#but I also don’t want my writing to suffer because of my stupid brain chemicals

[harmonictechnicality]

I’m gonna be super honest…

I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to finish editing this current chapter of the vampire eddie fic by tonight. It’s been just… not a great week mentally and I think it’s affecting my writing.

And I really want this chapter to be decent - there’s a lot at stake in it for the characters, so I want to do them justice. Hopefully I can make my evening focused on getting this chapter in order, so that I can post it tomorrow. That way, I can finish the next part of the memory log ficlet by Monday.

anyways thank you for listening xx

#fic writer update #doing my best but anxiety kicked me in the ass on Thursday #and I hate not finishing things on time #but I also don’t want my writing to suffer because of my stupid brain chemicals #okay I will stop being a pity party and get back to grouping words into sentences #have a lovely day out there everyone xx

[haik-choo]

request: can i maybe get some dating kuroo headcanons? 🥺 btw love ur writing, it's amazing 💕

request: Hello! I absolutely love your hc/scenario first kisses! Could I ask for a first kiss hc with Kuroo please? ✨😁

a/n: i’ve combined these and decided to do a little “dating kurro” with the first kiss and stuff hehehehe <3 thank y’ll for loving my writing!!!

@dearkozume because you wanted me to tag you in posts!!! <3

[DATING AND KISSING KUROO]

-kuroo

kuroo tetsuro.

general dating headcanons:

you CANNOT tell me that this man doesn’t like to show you off. like not in any objectifying way, he literally just loves it when you look good for yourself and flaunt it. he’ll be your HYPEMAN

likes to randomly scare you and then after making you nearly shit your pants he’ll make fun of you for the way you got scared and almost shat your pantaloons 

you either have to do stupid shit with him and you’ll have to deal with the consequences or you’ll DO the stupid shit WITH him and ENJOY the consequences. it’s chaotic, it’s amazing

you know this boy is smart AS HELL, so you two do a bunch of study dates where you think you’ll actually fool around but then he drops a stack of practice worksheets and your desk and forces you to do them until they’re all you can see when you close your eyes

he’s reliable and observant, and can tell when you’re feeling down in a heartbeat, but he himself is a little constipated when talking about problems in the relationship. he would rather glaze over them lowkey, but he knows that isn’t healthy

when you sleep in the same bed as him, you have to bring your own pillow because he uses the two he has to smoosh against his face, ears, and hair

likes to put his chin on top of your head when cuddling, whether he’s facing you or you’re facing away from him 

WILL make tiktoks with you but only halfheartedly. he’ll always be the first to comment on your tiktok or post and it’s always “look at my baby 🥵🥵 🥵”

i know he’s depicted as a sex god, and i’m not saying he’s not good at that stuff, but he still definitely gets flustered if you ever make the first move for anything at all, even if it’s something with you kissing his cheek in public he just gives you this little shy glance because. he shy :((((

if you go to his games and wave at him, he’ll wave back at you looking like a wacky inflatable tube man, his teammates make fun of him but it made you smile so. worth it

when you comb through his hair with your fingers they get stuck in the tangles and then he drags you around the house with your hand basically attached to his head. its great

first kiss headcanons:

you’d be the first one to kiss him because he’s really patient and wants you to set the pace for the relationship

it’s probably be during a study date when he’s frying your brain and you are BEGGING for a break but he’s just like “you can’t even balance chemical equations yet you absolute idiot. you’re not getting a break until you can balance them”

and you just refuse to do them and stare up at him defiantly. he stares back. you’ve been staring at each other for a minute, both refusing to give up. and you decide you’ve had enough and you just shoot up and plant a FAT kiss on his lips and it even makes a smacking sound

and you get up from the bed AND rush out of the room into the kitchen where you proceed to stuff your face with snacks and sustenance with red ears, trying to eat your embarrassment away 

and kuroo’s just. sitting there. frozen and red and confused.

