I didn’t mind them. They were relevant to the plot, quick easter-egg (pun intended), or a part of a joke. 

Some jokes...

I didn’t mind fart jokes... as silly as they are, there wasn't one every five minutes, so no big deal :-)

Sonic’s arms...

I still don’t get this argument (and I may not want to), but whatever... It’s a minimal change, and I never had a problem with it. The same goes for shoes or any other design choice. Small changes don’t ruin the character ;-)

“The Bad”

I don’t exactly have something I don’t like. But I thought I should mention a thing or two. I found a few “plot-holes” that bugged me after a bit, but they do have an explanation when you think about it. Let’s call them Sonic’s Fun Facts!

NONE of what I mention here is meant to trash the movie!! It’s more of an observation, a fun activity ;-)

The car...

I dunno if any of the cars have an alarm telling you to put on the seat-belt but in both cases of Tom and Sonic, it never rung. But some may not have this function.

The car v2...

Tom’s car lost the roof, yet we didn’t see anybody stopping him. I’m sure everybody would call cops. That would be so weird. The question is, how far he had it to Maddie’s sister, and how close that house was to the Center. Perhas he needed only a short distance or people thought he has those funny 3D-stickers or it’s part of s promotion... Who knows XD

The car V3...

Sonic’s driving... has a lot to desire. Yet, still no police on their tail. Maddie asked the right question. The answer... This is just a joke. Don’t think too deep about it :-D

The Terrorist...

Tom is called a terrorist, but we don’t see any police forces to approach him. Why? Perhaps Dr. Robotnik called dibs on him and given how much the government trust in him, they believe nobody else is needed. Also, if terrorist sees policemen, they tend to turn aggressive. So, for the protection of people, it’s best not to approach him ;-)

The terrorist v2...

Tom uses his badge to gain an access to the door with no security going after him even after the “kidnapping joke”. It still works with my previous statement. It’s meant as a joke, something silly and a bit of adult-humor that works with kids as well. You gotta love those people’s reactions XD

The door...

Sonic checked he needs a key to access the roof. Which is strange. In the beginning, we can see him run up some tall building. So why not here too? Simple... 1) Dr. Robotnik was chasing him, so he might have turn desperate and ran faster and more haphazardly then before. 2) He really wanted to stay with Tom and Maddie for the longest time possible <= Nail it! I’ve no doubt it’s this ;-) Sonic did “guilt-trip” Tom into helping him :-D

The last battle...

We know the story is Sonic’s memory leading to the final battle. Yet, when we get to the point Sonic didn’t run up a building. One would assume we would see similar/exact shot. But no problem here, the movie might have had “time-limit”, so instead of a repeat, we got something new ;-) 

The room painting...

When Tom goes and paints the wall with a freshly dipped paint roller, there is no wet mark. I’ve noticed it the moment I saw it. It’s kinda funny.

-----

Well, this seems to be everything I had on my mind :-) I’ve greatly enjoyed the movie that I go the second time <3

Thank you for reading <3 

#sonic movie spoilers #sonic the hedgehog #sonic movie #sonic movie positivity #sonic movie 2020 #tom wachowski #jeff fowler #maddie wachowski #james mardsen #tika sumpter #jim carrey #dr. robotnik #paramount pictures #paramount animation #movie review #ebachan rants

[grimes-claireboucher]

GRIMES | WHO KNEW WORLD-BUILDING WOULD BE SO DIFFICULT?

BY SID FEDDEMA

APRIL 23, 2019

You can hear it, can’t you? The pulsing, panning synth bass, ingenious and instantly memorable. A gossamer coo, almost a sigh. And then a voice in an unusually high register singing 
lyrics full of menace, at odds with a calculated syrupy-sweet, faux-naive intonation: I never walk about after dark / It’s my point of view / If someone could break your neck / Coming up behind you always coming and you’d never have a clue.  

Seven years later, its power remains unmitigated. “Oblivion” turned horror into art, and, while drawn from a personal, particular experience, it spoke to a universal pain, a sense of predation and vulnerability all too familiar for women. Most importantly, it is a defiant act of resistance, a steadfast insistence on Grimes’ ownership of her own experience, and a refusal to be silenced. Pitchfork named it the best song of the decade so far. NPR named it one of the “greatest songs by 21st Century women.” Grimes was suddenly a cultural touchstone, a feminist symbol, a cherished member of the resistance. Everyone was watching.

They still are. Look at the Twitter fusillades, the talmudic readings of even the most flippant utterance, the team-joining. Feuds! With contemporaries, the media, her label. Gossip! A storm of it, following her spacetime-warping appearance with Elon Musk on the Met Gala red-carpet. And to hear Grimes tell it, being caught up in all this has been excruciating. She’s said that 2018 was one of the hardest years she’s endured.

When we speak, Grimes is in flux—emotionally, artistically, career-wise. But that’s nothing new. If I was to describe her with one word, I think it would be '“mercurial.” Or “protean.” She never stands still, never settles. She feels less like one person than like a collection of occasionally-combative creative spirits inhabiting one body. Hence the wide cast of characters in her albums, the fashion experiments, the accretion disk of material spanning mediums and genres. As I was writing this article we got word that she has changed her name—to c [lowercase italic], rather than Claire Boucher, and that the Grimes identity she’s built up over the course of her career could be next to go. For a journalist, she’s a tough subject: not only is she encyclopedic in conversation, but by the time you finish your draft, half of what you’ve written may no longer be true. While this capriciousness is a powerful creative resource, it can also make things difficult. She is a hell of a lot of fun to talk to, though—a whirlwind of ideas, opinions, wisecracks, and puckish self-deprecation.

I was given four tracks from the new album to prepare. But when I bring up the first, the disarmingly raw, strange, and lovely “Shall I Compare Thee,” she laughs. “I hate all these songs now. I might even replace them all. I’m supposed to be finishing the album this month or whatever, but I’ve been making a shit ton of new music instead. Which is a really bad idea.” She sighs, thinks for a moment. “But I’ll probably put out the songs that I said I’ll put out.” I tell her that her fans would surely appreciate seeing what she’s been working on. “Maybe, maybe not,” she replies, grinning. “I think the fans want me to stop making metal, nu-metal. Which I will! I have, I have stopped making metal!” Meanwhile, she’s dropping demos for an augmented reality side project under the moniker “Dark,” scribbling away on a novel, and thinking about a suite of “hymns, like glossolalia vocal music,” but which she “probably won’t release as ‘Grimes,’” as she explains it. She has changed her artistic approach, and is intent on unshackling her creative impulses. “I read a book on speed painting, about how you just lay it down and become satisfied with it. So I’m trying to do a bunch of stuff like that right now. It does feel better, because it just contains more life,” she explains. “Shall I Compare Thee” embodies this speed-painting creative methodology: DIY production, recorded in “like, two hours.” But the other single from the album, “We Appreciate Power,” is the opposite. It’s polished to a shine, conceptual, accompanied by a well-produced video. “‘Power’ is sort of the end of the old music I was making,” she says. “This era of super-produced and perfected sound—it’s sort of a thesis on that, a bookend.” 

She’s eager to explain the concept of the new album. However she feels about the songs at any given moment, she’s clearly excited about the story that they’re telling. “Miss Anthropocene” is a character, essentially an anthropomorphization of the concept of climate change. The name is a witty pun on “misanthropy” and “anthropocene”—the geological era defined by humanity’s irrevocable impacts on the planet. “All the media about climate change is like one big guilt trip. It’s super depressing, like, here are some facts that make you wanna go home and kill yourself. It sucks and it sucks to look at, so people just kind of look away from it,” she says. “I want to change that. In ancient Greek culture you have these gods that represent abstract, terrifying concepts. Like a God of Death. So I wanted to make Miss Anthropocene this idea of, like, the God of Climate Change. She wants the world to end and she wants to bring about the end of humanity, but she’s fun. She’s fucking fun and evil!” Grimes laughs. “Also, climate change is beautiful, even if it’s terrifying. It’s so nice to look at. The sunsets are brighter and more beautiful. Volcanoes, oil rainbows, hurricanes... destruction is gorgeous—people are drawn to it.” 

Miss Anthropocene marks the end of an era for Grimes. When it’s released she’ll be finished with her obligations to her label, and she’s excited about the prospect of working without contractual restrictions. “I’ll never sign with another label. I’ll never have to put out another album... If I didn’t have this whole requirement to release an ‘album,’ I would have just dropped a bunch of music ages ago.” The album format, she says, feels increasingly ill-suited for her shape-shifting, experimental style. “Albums are trash unless you sit down and make a really good album. I’m not really that consistent. I feel like I would work better in like EP-ish formats.” 

It’s not the only departure from musical tradition that she’s considering. Touring, she tells me, has increasingly become a stressful obligation. “I wanna retire from touring. I wanna do a hologram tour. Why do we keep doing them for dead artists instead of living ones who have stage fright?” Does she still get stage fright, this far into her career? “Oh my god, yes. It’s nightmarish. Apocalyptic. Terrifying, horrible. I can’t hear clapping or cheers—I just hear an echo chamber of death. I black out. Dissociation—I can’t tell what’s happening. After a show I’m always thinking, What happened? And people are like ‘It’s ok!’ I know people like the authenticity of live performance, and I do too. But I’m not a good performer. I’m a director who accidentally fell into this position, and now it’s too late to change. So I need to Gorillaz it—I need to find a way to not have to do the Beyoncé thing as much.” 

The sense is that Grimes is finished with facades, done pretending, done jumping through hoops to meet our expectations for what a ‘pop-star’ should be. Coming to terms with all this has been a messy and difficult process, but she’s finally feeling like herself again. She’s optimistic, if wary. And she’s ready to let it all out. Her forthcoming album, to hear her tell it, is Grimes unleashed. “I feel like at times there is an extreme rage that I haven’t been able to lay down,” she says. “A rawness that I have withheld from the public, because people always told me to make it more accessible. I’ve given that up for this, and it’s been freeing.”