like you???? just????? tricked him????? but you also???? kissed him???? is he annoyed or happy

he is both

and when you come back he’s put all the study materials away and just looks at you and says “i put the stuff away can i have another kiss” while sitting on his bed criss-cross applesauce with his hands clasped in his lap

general affection headcanons:

during school (highschool or college), whenever he sees you, he’ll jog up to you and put his hand on your waist and kiss your cheek or temple and ask you about your day

in the privacy of his own home or your own home, he will come up behind you and squish you in his arms or squish your face with his hands and kiss your face everywhere humanly possible

nips at your ear playfully to get your attention when you’re cuddling

his kisses on your lips are slow and chaste, whenever he pulls away there’s always a smooch sound and it’s <3<3<3<3<3

if you’re sitting on the couch longways with your legs stretched out, he will lay his w h o l e body on top of you and bury his face in your stomach and might even blow raspberries on it

you pinch his butt. it’s a crime if you don’t

he likes to wing his arm ALL the way up before unleashing it’s power on your ass and the slap is all you can hear for the next five minutes as you hold your ass with his hand print on it

likes it when you get engulfed by his hugs or whenever he’s sitting down and you hug him tightly and he feels like you when he hugs you

sleeping with him is the WORST

he literally has NO manners when it comes to sleeping with someone. deadass takes the covers and pillows and doesn’t care if you’re cold. 

him: suffer, bitch.

doesn’t need a whole lot of affection, but he doesn’t want to be the one that initiates affection all the time. he likes to feel wanted, so even a small test of “i miss you :(” makes his heart ZOOM

love this boy and his bed head PLEASE

#haikyuu!! #haikyū!! #haikyuu #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu scenarios #kuroo testuro #kuroo tetsurou #kuroo tetsurō #kuroo #kuroo fluff #kuroo x reader #kuroo headcanons #kuroo scenarios #kuroo angst #hq kuroo #hq #nekoma #haikyuu nekoma

[hey-hamlet]

BNHA AU Ideas: Genetics Prodigy

Also on AO3!

TL;DR:  

Quirks might be the coolest thing ever, but they aren't magic, they're genetic. So what's to stop one very stubborn quirkless prodigy from working out how to give himself some?

Ok so! Tech Genius!Izuku AUs are a thing, right? I love them to bits but my problem is I know nothing about tech so I can't write them, but what I do know is biology!

Biology/Genetics prodigy Izuku giving himself quirks!

Stays friends with Katsuki (They have a rough patch but they work through it), not sure if I want Izuku to fiddle with Katsuki's quirk or not - not sure if I'll make the quirk limit 1 or 2, but I've always headcanoned you can give more quirks to someone born quirkless, so Izuku will end up with a few

So, after the dawn of quirks, a lot of, if not all, genetic research stopped. Sure, tech marched onwards, but genetics became an even bigger taboo than it was before. Izuku is a little genius, and this his massive interest in quirks when he's told he’s quirkless? It's more of a “how do I change this” than a “can I change this”

Izuku has always been the smartest person Katsuki knows. They have a rough patch at the beginning where Katsuki is trying to claw this one thing he's better at Izuku than over his head, to make himself ‘better’ than izuku

People have always called the quirkless worthless. If he’s less than a quirkless kid, what does that make him? Izuku eventually manages to drag it out of him and tells him about all the things people did before the dawn of quirks. Katsuki changes his mind to instead believing that everyone else is stupid for thinking quirks are everything and is now very vocal about that. (He still loves his quirk though, as does Izuku.)

His first real trial is a bit of a silly one: he cures Katsuki’s lactose intolerance. They were both salty they couldn’t share their icecream.

Collection of quirks:

Bakugo:

Explosion

Fire Manipulation

Midoriya:

Telekinesis

Heal

Forcefield

Jump

I want Izuku to give himself a quirk aged like, 8, with bakugo there for the ride as a lab hand, and I want them to realise with mounting horror what they've managed to do

bakugo turning to izuku and whispering "how many quirks would it take to beat - be as strong as - all might?" and izuku just shrugs because he hadn't thought about that but what he's done could start a new breed of bioweapons

he knows enough about the brain to see that more than 2 quirks in a quirked persons body, or more than 4 in someone born quirkless would be seriously damaging, but he's really scared about what could happen if he did go over that limit.

he won't, but he's curious, and he feels a little sick because of it

Nezu catches wind of this baby bio genius, one of the red flags is the only recent research done into quirks was actually from the lab nezu was kept in, so when he sees someone digging into that research he's ready to rain hell down upon them

then he sees an 8-year old that gave himself a quirk and he's like "oh. son."

oh he also totally has a little collection of lab rats that he spoils to bits - he's careful not to give them any quirks that would hurt them / cause an ethical issue. mostly they just have colour changing and glowing quirks, one of them can photosynthesize

he's a very good boy and his little rat children love him

So, when one is as hopelessly heroic as Izuku, it tends to be hard to avoid ‘accidentally’ using your quirk in public. When you have a heal quirk? It’s basically impossible.