She’s confronting her past as well. Miss Anthropocene was written during a period of intense self-reflection, and in the midst of personal tragedy. After losing others to addiction and overdoses, yet another close friend had passed. She hints obliquely at her own struggles with substances. It’s hard for her to talk about, but she has confronted it head-on while making this album, and is ready to be honest with the public. “I had early disturbing experiences with kids coming up to me and admiring things that were self-destructive. I was like, fuck, people think it’s cool to cut yourself or vomit or do crack. That’s not good! But then it became this stifling thing,” she says. “I don’t know. I’ve lived this hard, fucked-up life. I can’t pretend I didn’t. It started feeling like I couldn’t express myself properly, because I was so worried about being a good role model. It scares me to be hyper-honest, but we never see women getting to be that way. There should be someone out there that’s messy and fucked up—for some people this is how it is. It scares me because I don’t want little kids to romanticize certain things that are not cool. But I also don’t want to lie about the reality of my existence. I can’t make super honest or super emotional art if I’m always pretending to be cool and chill all the time.”

Grimes’ fans, who love her rabidly, have expressed worry at times in the last few years. If it seems she’s been self-sabotaging, whether online or in her relationships with collaborators and partners, it’s because she really has struggled. But unlike most of us, every step of her journey has been seized upon by a fascinated public and a cynical press hungry for headlines and clicks. And her reticence to tell us what she was really going through left all the more room for speculation. “Two of my best friends died before I was 18, and I lost like five friends to opiate-related deaths. Really close friends. I had one die when I was on a shoot, and found out while filming the second day. All this stuff, fucked up stuff, is happening. Before I would just not mention any of it. I feel like I’ve been through war when I think that all these people around me are dead. In 2016, my good friend died. They were a friend of 15 years, and I felt nothing. Just nothing. And it was so weird. But, you know, there you go. So you start removing yourself from everybody because you don’t want to face it. Life becomes too shockingly fragile, you know?” 

It hasn’t been easy for Grimes to engage with her past, but talking about it—in her art, in interviews like this one—is helping. “I’ve gotten better. I was really fucked up in 2016 when I wrote this album, but now I’m doing much better. When I was going through the Art Angels cycle, I was having severe PTSD, and everyone was like, ‘Don’t let the public know!’ I know there are people who think I’ve fucked up the last year, and I do need to be more organized and reasonable and thoughtful at times, for sure. But I feel my art is better.” 

Grimes’ favorite part of her job comes before she records a single note. “Dreaming it up feels so easy. The making and releasing can be horrible, but the dreaming is always fun,” she sighs. And that’s why she’s such an interesting figure, right? She’s a prodigious dreamer. We may love the music—I still blast “Oblivion” on an almost monthly basis, revisit the strange and compelling world of Art Angels—but it does sometimes feel almost beside the point. Grimes is building a universe, and she’s shedding the strictures that get in the way of that grand vision—the album format, her label, even her own carefully-crafted identity. “Part of what I’m doing is setting up the world-building. Reverse Harry Potter it. Soundtrack comes first, then the fashion, then everything, everything, everything. Then the book, right before I die,” she says, not really joking. Reaching this point of liberation hasn’t been a smooth process. Grimes is unfailingly honest with herself, her own worst critic. But she feels free, she’s happy with what she’s creating, and her ambitions have only grown. We just need to get out of the way and let her dream. 

#grimes #claire boucher #actuallygrimes #interview 2019 #flaunt magazine #sid feddema #2019 #zoey grossman

[thevividgreenmoss]

How Laugier knows what these victims go through is anyone’s guess. Still, what sets his depiction of a split-personality, revanchist killing machine apart from his forebears is that he almost immediately reveals to the viewer that Lucie is the one still hurting herself. Lucie’s manifested guilt is not entirely the driving mechanism behind the film: what eventually takes precedence is uncovering who the monsters are that created it and why they did it.

The fact that Laugier has a perfectly normal family act as the perpetrators of the film’s gruesome activities serves firstly as a dig at Craven’s Last House. The wily and utterly audacious Frenchman effectively shames the fittingly named American for stopping as short as he did in pointing the finger of blame at a small suburban couple who, having just lost their daughter to a gang of thugs, decide to creatively slaughter her executioners. Laugier upends that film’s self-satisfied, pseudo-ambiguous conclusion by suggesting that perhaps these milquetoast, child-rearing folk had a reason for hurting other people that goes beyond their family tree, a reason that is infinitely more sinister because it serves a curiosity that has no ties to the domestic or even the mundane. These people torture others because they want to vicariously experience their “other”ness, to see what it’s like to have a person cross over to “the other side” and come back to tell them how green the grass is. This is where I really start to go out on a limb, so bear with me.

...Though it may look obvious or intentional, during this process of bloodletting, the skin color of the only martyr left alive gets a little darker after a couple of beatings (there’s no logical explanation for this as the martyr in question is never shown to be hurt with anything except her captors’ fists and boots). The martyrs are beaten without a word from their jailers, as if to show that the act of beating another person cannot possibly be called an “advanced interrogation tactic.” These girls must first be completely alienated and once they’ve been physically and emotionally broken down, they have their “other”ness and all other traces of their identity forcibly ripped away from them. This means literally losing their skin, the flesh ripped away to reveal glistening tendons and muscles. Any possible sign of their race or gender is thus completely removed, turning them into so much unidentifiable flesh. First the martyr becomes an “other,” then they become nothing. There is no possibility of “getting off” here, just a hyper-real representation of the horror of physical suffering. This is the kind of movie that justifies its daunting provocation with scant but revealing dialogue like,“People no longer envisage suffering, young lady.” Martyrs has an intelligence and a dogged determination to do and to say what its predecessors could or would not.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/martyrs-2008/

In one pivotal scene Anna discovers a victim, chained in a cellar dungeon beneath a family home. She’s a terrifying sight: her eyes covered with a metal visor which has been nailed into her skull and her emaciated body covered in scars and scratches.

Our first instinct is to shy away – to shun this horrific, yelping creature, who has been brutalised into something less-than human, and is all the more frightening for it. And yet, just as we’re poised for a nasty shock or attack, Anna reaches for the woman’s hand, presumably offering her the first kind, truly human contact she has received for years.

In a film filled with savagery and horror, it’s a moment that shocks to the core: a reminder that unexpected tenderness can be as viscerally, skin-shiveringly affecting as torture.

...Like the worst real-world monsters (Josef Mengele is the obvious example), the movie’s torturers, whose true motivation is revealed in the final act, are also convinced that they’re doing the right thing. They see themselves as experimenters, explorers, brave pioneers – and, disturbingly, Martyrs manages to temporarily put its audience into their blood-stained shoes. Even as we wince for the film’s victims, we find ourselves simultaneously desperate to know what their abusers will uncover.

Ultimately, horror movies can frighten us in lots of different ways, combining their inherent darkness with sly humour, adrenalin-fuelled scares, or with painterly splashes of gore. But Martyrs is a rare creation: a 21st-century film that subtly elicits all the sorrow of the preceding century, imbues its scenes of torture with a sense of vivid, heart-breaking pity, and forces us to really feel.  Is it painful to watch? Very much so. But worth the suffering? Absolutely.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/martyrs-2008-pascal-laugier/

Most of the conversation people have about Martyrs concerns its final 30 minutes or so, and for good reason: That’s when the film shifts gears and heads into the torture sequences that have given it such notoriety. (And definitively trumped the most harrowing moments in other French extreme horror movies like High Tension, Frontier(s), and Inside.) What they forget is that the first hour is completely gripping and suspenseful in an entirely different and infinitely more palatable way. Yes, it’s bloody and disturbing in its own right, but it’s also genuinely charged and full of arresting ambiguity, far from the clinical sickness that follows in the third act. Torture isn’t in the foreground yet, but informs the action, as a once-abused child grows up to exact a revenge that may be just or may be the product of a haunted and irretrievably damaged mind.

...In the final act, which is as bloodless and clinical as the first two-thirds were propulsive and emotional, Laugier seeks not just to reveal humankind’s capacity for cruelty and exploitation, but its capacity for suffering as well. The explicitness of Anna’s torture and “martyrdom”—a demonstration of female strength and resilience that’s meant as a (suspect) type of feminism—isn’t quite like that in so-called “torture porn” movie. It’s not mediated by gimmicky machines like those in Saw franchise or carried out in the spirit of psychosis or vengeance, as in Wolf Creekor The Devil’s Rejects. It has more in common with real, institutional forms of torture and human experimentation, and is conducted with an emotional distance that’s infinitely more disturbing and terrible. We simply watch Anna get broken down—systematically, inexplicably:

...And so on, until she’s so completely pliant that she doesn’t wince or fight or feel fear any more. Then it’s on to “Stage Four,” which is so horrific it isn’t worth describing. All of these sessions are handled in brief, methodical chunk, followed by a cut to black. They have the effect of breaking down the audience, too, because we eventually come to the realization that Anna—though strong and resilient in the classic “Final Girl” way—has about as much chance of extricating herself from this situation as detainees not named Harold and Kumar have of escaping Guantanamo Bay. Being robbed of that narrative expectation is incredibly deflating, even soul-crushing, and I think Laugier means it to be. On some level, Martyrs feels like a comment on other films of its kind, because it shuts down any notion that pleasure could be derived from watching it. It feels like the death of extreme horror—or at least takes the subgenre as far as it can conceivably go.

https://film.avclub.com/martyrs-1798223075

@lobotomybarbie

#*

[unpretentiousblogging]

My first suicide note

Don’t worry, this isn’t THE note, merely me reminiscing about what WAS my first note. And anyway, starting my actual suicide note with ‘first’ would be extremely stupid and already declaring defeat...which is ironic, since, you know, suicide is declaring defeat from life in general. 

Oh god. I do this a lot. Use poor humour to deflect from my obviously concerning thoughts. But anyway, it’s fine.Back to topic. (side note; there was no humour in my first suicide note. Hmm. Maybe I should incorporate that in the next one...joke. Maybe.Hopefully. Idk)

Anyway, first suicide note. Ah yes. I was fifteen.It was..2014? I don’t really remember much of it or the details surrounding that year. Just that it was angry and sad and vengeful and full of so much...hurt.Against everyone.My friends.My enemies. My mother. 

Ah. My mother. A recurring character in every suicide note I’ve ever written. It’s not her fault. She is not per say a bad person. But more on that later. This isn’t about her. This is about my suicide note and how it ended up being the first one.