Healing quirks actually have a special provision under the vigilantism act, along with exemptions due to age, but when Izuku gets caught, the police don’t tell him that. They honestly just want to try and scare the kid straight because it was a ‘miracle’ (forcefield) that he didn’t get hit by the falling rubble.

So Naomasa is brought in, as usual for the Mustutafu area, and asks the basic questions: name, age, quirk. Izuku, being a genius but still like 8 and scared he's going to jail lies for the first two questions, and he doesn’t lie very well because the poor kid is chronically honest.

‘Um, my name is – Tsubasa! Yeah!.” “I’m 10!”

But the last question throws Naomasa for a loop. “What’s your quirk?” “I was born quirkless, I’ve got the x-ray to prove it.”

That wasn’t a lie. But he visibly used a quirk, they saw it happen. And Naomasa suddenly gets a terrible feeling, because there is only one person he knows that can take someone from quirkless to quirked.

“So you don’t have any quirk?” “No sir.” A lie. Fuck. He lets Izuku go because, despite the horror of a child caught in AFO’s clutches, he might be the most valuable lead they’ve ever had. So they keep an eye on him.

It doesn’t take long to see him using more than one quirk. The kid is creative and isn’t bad at disguising them as the same quirk, but using a forcefield to shield you and your friend from rain is visibly different from telekinetically doing the same, if you know what you’re looking for. And boy do Naomasa and All Might know what they’re looking for.

Their second heart attack comes from an absent “So have you been practising with flame manipulation?” “Of course, dipshit, I’m not lazy. We’ve gotta practise to become heroes, don’t we?” “I know, Kacchan! I’m just excited!”

They keep freaking out about it until they bring in Nezu. It takes him a week or so, but he quickly finds out whats going on. “So, I’m not sure if this is what you wanted to hear but: It’s not All for One,” general sighs of relief “But the child has worked out how to synthesize quirks.” PANICKED NOISES

I feel like izuku is def. the first to make a quirk suppressant chemical, which really interests overhaul. Unfortunately, so i assume he can counter than with something that could just speed up the metabolism to flush another chemical out and because aizawa's quirk binds to the quirk factor, he could just give himself a quirk that has a different biological mechanism - confusing the fuck out of everyone involved

Timeline of Izuku’s shenanigans

Katsuki: lactose intolerance cured, proof of concept – age 6

A very nice rat: Attraction of small objects, yes the rat used it and yes it was amazing because other rats counted as small objects – age 7

Izuku: Attraction of small objects – age 8 (Inko’s quirk)

Katsuki: Flame control, a portion of Hisashi’s quirk from Izuku’s genes – age 8

Izuku: Jump, from a detailed study about a quirked rabbit – age 8 (late)

Another very nice rat: given the ability to live to 10 years old. His name is Hermes – age 9

Izuku: Starts a medical degree – age 10

Izuku: Forcefield, partly from a study of a weak forcefield quirk from the beginning of quirks when genetic studies were less taboo, combined with some promoter sequences from Katsuki’s quirk – age 10

Izuku: Heal, something he’d been working on since the beginning, created without reference for a similar quirk, his masterpiece – age 13 (This quirk is not tied to the quirk factor and therefore can not be stopped by erasure or the quirk erasing bullets.)

Izuku: Finishes the medical degree – age 14

Katsuki tries to get him to write Dr. Midoriya on his application to UA but he refuses, sadly. Not that it matters, Nezu recognises the last name from some of the only quirk research since the lab he was kept in was shut down. He’s very interested about one of the boy’s earliest papers; a case study about a quirkless boy born to 2 4th generation quirked parents, and the conclusion he drew: it wasn’t possible. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the quirkless kid was Izuku himself.