A lot had been leading up to it. I should probably avoid saying the work depressed since I wasn't clinically diagnosed, but a bitch isn’t dumb. Or I mean, she is. But not in this case. You know when you spend the better part of two months not talking to anyone and experience the crushing pressure of this giant, pressing hollowness gnawing-ness that stays there no matter what you do, that THAT isn’t normal. Or at least, it wasn’t to me.

Tbh, I don’t understand much of it. That feeling. What caused it. Why it became such a significant part of my being. I was just in a negative head space. I had suddenly become hyper aware of the farce in everyone’s interaction with me. I detested that I couldn’t study what I wanted to. I had just...a lot going on. 

And also, truthfully, I think I had been using too much Tumblr. I would see this constant downpour of emaciated, beautiful girls talking about sadness as skinny white boys with cigarettes dangling from the corner of their mouths would tenderly hold them and I guess I internalised that this was what it took to be loved and also all that life had to offer.

Love. What a funny thing I chase after.So uninterested but also so extremely curious. Sigh.

Also, funny how the very platform that propelled me into the state I was then, is what I have chosen to come back to while meandering somewhere similar to that state. Not really funny,but what did I say..force of habbit. 

Anyway, back to story. I was sad.Really sad. And angry. And the final straw was the fight with my mom. I don’t remember what it was about. Not important. Just that I realised that I didn’t want my life anymore. Any life for that matter.

So, how does a 15 year old, kill herself? Or well, try to. Because, suuurprise. It obviously didn’t work. I didn’t die. (yet) Or I wouldn’t be ‘’killing time’’ (haha) by writing this.

Well,didn’t own a gun.not smart enough to figure out how strangulation worked.House not tall enough for free falling from roof to cause desired effect. Too much of a wimp to cut veins.

The only other logical explanation was to ingest some poison. Painless. Bound to achieve results without risking grotesquely convulsing my appearance in the way that free falling or burning would do should the fail to work.

Now, we didn’t have any poison lying around the house but I remember how popularised the video of the Amanda Todd suicide was and how she mentioned drinking bleach to kill herself. So, my manic self rushed to the bathroom in search for my poison.

Unfortunately, I could find no bleach. So,I reached out for the next best thing. This anti acne product I had bought from Shams recently. It was pretty expensive and barely used but since I was going to die anyway,what was the point of me being careful with this overpriced bottle of skin care.

Yes, I decided to die by gulping down a bottle of a beautification product for my skin. Not only is that highly improbable but I think about it and snicker at the fact that is basically a twist on the whole ‘eat makeup to become prettier on the inside’ joke. I was basically annihilating all the blemishes on my inside by ingesting that bottle of toner. Pretty funny, if you think about it. Or just me?

To be fair, at the time, I didn’t think it was. I legitimately thought I was going to die.With my eyes sputtering out a tsunami of tears,I guzzled the colourless liquid from the transparent bottle and drank till there was only around 20 percent left. 

The whole thing rushing down my windpipe in one giant gulp. The second I was done with this I started freaking out. My throat burned and I felt this warm, icky wave of nausea steadily creep up on me.

You see, I stupidly didn’t wager that it would take so long.My juvenile brain had been expecting the job to be done quick and painlessly. This was neither and now my paranoid brain started whizzing like an unstoppable slot machine. I started panicking, remembering this post I had read online by this guy who recounted how his failed attempt at ingesting pills for suicide resulted in a highly painful stomach pumping experience and a life time of painful and uncomfortable digestion. I wasn’t prepared for that.I couldn’t not die and also end up with more issues on top of the ones I already did.

In a mad rush against time, I scrambled to get my phone and performed a quick Google search-what to do if you eat poison. The most frequently suggestions were to call poison control and to induce vomiting. Since, I couldn't really do the first one, I made way to the toilet and thankfully to my minor stint with bulimia (and they said eating disorders aren’t useful, pfft) , I knew exactly how to do the latter. Quickly, I shoved my fingers down my throat and attempted to force my alimentary canal to defy gravity. I alternated between this and ramming my toothbrush down my mouth and lo and behold, spurts of translucent chemical gush forth from my mouth like a faulty tap. 

At this point, I had progressed to full blown sobbing. I wasn’t able to successfully eliminate all the toxic liquid from my body and the purge had just resulted with me hiccuping incessantly and my stomach gurgling uncontrollably. Also, my mouth had a horrible aftertaste. Overall, I felt repulsive and sick and also glaringly aware of my soon to be (in my head) death.

In my misery studded mind, I made peace with my fate and decided that were I to to die, I had to make sure I hurt everyone who ever hurt me just as much as. I wanted them to feel guilty. Afterall, my death couldn’t just end with a bunch of people feeling sorry for me and the people who had done me wrong to not experience any of the anguish I had. So, I put pen to paper and began to scribble on an old English paper-my first suicide letter.

At the time, I didn’t know it was to be my first, of course. I thought it was my one and only. I dedicated this atrocious piece of writing to virtually everyone who meant anything to me in my life. Ex best friend? Obviously mentioned. Brother? Definitely to blame. Friend who cared but not enough? Special shout out.

But the star of the show, the main dedication of the bitterness fuelled literary rampage was  one person-my lovely mother. Like I said, not a bad person.  But just not compatible with me, to put it nicely. Anyway, the body of this letter revolved around her and how all the events of my interactions with her had materialised into this blame. If any one was to be guilt ridden after this entire ordeal, I wanted to make sure that it was her. 

Everyone else got a few sentences or a paragraph, but my mom, well she got pages and pages of my teen angst and venom against her. In fact, the opening of this abysmal note started off with something like, ‘’In case I don’t wake up tomorrow’’ (I wasn’t sure how effective the ‘’poison’’ would be. In hindsight, not at all), ‘’ you (mother) should know that YOU are to blame for all of this’’.

Pretty dramatic, am I right? Anyway, I don’t really remember more of what happened in the note, but basically, you get the idea of how it went, ok? 

So, yeah, after penning that intense piece of literature, I willed myself to go to sleep and hopefully die painlessly in my slumber. Or not. I wasn’t sure at this point whether I wanted to survive or not. Probably the most anxious sleep I was getting. After all, I didn’t know whether I was going to wake up the next morning or not.

Spoiler alert: I did. With relief.

And I tore up the note immediately. I think my mother had already read some of it but I am not sure if I remember entirely. I recall sitting in the car with her as she drove and a passing mention was made of it and all I said was that I had written a story in my notebook. And that was it. Did she believe me? Or did she simply not care enough? Or maybe her brain could not even begin to register that I was capable of performing such an abominable task. I don’t know. I wonder though, if she ever stays up at night wondering about what it meant. What any of it was.

I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even remember. I do. 

And that, brings to a complete, the pointless rambling of me and my first suicide note. 

good bye.

(we’ve reached the end. im not gonna go kill myself...right now. lol. maybe/ ok bye)

#suicide #death #ramblings

[rise-above-the-grave]

In Defense of Caleb Widogast

Caleb Widogast is a very important character.

He is the best exploration of PTSD and trauma in a character that I have ever seen. His flashbacks, his self-loathing and self-hatred, his fear and paranoia, his belief that he is a Bad Person (and not only for having killed his parents but also, for example, for “using” the M9 for his own ends), even his selfishness are all part and parcel of a fantastic portrayal of PTSD.

PTSD fucks with your head, and in more ways than flashbacks. It--and the trauma that caused it--ruins your self-image, destroys any objective view you have of yourself. Suddenly everything is viewed through the lens of your trauma; everything you see about yourself is tainted by the shame, the guilt, the horror of what you’ve experienced.

Fear and paranoia are very common side effects of PTSD. Hyper-vigilance is actually one of the key components of PTSD. It manifests in different ways for different people (always knowing where the exits in a building are, jumping at loud noises, and being acutely aware of all the people in a room are just three examples; there are many, many, many other forms of hyper-vigilance), and in Caleb it seems to manifest mostly in fear and paranoia.

His selfishness is a little more difficult to understand. But PTSD really, really, really fucks with your ability to regulate yourself. When you’ve undergone the type of trauma Caleb has (and I understand the type of trauma he has been through in a way no one ever should), it is so, so, so easy to slip into the mindset of “I have to protect myself, I have to make sure that never happens again, I have to do anything and everything to ensure that no one can hurt me ever.” That looks a lot like selfishness. It can be selfishness, when it interferes with someone else’s well-being.

As for Caleb’s belief that he’s a Bad Person--well, some of that comes from having killed his parents. But PTSD and trauma have an insidious way of convincing you that everything you do afterwards to protect yourself makes you a Bad Person. In fact, it convinces you that every little thing you’ve done that could be considered “morally questionable” makes you a Bad Person. This is especially the case if you have ever been punished for making mistakes or “being bad”--which, given what we know of Caleb’s backstory, I find highly likely.

The truth of the matter is that Caleb’s PTSD isn’t just from killing his parents. Sure, that is one of his greatest regrets, one of the worst things in his life, his greatest trigger; but it’s not the only thing that caused his PTSD, I can 100% guarantee that. Because well before that, Caleb was abused by Trent.

Just how far that abuse went, we don’t know for sure. We do know there was manipulation and mind games. We do know there was experimentation. We know there was torture. Just how far that torture went, just how deep those mind games sank, whether or not there was ever a sexual element to the abuse, we don’t know (yet). Regardless, though, we know that it was bad.

Caleb was a victim, long before he ever made the choice to kill his parents. In fact, I would personally argue that Caleb was even a victim in killing his parents, even though he is, in some ways, culpable for that choice.

Here’s the thing: I have PTSD. Even more than that, while I didn’t kill my parents, I have done some really awful things in my life. I’ve hurt people, I’ve been the reason people have been hurt, I’ve condemned people to pain and suffering. I’ve done some really shitty things.

And yeah, most days I blame myself--just like Caleb does. Most days I will argue until I’m blue in the face that I am 100% responsible for that pain and suffering. Most days I believe wholeheartedly that I was not a victim in those scenarios, that I made the choice to hurt those people (and one person in specific) of my own volition.

But on my good days? On my good days I can understand that my actions were a product of my brainwashing and the manipulation I underwent. On my good days, I can understand that even though my choices were morally wrong, I was still a victim in the scenario.

The same goes for Caleb.

Now, I’m not saying that Caleb is absolved from any and all shitty things he’s done, including killing his parents. That’s not how trauma and PTSD work. But there is an explanation for his actions, be it brainwashing and manipulation, or PTSD and the resulting effects of trauma. And understanding how PTSD (and trauma) destroy a person is crucial to understanding Caleb as a character.

Because he’s not a Bad Person--at least, I have to believe that. (Because, if he’s a Bad Person, then that means I’m a Bad Person too, because I’ve done things like what he’s done and said.) Sure, his actions need to be held accountable to him, but there needs to be understanding and forgiveness to a degree that would not be expected of someone who was not suffering from such extreme mental illness.

That’s why I think the Mighty Nein--and by extension their reactions to his PTSD and confessions--is so important. Because they showed him that understanding and forgiveness.

With them, I think Caleb has a hope of getting better--of healing.

And in the meantime, he will continue to give me hope, and a better perspective on my own PTSD and trauma. In the meantime, he will help me. In the meantime, he will help keep me alive--and all because Liam O’Brian crafted a beautifully complex character that almost perfectly exemplifies what it is like to have PTSD.

#caleb widogast #critical role #critical role 2.0 #cr #this post is made of salt #please reblog

[shinneth]

Gem Ascension Tropes (5XF-specific: G - J)

Primary General Post ✦ Full Article ✦  Primary Peri Post ✦ Primary 5XF Post 

Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: Hilariously shares this trope with Peridot and even invokes it on the very same person: Steven. During Chapter 2 of This is Who I Am, after Peridot is poofed via gator ambush, her gemstone – while thankfully undamaged by the gator – drops straight into murky waters and sinks out of sight. This prompts Steven to cry out for her and panic; he impulsively attempts to dive into the water unprotected to retrieve Peridot, but 5XF is quick to stop him and doesn’t hesitate to give him a stern slap while denouncing him for wasting time with his sentimentality when he should be going after his girlfriend in a sensible way that won’t get him killed.

Green-Eyed Monster: 5XF is extremely jealous of Peridot, and the rest of the Crystal Gems by proxy. Peridot, however, is the biggest offender by far. See The Resenter for the multitude of reasons why 5XF can’t stand her little sister. It’s actually somewhat justified.

Grew a Spine: A bit of a misguided variant that was triggered from living through years of Homeworld’s oppressive society rather than being fed up with Peridot and Steven’s antics. Though 5XF’s lack of faith in them did play a role in how she took this trope a little too far at first, it’s noted in the narrative and stated by 5XF herself that she was sick of being cautious and playing by the rules all the time. 5XF had to live that way her entire life in order to survive. Now, 5XF realized she did want to take her life back, but couldn’t bring herself to trust anyone other than herself in that endeavor (which was problematic, as 5XF was stranding herself on an alien planet she knew nothing of and had no home to return to). It was definitely to her benefit that 5XF worked up the nerve to finally act on her desire to be independent; though she initially stumbled a lot due to unfortunate circumstances coinciding with her nervous breakdown, she was able to meet Sphalerite due to this – and in more ways than one, 5XF finally found someone she could trust who could help rebuild her life.

Had To Be Sharp: Much like Peridot, 5XF had a strategy she stuck to in order to stay alive in Homeworld society. Unlike Peridot, 5XF’s method was more passive. While both saw no value in having “friends”, 5XF was content to just keep to herself and do her job rather than to go beyond her means. While Peridot aspired to dominate her kind, 5XF opted to blend into the background to ensure her safety.

Handshake Refusal: Not only does 5XF staunchly reject Peridot’s offer of a handshake greeting when she’s first released from her bubble, she doesn’t hesitate to slap that hand away from her.

Heel Realization: Hints of it were shown when 5XF got extremely upset at Peridot nearly killing herself just to keep her dark self from killing both sides of Steven. It wasn’t until the situation was entirely resolved when 5XF watched the fully restored Steven and Peridot cling to each other and sob out the mutual trauma they went through to keep each other alive against the odds that she realized she had done a very awful thing on par with 5XG’s level of brutality that 5XF so desperately wanted to avoid. Feeling shame and guilt rather than satisfaction after seeing what she put the couple through is what really made 5XF realize she screwed up and wouldn’t be able to live with herself until she properly atoned for this. Surprisingly, Steven and Peridot getting back at her earlier wasn’t punishment enough in 5XF’s eyes – she knows that alone won’t absolve her of wrongdoing, which is why she confessed her crimes to Garnet later and accepted whatever punishment was handed down to her.

Hyper-Awareness: Discussed by many characters throughout This is Who I Am. While she possesses no inherent supernatural abilities like her sister, 5XF has unusually exceptional observational skills and can easily pick up on details that often get overlooked. No doubt her insatiable curiosity is a factor here, but 5XF also has very sharp instinctive skills, reflexes, and deductive reasoning. These abilities are how 5XF could piece together that Peridot repressed a certain traumatic moment of her life that would be to her detriment to ignore. It also plays into how she of all gems was Genre-Savvy enough to implement an Opponent Switch on a scheduled Mirror Match, as 5XF applied what she learned in an earlier Info Dump to realize playing the latter trope straight would immediately backfire. And while 5XF is fully aware how rushed her relationship with Sphalerite is, she actually has a logical justification for indulging in it: she already pieced together that their relationship will be difficult to maintain due to Sphalerite being a fusion, which severely limits the time the two can be together. She rightly assumes Steven and Peridot won’t be okay with their relationship, either. Therefore, she intends to make the most of the time she does still have with Sphalerite, which requires them to rush through what few steps they didn’t skip. This way, 5XF can rest assured knowing she made the most of her limited time with her lover.

Identical Stranger: Aside from having loose-hanging sideburns instead of curls framing her face, 5XF looks exactly like Peridot prior to her reformation at the beginning of the story. However, Peridot never acknowledged 5XF’s existence during her Homeworld days, while 5XF only knew of her second-hand from other Peridots she terrorized directly, as they were assigned to neighboring workstations.

If You Kill Her, You Will Be Just Like Her: Seeing firsthand how badly she physically, mentally, and emotionally damaged Steven and Peridot made 5XF feel horrible inside when she expected to feel validated and fulfilled. Only then did she realize the elaborate trap she forced the couple into was incredibly cruel and sadistic; a trait scarily similar to 5XG’s approach. The last thing 5XF wants is to become anything like her little sister’s past life, so this revelation really forced her to reevaluate the decisions she made. 5XF came to the conclusion that she not only did wrong by Peridot and Steven, but needed to do whatever she could to redeem herself in hopes of distancing herself from being anything like 5XG as much as possible.

Ignorant Minion: Like the rest of her kind, 5XF has no idea what’s going on during Gem Ascension, and is only beginning to learn the details of her situation when she’s brought out of stasis on Earth in This is Who I Am. The very concept of being able to discover her own identity on Earth is something she’s still uncomfortable with.

Jerk-to-Nice-Gem Plot: While her actions in This is Who I Am Chapters 4 and 5 made her pretty damn diabolical, the circumstances of how it happened were pretty unavoidable; 5XF didn’t trust Steven or Peridot, and it’s technically their fault for not doing a good enough job making their guest feel comfortable in this strange new world (releasing her in some of the most dangerous locations on Earth certainly doesn’t help), while failing to properly foster a trusting relationship. And it turns out in the final chapter that 5XF legitimately feels terrible about her prior actions and is committed to atone for them, because the last thing she wants to be is a monster who gets away with her crimes like Peridot used to do regularly in her previous life. Now that Sphalerite succeeded where Steven and Peridot failed in helping 5XF understand how exciting and liberating her new life on Earth will be, she’s much more agreeable and compliant with the other Crystal Gems. She still hates Steven and especially Peridot, unfortunately, but hopefully future story arcs will show her gentler, more considerate side that has already been present in her introductory story arc.

Job Mindset Inertia: Granted, it hasn’t been that long since 5XF’s career (that she’s basically had since her emergence) ended abruptly, but even later chapters of This is Who I Am show her still worrying about her productivity/work rate.

Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: For the first three chapters of This is Who I Am, 5XF appears to gradually warm up to Steven and Peridot after immediately deeming them untrustworthy and incompetent when she’s first set free. She even acts selflessly for their benefit by urging the couple to discuss a difficult topic neither would have thought to do on their own. However, by Chapter 4, she’s back to doubting the couple’s integrity and honesty while questioning her own actions. Her snap decision to only trust herself leads her to stealing Peridot’s tablet and running away. She ends up in a temple, accidentally gets infused with power from a questionable source, and when Peridot and Steven nearly corner her to bring her back, she trusts the random voice in her head to give in to power so that she can instead capture both and force them into deathmatches while she watches with glee. She gets better.

#gem ascension #gem ascension tropes #gem re:ascension #ga references #this is who i am #tv tropes #steven universe #su fanfic #su fanfiction #steven universe oc #5xf #peridot #su peridot #sphalerite #garnet #su garnet #su ruby #stevidot #headcanon

[jamiebluewind]

I Was Touch Starved In Real Life

We've all seen fics that talk about touch starvation. Them craving touch and the insane lengths they go until eventual cuddling happens. Well I lived it and let me tell you, it's nothing like the stories I've read...

When I was a kid, sometimes my mother made me go hungry for food. Miss a meal and you get hungry. Miss two and you get real hungry. But something eventually happens after a day or two. You stop feeling hungry. Go long enough and food makes you sick to your stomach (on top of being a little out of it). Go without often enough and you will have trouble knowing when you're hungry for the rest of your life and will randomly forget to eat longer than what is healthy because you didn't remember or you didn't smell food so your body forgot to remind you. Sometimes when you do feel hungry, you don't even notice. It affects you for the rest of your life and it's about the same with touch starvation.

Most kids will hug and hold hands and are quick to touch. It's necessary for mental health, oxytocin production, and bonding. I was use to touch, especially since I stayed with my grandparents (mamaw and papaw) when I was little because our house was full (2 parents, my older brother and his new wife, and my mother's  sister and her husband and no that is not normal in the US especially in a 3 bedroom!). Mamaw and I shared a bed and would cuddle up. Papaw would play cards and games. There was always a dog or a cat (usually both). I walked next door every evening to cuddle and wrestle with my dad or brush each other's hair. Lots of contact save for my mother and maternal grandparents. Even when my mother did brush my hair, she would pull, yank, and tease, so it wasn't an enjoyable experience.

Then papaw got sick (cancer and later congestive heart failure) and I had to go back to living with my parents in a single bed. The computer room was converted to a bedroom for my aunt and uncle until they moved out. When I started getting less affection, I would hug my parents randomly like in the middle of phone calls. I'd lay on my dad after work. I'd go next door to see mamaw and papaw and help out as best as I could. My body knew I needed it even when I didn't.

My dad worked more. My mother pulled me out of school, lying to my dad and family that she was homeschooling me (and the government never checked). My mother told my friends who called that I had moved. I became the babysitter for my nephew and later a second. I loved them so much. They often slept in my bed or dad's bed (as my parents had stopped sharing a bed at that point). I got most of my affection from them and mamaw.

Then my brother got on drugs after being clean for years and had a falling out with our dad. He moved out. His wife tried to stay with him, but eventually moved on and moved closer to her family (we still talk). Papaw died. Mamaw moved to town closer to her other son. Grandmother moved in my brother's room. I lost all my regular sources of affection. My dad gave me a few minutes when he got home and I was able to have my mother drive me to see mamaw a couple times a month and sometimes once a week. My mother made me stay alone a lot. I hugged mamaw a lot when I seen her and would hug my parents with permission, but became less and less likely to touch other people, especially strangers.

I'm not sure when it started happening, but suddenly, I became hyper sensitive to touch... and it hurt. Only mamaw, dad, and my nephews were exempt and even then I wasn't excessive. Animals were still safe. Just not people.

I got much better at hiding my emotions. When my aunts and uncles visited, I would hug them before they left despite it hurting. I couldn't tell them not to touch me because it caused me pain. I didn't want to hurt them. I hated shaking hands so much that people thought I had a germ thing (especially if they had never seen me with my nephews). Family reunions and crowds were hell.

The abuse, isolation, and lack of touch caused my anxiety and depression to get worse and worse. I survived because my pets needed me. By the time I got out, I was so sensitive to touch that making myself touch anybody but my dad, mamaw, and my nephews was extremely difficult. The less prepared I was, the more painful it could be. I was so sensitive that I could be blindfolded and somebody could get about 3 or 4 inches (about 7 or 10 cm) from my bare skin and I could tell you exactly where they were. People didn't believe me when I told them, so I did it on several occasions. The effects later years. I wore clothes that covered as much skin as possible to negate the effects of contact. I got sick a lot. My first gynecologist appointment was especially terrible.

I remember the day it started getting better. I was working in the library in my early 20s during my first semester of college. There were two small boys with there mom as she studied. I kept them entertained so they didn't disturb the other students. Just bright eyes and full of happy giggles and curiosity. When they looked away about to leave, I reached out slightly towards the youngest with hesitant movements, trying to psych myself up to choose to touch someone on purpose without being prompted (other than the four I could). I reached the rest of the way and ruffled his short tight curls. He looked up at me with this huge smile and waved goodbye along with his brother. The touch was over in an instant, but it didn't hurt. I think working there had helped me slowly get use to people, but that moment was the turning point. Sure touch was sometimes uncomfortable and a touch without knowing it was coming could still hurt, but it was huge for me. I could wear shirts without long sleeves or crew/turtle necks. I bought capris and shorts. I started hugging and the like.

I was still sensitive in my mid 20s even a year or two after my first serious boyfriend, but the pain didn't happen save for very rare occasions. I became very platonically affectionate a big hugger, even with strangers. Some found it mildly offputting, but at least I was respectful and always asked first.

I ended up in a bad relationship off and on for 7 years. I think a big factor in me staying was the fact he gave me the affection my body and mind craved. I convinced myself that we were in love and that he was the best I could do. Whenever we would break up, I would end up lacking again especially after I became disabled and couldn't work, losing most human contact. When he would come back and hold me close, I thought it was love I was overpowered by and the sparks between us, but it was just my body reacting after being starved for touch. It was like being given a full meal after living off scraps.

Now I'm in my 30s and it still effects me in ways. I go too long without human contact without noticing until I have it. I still hug everybody, love all the pets, and I'm always willing to help, but I can get overwhelmed. I'm simultaneously the most open person you will ever meet and the best at hiding pain of all type. Lack of touch doesn't make me nervous, but it makes the anxiety that does happen last longer and harder to get rid of. I don't feel cold without it, but it does make me feel warm in a nice way and a little calmer when someone touches me, but normally only people I care about like my dad or my best friend (who I will be moving closer to next year). Most other people feel neutral or nice, but it depends on the person or the situation. The calmness can last for a while afterwards. I don't take hot showers to replace touch, but to try and relax and lower my anxiety. I often don't notice when I need it, instead just seeing that my anxiety is noticeable or I feel more depressed than normal. Since both can also be due to a bad day, forgetting to eat, a hormone thing, or life in general, it's hard to tell if one of those days is because 'the news is especially terrifying recently' or 'I just need to guilt my dad into hugging me for a while'. Dating is hard because normal romantic touches can make my brain fall in love (not lust) far too fast. Being newly single causes me severe depression (pro tip, show the people you care about extra affection after they go through a breakup unless you want them miserable and/or rebounding with a bad person because their brain is suddenly without a chemical it desperately needs). I'm physically clingy at times.

I cope though. Sometimes wearing a scarf around my neck helps lower my anxiety some. My cat helps me. I have good friends. I go to a chiropractor every two or three weeks which also helps my migraines. It's weird and can make things harder on me at times, but I'm okay and that's what matters.

#bluewind talks #touch starved #child abuse #writing source #please be respectful #tw child abuse #tw abuse #tw neglect #tw death #tw drug abuse #tw pain #tw isolation #plesse tell me if i missed any #tw starvation

[inkdropsonroses]

A Response to Purity/Cancellation Culture

Last night, I made the point that Tumblr’s enforcement of Purity/Cancellation culture is both toxic and counterproductive, doing little to solve the problem behind it. It goes further than that, in fact, with the introduction of avenues for intellectual and moral superiority complexes and elitism.

With the introduction of purity culture comes an impossibly high standard to hold oneself for media consumption. In this area, one should, by the logic this culture follows, be aware of all problematic behavior in all the media one consumes all the time. While the information to achieve that is more readily accessible, it leaves little room for innocent and casual enjoyment of media – liking things for the sake of liking things. It imposes a sense that one should be hyper-aware, not only of oneself, but of others with whom they interact.

Following this line leads to a sense of moral elitism, the feeling that one person has a higher moral standing than another based on the media they consume. This presupposes that everyone enjoys the same media for the same reasons, which could not be further from the truth. In film, for instance, one person might be a fan of the actors and actresses cast in the roles while another might not care and instead watch the film for the sake of the storyline or concept presented. In music, the same logic follows. One might enjoy the lyrics of a particular song while another is there more for how the song feels. There are a plethora of mixed reasons and nuanced responses to why people enjoy the media they consume, and the implication Purity culture makes is that there is a right way, perhaps a single right way to consume and thereby enjoy media.

To address the moral line, much the same could be said in that there are many complex responses to the question of how and why the media we consume resonates with us. It could be anything from a new perspective on an age-old problem to valid representation to a wholesome overall message for a particular group. Also, moral quality might not play as large a role in the enjoyment of media as we give credit. That presupposes that media and its consumption ought to have a deeper purpose than merely existing, which isn’t the case. Media and all its art forms have value based on the right of their existence.

To address the proposed solution of purity culture as a one size fits all answer to a problem this complex is not only logically unsound, it does little to fix the actual problems. The idea that one should immediately cut ties with problematic figures as soon as their behaviors are made public limits the resources with which we respond. Surely, consequences should follow toxic and problematic behaviors behind all the -isms and -phobias, but to cut ties so quickly doesn’t allow for critical thinking and emotional recovery to play a role in the process, insofar as it has come to the point where it’s a one strike and you’re out rule. Not to mention, even the mere rumors of these behaviors can spark a knee jerk reaction that leads to the dominoes falling before the first one topples with any evidence.

This one strike rule also leaves little room for the education and improvement on the side that has done wrong in that apologies no matter how sincere, time no matter how much, and dues no matter how many paid are simply not enough because the damage, by and large, has already been done. It leads to the line of thought that ignorance and mistakes are the worst crimes one could commit without an avenue out.

Now, to address the monetary side of this media mess. In the system in place, particularly with film and music as I’ve emphasised, there’s no way for the patron to decide where their monetary support goes. The argument may be presented in such a way that to buy a product is to support the behavior of those who made it, and while that may be true in some cases, it cannot always be so simple. This implies again that not only is media consumption based on the names behind it, which is not always the case. In the current system, where choice to whom monetary support goes, like in music or film, it is easy to see how that argument would come about. Simply not purchasing a product is not enough, however, and can often be harmful to other parties involved. You cannot buy a ticket to one actor’s performance in a film, nor can you buy the lyricist’s songs without inadvertently supporting the artist. This all or nothing approach can be particularly harmful in many smaller projects like independent films or more niche musicians in that cutting support for the artist may harm the people you wish to support through purchasing the product.

Because of this, there should be different ways in which humans combat problematic behaviors without this extreme of an approach. Reviews are a way to play an active role in vocalising the support of some people while reprimanding others. Social media, when used in a non-inflammatory way can be a way to let your voice be heard by addressing the issue or speaking directly to the party with whom you’re concerned.

Following this, though, there should still be room for casual enjoyment and media consumption because what purity culture implies through its supposition that everyone be hyper-aware is that not only does everyone have the time, energy, and resources available for such an in-depth awareness, but it makes ways for doing so for the wrong reasons. Intellectual and moral awareness, particularly when it involves celebrities and hot-button issues, should be born out of genuine curiosity, interest, or concern for the matters at hand. Hyper-awareness born out of imposed shame or guilt for not having met the standards this culture sets up is both counterproductive to the problem in that it raises a false, disingenuous concern through negative reinforcement as well as emotionally damaging to the person that is more or less being manipulated to hyper-awareness. In short, it’s a fast track to kill any joy to be had in media consumption.

Not only does the proposition of purity culture impose an unnatural and impossibly high standard of perpetual awareness, but it does so through negative pretenses and judgments. It also does little to solve the problems it tries to address. Instead, it opens up avenues for intellectual and moral elitism by creating false dichotomies that would suggest one person is better or of higher moral or intellectual standing based on the media they do and don’t consume.

Your moral standing should not by any comprehensive means be judged by the media you choose to consume, and you are no more or less intelligent based on the media that brings you joy.

*Originally posted on my WordPress blog*

#ink drops #original #film #music #joy #anti tumblr purity culture #tumblr purity culture #anti tumblr cancelled culture #cancelled culture #media #media consumption #happiness

[happiness4jane]

The Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Done

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Well, this is terrifying. Paralyzing almost. My hands are literally trembling as I try to punch the letters on my keyboard. When I allow myself to think about the people that might read this. People I know. People I work with. Students I teach. Students I’ve taught. My soon-to-be-in-laws. My exes. Their families (they’ll say, “I told you so!”). My friends. Their friends. My family. My children. All 836 of my Facebook “friends” are potential critics. And they’ll share it with even more people that might know me or will know me, that see me around and will avoid making eye contact with me in Walmart forevermore! When I allow myself to think about that – the people that might read this – every self-doubting, loathing, shaming, insecure demon inside me surfaces in protest. BUT… but. That’s the point, after all. For people to read this. To maybe help others claw their way out of the uncompromising, crippling, and degenerative grasp of the illness known as Bipolar Disorder (no, but seriously, this scares the shit out of me and I can’t breathe).

Here’s the thing though – I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It isn’t fair we live in a society that shames people with mental illness into silence. That calls us “crazy”. We can’t just snap our fingers and make it go away (but, oh, if I could!). We can’t just act normal, act rational. It’s not something we can tame on command. And we didn’t choose this. Who would choose this?! Who would choose to leave behind a legacy of wreckage? Well, I don’t doubt there are some who’d choose that… As for me, when I think on all the destroyed relationships, the lost jobs, the unfinished projects and departed dreams, the reckless moments that would haunt me for years, the countless days stolen away by infinite darkness… the shame, the shame, the shame – I would never choose this. And yet, despite all the chaos and ruin and regret, it took me about twenty years to get help. Why? The simple answer is, I didn’t want to be Bipolar. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy (Ha! Like they didn’t already!). So, I refused to accept it. I refused to seek treatment. And it got worse. Much, much worse.

About seven months ago, after another life-is-amazing-and-I-don’t-need-to-sleep-and-I’ll-hyper-focus-and-finish-that-novel-and-train-for-that-marathon-and-FUCK!-you-better-stop-getting-in-my-way-or-I’ll-bite-your-damn-head-off-so-feed-yourself elevated state (Symptoms of a manic episode: increased activity, energy or agitation; decreased need for sleep; abnormally upbeat) followed inevitably by a crashing-into-bed-and-plotting-out-the-details-of-my-exit-because-I-just-can’t-live-in-this-world-anymore-and-I’m-worthless-and-horrible-and-you’d-all-be-better-off-without-me depressed state (Symptoms of a major depressive episode: feelings of sadness, emptiness, hopelessness; marked loss of interest in activities; fatigue; feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt; thinking about, planning, or attempting suicide), I sought the help of a counselor. So, what changed, you might be wondering? What made me seek treatment at this point, after shunning it for so many years? Well, it used to be that I had normal periods of time between the depression and the elevation. It used to be fun and ambitious and productive (euphoric but always beguiling) to be elevated. It used to be the depression came maybe a couple times a year. The unwarranted distrust and insecurity and ultra-sensitivity was fleeting. The suicidal thoughts were daunting rather than soothing. That’s what used to be. It was easier to pretend I was normal then. I was just eccentric! I was special! Like some of the greatest artists and inventors and individuals that made history. I was a mad genius just like Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, Charlie Chaplin, Ben Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, Michelangelo (Symptom: exaggerated sense of self). I was able to ride that train of twisted thought for a long long time, because I could finish what I started then, because I was younger then, and there was always another job, another lover, another place that would accept me. But around seven years ago, that all began to change. The depression seized more frequently. The elevation became less euphoric and more agitated, even rageful at times – lashing out at and rejecting the people I loved most. I started projects but never finished them. It became more and more difficult to go to work, and when I got there, I had to convince myself out of the car and into the classroom. In the classroom, I felt like an alien. I couldn’t stay on track, couldn’t focus my thoughts (Symptom: rapid and frenzied speaking, racing thoughts). I felt like I was disconnected from everything around me, like I wasn’t real (Symptom: dissociation). And then over the past year, the episodes seemed to be crashing right on top of each another with no reprieve in-between. It was relentless, crippling. One day of unbridled energy followed by two days of extreme irritability followed by one day of bed-ridden depression and then rinse, lather, repeat. Weeks, months, a year like this. The darkness that occasionally consumed my thoughts mutated to a pervasive utter blackness – leaving a void where hope and happiness used to visit. My fiancé pleading with me to get out of bed. My 10-year-old son asking me why I was so angry. My six-year-old daughter saying, “Mommy’s sick again.” I hated myself. I couldn’t pretend I was perfectly healthy – just eccentric – anymore. I was sick. Very sick.

You see, Bipolar Disorder is a degenerative illness, and by denying myself treatment, I had enabled a progression into periods of rapid cycling, meaning I was basically Bipolar on steroids – my depressive and manic moods shifting in a constant unpredictable shitstorm. This is the way it was explained to me by my counselor (in much more eloquent terms). She said that in the same way progressive diseases like Cancer will eventually cause organ failure if left untreated, Bipolar Disorder gradually diminishes brain function if left untreated. Oh, did I mention this conversation took place just a month ago? And, perhaps you remember that I went to see her the first time about seven months ago? No, it didn’t take that long to diagnose me. It took that long for me to commit. I honored my appointments only twice before I disappeared for another two months and then for another five months after that (I was still battling my desperate desire to be “normal”). During those initial appointments, I either purposefully omitted the symptoms of my elevated states, or honestly didn’t know they were elevated states. Hard to tell. On the one hand, for most of my life the elevated states were something to look forward to. They were a tremendous relief since they often followed a long period of depression, or, they were a welcome rush of intense energy and focus and ambition after a period of normal moods and routines. On the other hand, there was a part of me that hoped, if I had to be diagnosed with something, that it be depression and/or anxiety – just not Bipolar, please, not that! For some totally illogical reason, having depression and anxiety seemed more socially acceptable to me. People posted about their depression and anxiety on social media. My students openly discussed their struggles with them in class. Lot’s of people are depressed and anxious! Poor reasoning but, I convinced myself that my elevated states were just “normal” times when I wasn’t depressed. After all, I didn’t behave like someone that was manic. I was nothing like Bradley Cooper’s character in “Silver Linings Playbook”! I didn’t suddenly become totally irrational. I didn’t spend everything in my bank account in some obsessed frenzy. I didn’t abruptly start making good on all my wildest fantasies and desires. I didn’t incoherently speed-talk and jump around from one interest to another. No, it was never that pronounced. Or, was it? I’d certainly been called Bipolar enough in my lifetime – and not in a concerned or encouraging way. More like I was being called a “crazy bitch”. It was a bad word. And I did spend [a lot] more money than I should when I felt “good”. Like, when I bought that boat with a personal loan on a 50% interest rate. Or, when I financed that international trip while negative in my bank account. And on all that professional camera equipment when I decided to be a video editor, and on this website two years ago when I decided to be a blogger (Perhaps, now, I’ll finally make use of it?). And the hundreds of dollars I invested in gear when I was suddenly inspired to run a marathon (but I did follow through on that one, thank you very much!). Oh, right, I guess I do jump around from interest to interest when I’m feeling “inspired”. I’m going to be a motivational speaker, no, a novelist, no, a personal trainer, no, a corporate trainer, no, a filmmaker, no, an entrepreneur, no… the list goes on and on. But these things felt so good. Even though I had to clean up the wreckage whenever I smashed back down on the pavement. The rubble of estranged relationships, busted bank accounts, retired jobs. So yeah, I went with depression and anxiety, masking the symptoms of mania. And I refused medication (because all I really needed to do was get my shit together, not numb myself with zombie-making pills). Until the progression to rapid cycling imprisoned me and I sulked, defeated, back into therapy five weeks ago.

After years and years and years of heartbreak and rejection and confusion and self-loathing and denial and protest, I began taking a daily mood stabilizer and seeing my therapist once a week. It took a couple weeks before there was any discernable change, and after four weeks, the change in my behavior was nothing short of striking. At that point, I realized I hadn’t been swallowed by the black void in three full weeks – a record time in nearly a year. I hadn’t lashed out in rage at anyone either. And the most surprising thing? I wasn’t the living dead. I had heard these nightmare testimonies about people with Bipolar Disorder beginning medication and going numb, like they’d been lobotomized, and that panicked me. I didn’t want to stop feeling, I just wanted to experience my feelings in a regulatory fashion. And I was, for the first time in years. Now, I want to be very careful not to sound like the poster girl for medicating. My strong belief is that we over-medicate in this country (but that’s for another post). No miracle has occurred. I’m not “cured”. In fact, there is no known cure for Bipolar Disorder. It can be managed, with a combination of medication and psychotherapy. Some days are better than others. But every day, I still battle my demons and the life-long conditioning of patterns, emotional reactions, and behaviors. My recovery is a continuous journey where no arrival point exists. But I have hope today. I wake up motivated to get out of bed without needing the boost of mania. I carry out the responsibilities and routines of the day without fighting off panic or becoming despondent. I fall asleep without the “lulling” melody of my own death dancing around my thoughts. Yes, I still get anxious and angry and sad and overly eager. The difference is in the way I’ve responded to those feelings since starting treatment. My awareness of the condition and the symptoms that accompany it, along with my medication, has helped me acknowledge my feelings before acting on them.

I hope it’s not the honeymoon period. I hope it lasts.

It’s early yet.

But if this remarkable change is here to stay [with dedicated treatment], I can’t help but feel frustration with myself for not seeking help sooner. Just to think on all the chaos and anguish I could have spared myself and others… But I’m here now, and perhaps it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be – writing this blog so that you may read it and be inspired to act now. For yourself, or for someone you know, before it’s too late. Make no mistake, this disease does kill. The suicide rate for people with Bipolar Disorder is twenty times that of the general population, and nearly 30% will make a suicide attempt at least once in their lifetime.

Don’t pity me, and please don’t fear me. I’m not very different from you. I have a family, friends, a career, hopes and dreams and struggles and fears. For those of you that know me, I’m still Jen. Maybe I’m even a better Jen – my greater and more genuine self. As a society, we need to reframe the way we perceive and speak about mental illness. Help me promote a fair image for those individuals and families that are afflicted with it – so they won’t suffer in silence. So they get help.

My name is Jen Hogue, and I’m diagnosed Bipolar II. Today, I’m in treatment. I take my medication everyday and see my counselor every week. I have a sense of hope that I haven’t had in far too long. I still don’t know if I’ll be brave enough to publish this. But I hope I will. After all, it’s often in the greatest risks we take that we find our greatest triumphs, and our greatest gifts to one another.  

#happiness4jane happinessforjane mentalhealth bipolardisorder bipolar depression anxiety mentalhealthsupport

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Leverage Models

Leverage Models started as the latest project from Shannon Fields (late of the much-missed New York collective Stars Like Fleas, and who’s also worked with everyone from Helado Negro to Rhys Chatham, JOBS to The Silent League). After 2013’s highly-praised self-titled debut on Hometapes, Fields wound up assembling a touring band that would wind up making Leverage Models’ newly-released sophomore record Whites(which, for reasons both personal and political, was made in 2015 but is being released now, partly as a fundraiser for the Southern Poverty Law Center). Joined by singer Alena Spanger (of Tiny Hazard) and all three members of the very powerful trio JOBS, among others, in their own words "Leverage Models makes pop songs about transubstantiation, ritual abuse, political apathy, divorce, white collar criminals, poverty, white liberal guilt, anxiety, & self-harm. With roto-toms." In his review, Dusted’s Ian Mathers says about Whites, "Musically, this album would be just as impressive if it had come out in early 2016, but back then maybe more people would assume the high-stakes intensity of the songs here were worrying too much. Sadly, the subsequent time has only shown again and again how appropriate that aspect of Leverage Models’ work really is." For Listed, Fields and Spanger provided a list of current inspirations and overlooked art pop.

Alena’s Current Inspirations

Life Without Buildings—"The Leanover"

The way that this singer, Sue Tompkins, approaches melody and lyric is hypnotizing to me. I love how she continues to repeat words—almost slogans—and alter their pronunciation until they seem to lose their original meanings and become more about the sound of the words. I typically wouldn't love the 90's alt rock aesthetic, but the steady, unobtrusive accompaniment provides the space needed for her vocals to live in.

Francis Bebey—"Pygmy Love Song"

I've been incessantly listening to Francis Bebey for months now. He seems to lean into the rawness and outer edges of what the voice can do. I love the way he mimics the bamboo flute with his voice on this song.

Lizzy Mercier Decloux—"No Golden Throat"

I sometimes feel like I need to shake off everything I learned from years of studying music and get to back to a more fundamental, raw approach. Lizzy is one of those untrained inspirations for me. She barely knew how to play the guitar and started singing not long before this album came out. This resulted in such adventurous, unselfconscious music. She is at once playful, unbridled, and searingly direct. She wasn't really respected in the NY scene when this record came out, and was by some seen as an imposter, reliant on her male collaborators to hoist her up. After digging deeper into her music, it's obvious that she possessed great artistic autonomy and vision and her lack of recognition was a result of unfortunate industry circumstances and sexism. The lyrics in this song are her response to the pressures that's she experienced to sing more conventionally.

Lonnie Holley—"Here I Stand Knocking at Your Door"

I saw Lonnie Holley play in NY recently and was so moved by the freedom with which he sings and the purity and untouched quality of his music. Every aspect of his performance- down to the smallest movements of his body were connected to the sound and channeling into one cohesive and beautiful statement. He is one of those rare, singular artists, who seems to make art out of everything he touches.

Brigitte Fontaine—"Moi Aussi"

She is such a badass. I love the simplicity of using just a drum as accompaniment. In this song, she's singing with her partner at the time, a French/Algerian musician, Areski Belkacem who brought some traditional folkloric sensibilities to their music. The effortless blending of theater and music is something I really strive for in my own work.

Shannon

I needed to give myself a theme so I decided to select some of what I think are overlooked vintage art-pop coming out of the post-punk 80s into the and slick new-agey, ‘world music’ appropriating 90s. I’m completely taken in by that era of experimentation and production right now, though I can’t say why. I find myself drawn most to the songs that effortlessly stumble into choices I don’t always understand. They don’t seem like they’re out to destroy any genre conventions so much as they seem blissfully ignorant of them. Certain moments shock me as to how much more relevant and contemporary the MIDI/electronic, experimental and arty music is as compared to the 60s & 70s guitar-based music that’s ruled for so long (and which has nothing at all to offer a lot of younger musicians I talk to these days). I could have easily made this list 20. This was hard.

Che—I ‎(Narcotic, 1987)

What a confusing record. Half of it is very eccentric, slightly woozy funk. With the subtlety-obliterating rhythm section of Art of Noise or later New Jack rhythms, cock-rock guitars, and these drunken almost a-melodic passages. The ending of Scream Like A Swiftcould be a codeine-fuelled pass at Jensen Sportag’s contemporary hyper-MIDI, vapor-wave smooth-jazz. Moving The Silencesounds like The Blue Nile but with the kind of ironic detachment (think Arto Lindsay & Ambitious Lovers) that leaves you creeped out and confused rather than crying in your drink. And while I’m a bit black-hearted and prefercrying in my drink, I’m also completely transfixed by this. This song, Jerusalem,just kind of takes my breath away with something entirely unfamiliar: built from slabs of goth and pure Peter-Gabriel world-cheese, it somehow alchemizes into something I have never heard. A whole album of this and I’d have it on repeat with Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter(which also belongs on this list and is one of the best ‘confuse-core’ records ever made).

Akira Inoue—サファリ・オスティナート (Splash, 1983)

I’ve seen this song title translated as "Safari Ostinato". I know very little about this person or this album. Somebody help me. It’s the kind of album that repels and compels alternately. It gives you whiplash in the gentlest, most covert way. It’s a sort of adult contemporary, New Wave, jazz fusion MIDI album and this song is both beautiful and bonkers. The whole album is. I wonder if Dutch Uncles have heard this album. I could draw a line from here to there.

Andréa Daltro—Kiuá (Kiuá, 1988)

Released by the amazing Dutch reissue label Music From Memory. Originally released on Estudio De Invencoes in 1988. Andre Daltro was a singer and the song was, I believe, originally recorded with the band Brazilian "spiritual jazz band" Sexteto do Beco in 1980. But this version trades organicism and chops for drum machine, keys, MIDI sounds, and rattling ambient chatter, both acoustic and synthetic, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard…it rivals Arca’s new s/t album for this kind of strange, winsome cyber bel canto transmission from an alien jungle, though far less brooding, no less arresting.

Jane Siberry—Lena is a White Table (The Walking, 1987)

I knew Jane Siberry later hits and didn’t much care for them. I knew she worked with both Hector Zazou and Barney the Purple Dinosaur. I was not prepared when I first heard this album, The Walking. I believe when she was first signed the industry thought of her as the "new Kate Bush" and wanted to cash in on the mass tolerance for ‘art-rock’ a-la Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. But The Walkingis to Hounds of Loveas The Blue Nile’s Walk Across The Rooftops is to Laughing Stock’s Spirit of Eden. I love all of the above, but what Siberry and The Blue Nile share in this example is the same kind of epic freedom and reach but a sort of fragility and limitation and ramshackle, almost amateurish quality that make them really humane and relatable to me. The first time I heard this song I confess that my first thought was how much it reminded me of Alena’s old band, Tiny Hazard, who were one of my favorite bands in Brooklyn. I know it seems silly to say it, but somehow this track feels so much less ‘theatrical’ then the same era of Kate Bush…more interior. It feels like a very intimate experience to listen, to the point that I find myself feeling embarrassed for listening in.

Gary Numan—Cry, The Clock Said (Dance, 1981)

I hesitated to use one of my choices on an artist I feel like everybody knows. But I almost never meet anyone who really knows THIS album (and I know because I push it on everyone). If you only know the playful, cold cyber-punk of the first couple of Gary Numan/Tubeway Army records (which are, to be clear, brilliant, and a big influence on me) you really need to hear this album. At its most extreme corners (of which this song is one) I don’t know anything like it. Gary Numan’s great magic trick, the one I endlessly faun over, is how his disaffected, conventionally ugly, robot voice transforms into something heartbreaking and relatable by the time it reaches my heart (especially on Telekon’s piano-based tracks). I know that’s a cheesy thing to say but fuck you, I need sentiment these days. Anyway, nowhere is it more the case than in this songs arrangement. Musically, it feels entirely alien and also entirely familiar, with Japan’s Mick Karn barely there alongside what sound like Casiotone boss nova beats and the most heartbreaking little chiming synth arpeggio that come and go like a kitten that wakes up momentarily from its drug-induced nap. It’s 10 minutes long. I’ve had it on loop for hours without getting tired of it. I’ve wanted to make something like this for a long time now. Some day I’ll have this kind of restraint.

#11 Bonus Track!

Né Ladeiras—Cruz (Corsária, 1988)

I also know next to nothing about this Brazilian album, dedicated to Greta Garbo. I read that it was produced and arranged by Luís Cília ,who wrote a song that became a sort of second anthem for the Portuguese Communist Party. The MIDI harps sitting matter-of-factly on top of those plate-reverbed guiro, clave, bells…I want to live inside the room they build. And it’s a lovely, airy progression that never grows tiresome as it modulates in a drifting-down-the-stream sort of way. The ending lifts so high with barely a shrug’s worth of effort. Gorgeous.

#dusted magazine #listed #leverage models #shannon fields #alena spanger #life without buildings #francis bebey #lizzy mercier decloux #lonnie holley #brigitte fontaine #che #akira inoue #Andréa Daltro #jane siberry #gary numan #né ladeiras

[whispersovertime]

da shine note

sometime this past summer, i was raped.

or at least i think so. my side of the story is in another post that i wrote to (supposedly) obtain some kind of closure on the incident.

what i did after is probably textbook of what exactly NOT to do. i started telling my poor, confused boyfriend about it that same night when i came home at 4am but stopped myself before it became too real/before the real thing happened. i then told some wonderful, understanding friends various versions of the truth. and even then that wasn't enough- i contacted the perpetrator to meet up to talk about what happened.

my boyfriend acted how any rational, loving boyfriend would react- shock, confusion, and then complacency after i turned the story around to cover it up because i didn't know how to address anything or what even i was doing. i felt various emotions of shock and confusion myself, and some guilt as well. yes, i was drunk, but what does being drunk mean in terms of consent? in terms of whether or not i could have stopped it from happening?

my friends gave me wonderful advice and were incredibly accepting and kind and all the things a strong support system provides. i'm sorry that i pretty much followed none of their advice. even then, they were respectful of my wishes- which was to do absolutely nothing.

meeting up with the perpetrator was the opposite of productive, just like how my friends said it would be. i had never fully understood the term "gaslighting" before. now i do, after researching the concept afterwards and seeing how he hit all the flags in our conversation.

at the same time though, and this might be the gaslighting speaking, but i can't find it in myself to say he was 100% evil for what happened. i was incredibly drunk (blackout drunk for sure) and i have no memory or judgment to say how drunk he was, but i'm sure he was at least some level because no fully functioning person would have done all of that, right? can a drunk person still rape? if i'm drunk, and i don't resist, does that mean i'm still consenting? or that deep down, i wanted it to happen?

even worse, i felt this strange sense of attachment to him. for the next week or so i for some godforsaken reason so badly wanted to contact him, and i called him a few times to talk about absolutely nothing substantial and texted him about meeting up again, which we never did. thank god.

at this point, i was caught up in a million webs of lies. every single person had a different version of the truth and no one had the same version. it just came out different each time. the stress this placed on me was something that i probably did not realize at the time but i do now, now that i've completely and utterly fucked over myself. i'm historically a pretty open book and suck at deception. any lies i need to tell or bending of the truth, often for the sake of not hurting others in terms of social situations, evoke extreme anxiety within me. i felt like i had suffered little trauma and was ready to move on with my life with the knowledge that this little chapter would forever be closed to everyone, including myself.

well, i was completely and utterly wrong.

it wasn't going well before, but i suddenly became hyper aware of how i wanted to do nothing sexual with my boyfriend. i reached out to different friends about this topic and still listened to none of their well-meaning advice. suddenly the idea that i needed a break to rediscover myself romantically and sexually became unbudgeable. i discussed this with my boyfriend (who, again, is incredibly mature and forgiving and i'm so sorry this had to happen to him) and we somehow agreed we would take a break in the future, but in the meantime i would be able to go on dating apps again and go on dates prior to the actual break when we would not be living together.

i should have realized how fucked up i had become mentally when, prior to my business trip to nyc, i suddenly had the impulse to browse the r4r subreddits. literally the night before i was to fly out i made 2 tentative plans to meet up with complete strangers. one was to be massaged (no idea what i was expecting there) and the other was to get dinner and drinks and see what would happen after. prior to all of this, i had never ever drank with a stranger on first meeting and had never had sex with someone other than my boyfriend. or even kissed anyone other than a boyfriend. is this one of the common responses to being raped? please tell me it is otherwise does this just mean i have different values/morals? is this just what i want at my basest self? has having that experience suddenly released my true self?

and then, upon coming back from nyc, i went on my online dating dates. they were all innocent and in public spaces (with added drinks this time around), until i agreed to go over to a guy's place for the second date. going in, i honestly had no expectations or motives. and yet, i drank a lot, too recklessly, a suddenly common theme, and before i knew it i was engaging in sexual conduct with this stranger while my unsuspecting boyfriend was at home taking care of my dog.

so what did i do when i came home? i tried to act like nothing had happened, but my boyfriend saw right through it and pieced things together over the night (it didn't help that i had sent a series of very explicit drunk messages to a friend) and saw right through me for what i was- fucked up, incredibly selfish and inconsiderate, definitely a cheater at this point, and all around just incapable of making any rational, ethical, or moral decisions.

i think i can finally admit to myself that i've been incredibly traumatized and messed up from the past several months. and that i've lost all sense of morality and proper judgment.

i'm sorry to everyone hurt.

first and foremost, i'm so sorry to my boyfriend, who i definitely don't deserve. i deceived him from the onset of the incident after having always told him the truth (perhaps too much sometimes). i was so scared to lose him, which for his sake he definitely should have left me and never looked back from the incident. nothing was ever his fault and i only hope he can focus on the good memories we have and think of my actions from the past several months as a weird sort of sickness/blight that took me out. and i'm so thankful for him sticking by my side even after i changed and so sorry he had to go through that. i know it must have hurt so much, the things i said and did even before the last and final straw.

i'm also sorry to all my friends who i disappointed. sorry for not telling the full truth, but also sorry for burdening them with even a little bit of the terrible truth, no matter how shielded it was. and i'm also so thankful for my friends' support and the time and energy they took out of their limited supply to talk with me and try to help me. and for their belief in me, that i could do better than what i did.

i'm also sorry to my parents, who only know the very last bit, the breakup and the reasons for that (though also an abridged version, i honestly don't know how people who lie about significant aspects of their life get away with it, mentally i am so so exhausted). i'm sorry for throwing away the great life they helped me build and for ignoring all their upbringing and teachings.

i can't tell if i'm a victim or if i'm just a terrible, horrible monster. actually, i think i know. the world isn't black and white, so i'm both.

sorry for turning out like this.

[pawnshopsouls]

//Wow I’m feeling really down in the mouth today/tonight. Like really down in the mouth. So um, I’m going to put down some thoughts that have been really bothering me so that maybe I can lift some of this melancholy and get some decent sleep.

//Ok, so um, first are some things which are a bit more personal.

//So on the advice of a friend, I’m going to give you guys a heads up on what’s going on with me and why I haven’t completed any of of the commissions still in my commissions folder, done anything much outside of pencil doodles, and been generally inactive except for MAYBE some rp stuff on @pawnshopsouls​ if I’m having a good day.

//Basically, pain, finances,  stress, and what’s been feeling like crippling depression.

//I have each one of my commissions in my commissions folder but have been unable to focus on them due to:

being in quarantine bc of bedbugs the last couple months (which is like, 90% isolation with the other 10% being trips to the store or parks with the kids bc we can’t interact with friends in our church ward without a house-hold inspection to make sure we don’t spread bedbugs),

having to share 1 graphics tablet with 2 sisters (bc the other two broke) thus limiting my access to my usual digital art mediums,

dealing with a resurgence of my RSI,

trying to convince myself that no, what I do and have done on this blog ISN’T a waste of time, that my work IS worth paying for, that I’m NOT cheating people just because it takes me longer to finish pieces due to said circumstances above, and that I am worth something even though I’m not as fast or as skilled as many others around me,

and dealing with the loss of our internet due to how expensive it was getting and are now using our phone data to make hotspots which means gappy wifi & digital isolation on top of rl isolation.

//With this in mind, I’m pretty sure I’m actually in a load of emotional distress that I’ve been suppressing or disregarding in favor of attempted productivity. I think right now it’s to the point where I often don’t recognize or take heed of this distress until it’s extreme enough that I can’t physically function because it’s so paralyzingly powerful. ( I often try to nap it off, which usually works but only for a few hours).

//This is also probably why I’ve been so hyper focused on Salem and Bonely - specifically drawing those two since doing so is comfort for me. I also feel guilt at feeling not-so-good even though I’m not in as bad a situation as many others.

//Suffice it to say, I’m in a lot of pain (physical due to my aggravated RSI + mental/emotional due to everything else) and am still trying to figure a way to fix it that doesn’t include more personal isolation.

//Now to the less personal issues - I’m not sure what to do with/how to handle the toon bros and how to interact with other toon characters. Despite asks and prompts being key to developing character relations, I’ve never been good at sending random asks that weren’t part of an ask/rp prompt (god bless those things). Anything I come up with end up like small-talk and honestly, anything small-talk related is a STEEP shortcoming of mine. I can’t small-talk and I struggle with talking to others unless I have something I think is significant or somehow relevant to a post, rp or previous conversation.

//Because of this, I’m not sure now how to approach other toon ocs rn - especially with the Cuphead hype dying down & toon ocs becoming their own things, thus removing the common relevant factor between our characters:  Cuphead’s Inkwell Isle. The biggest reason this is a problem for me is that unlike Canon!bros who can end up anywhere any time thanks to Bonly’s Jumper’s Gyro, the Toon!bros don’t have that luxury and their setting isn’t static.

//So I guess it’s a matter of, “Do I keep them in Inkwell? Or do I move them back to Limbo Town in Soulstice? or will it matter since those settings won’t mesh anyways with the ocs I want to reach out to?” Idk guys, i’m really struggling here. Though the option of making Sal’s cemetery (bc he’s still a grave digger guys. It’s the base for his whole character design here) and Bonely’s loan office locations nebulous/unstated is very tempting since it would mean the office could legit be anywhere and available to anyone.

//I’m still debating on what I should do so if any of you have any thoughts on that, I’d appreciate them.

//anyway, thanks for reading this far and sorry if I got you down with this.

#¢::Passin'Gossip::¢ #ooc #¢::OutOfSpooks::¢ #//feeling down in the mouth #personal #//vent I guess? Just some stuff #//but yeh this is why I'm so spotty

[theadmiringbog]

*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device 

–@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

--

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward. 

—                 

Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online.                 

--

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself? 

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.                 

--

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”                

--

As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”                

--

Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.                

--

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”                

--

Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”               

--

Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”                

--

... he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville: 

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.       

--

My most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. 

Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.                

--

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.                

--

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.                

--

Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.                

--

A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.                

--

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.                

--

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.                

--

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.                

--

We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.                

--

“In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all.                

--

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large.                

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In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes: We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

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In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them. But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century.                

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Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.” 

Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.                

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“knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.                

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Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,”                

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Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.                

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When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.                

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In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.                

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The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.                

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(“bland enough to offend no one”)                

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The professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time.                

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Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.                

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Our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising.                

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Mastodon... They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public.                

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... forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public!                

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A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global mesh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.                

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In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.”                

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Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.                

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Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.                

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“I would prefer not to.”

#How to Do Nothing #books