Izuku and Katsuki walk to UA together, Uraraka still saves him from tripping, Katsuki was just laughing at his suffering. Izuku’s a little less awkward in this AU and actually manages to thank her. They all enter the hall together.

Izuku never exactly kicked him mumbling habit, Iida still tells him off. Katsuki is trying to fight the urge to fly down there and kick his ass. Not that they can see, but Uraraka is also glaring at Iida for being rude to the nice boy.

Iida tries to stop Izuku from saying hi to Uraraka but she blows straight past him, loudly thanking Izuku for stopping to say hi. She’s glaring at Iida, Izuku is blissfully ignorant of that. Iida feels like he's offended the wrong person.

The exam starts, Izuku jumps straight into the middle of the exam. His legs hurt but he's totally clear of the other test takers. He starts kicking butt. He yanks wires from ports, tears screws from joints, punches robots with forcefield protected fists, etc. He gets maybe 30 points like this.

All around him he can see people in danger, he throws up countless forcefields to protect his fellow test takers. The judges are impressed with the versatility of the quirk, All Might, even though he knows Izuku isn’t connected to AFO, is having a slight breakdown. Nezu is incredibly impressed. Izuku is flagging though, his forcefield quirk takes some serious energy when he doesn’t have much to spare.

The zero pointer is released. Uraraka is pinned, and, unlike canon, she isn’t unscathed. Her ankle is snapped under the rubble, her ribs are badly bruised. Izuku sees this happen and he just moves. He doesn’t trust his forcefield to hold enough weight, so he goes the other direction: brute force. Using his jump quirk, he rockets into the air, landing a solid, quirk enhanced kick to the face of the robot. As it teeters, he uses attraction of small objects on as many individual points as he can, flying over the back of the robots head. He lands with an impact that jars his teeth, just as the robot starts to tip backwards. He makes it to safety with seconds to spare.

He’s exhausted, so far into quirk exhaustion it isn’t funny, but he’s not done yet. He stumbles to Uraraka helps her lift the bolder off her broken ankle, and heals it. He collapses just as the test finishes, Uraraka catching him and keeping him safe from the last few bits of falling rubble. She’s so thrown by her healed ankle.

Recovery girl comes over, checking on Uraraka. She saw the injury on the cameras and felt bad for the poor girl, but when she gets over there’s nothing. Sure, there’s some blood, but under it all there isn’t even a single cut. Uraraka begs her to help the boy in her arms and she thinks she might know why. The boy looks half dead, likely quirk exhaustion. Still, she didn’t know anyone with a healing quirk was applying, normally Nezu would have told her.

#biology prodigy au #BNHA au #bnha #midoriya izuku #bakugou katsuki #uraraka ochako #All Might #Iida Tenya

[pricklerick]

so, i’m such a slut for the “presumed dead” trope

Because I am all about that emotional rollercoaster drama bs. Anyhoo, here’s a fic idea that I will never write.

So, remember Prince Nebulon of the Zigerions? He was just a prince, right? Who is Queen of the Zigerions? Let’s call her Queen Z. Queen Z is pissed off that Rick blew her kiddo to smithereens, and she’s out for vengeance. It takes her a while to find Rick, though, because... well, they never did get that concentrated dark matter recipe, did they?

Alright, so Rick and Morty off on some planet, right? Where totally doesn’t matter, because I’m too lazy to create any legit plot for this. But wherever they are, Morty’s got this bad gut feeling, and Rick is sort of half exasperated/half affectionately blowing him off. Because Morty is always a little drama queen, and half the multiverse is pissed off at Rick for some reason or other. Jeezus, Morty, calm your tits.

Maybe they get separated for a bit. Maybe Morty storms off in a huff. But for whatever reason, Morty is gonna find some evidence of a huge Zigerion conspiracy against Rick. Maybe he overhears part of the plot, or sees some files laying around, or whatever. Again, it doesn’t matter. Morty is horrified at what he discovers, and now he’s doing his absolute damnedest to find Rick and warn him.

Queen Z’s plan is to kill Morty and capture Rick. She’s done her research, okay. She doesn’t care about the concentrated dark matter recipe anymore, she just wants Rick to suffer the way she suffered. She knows that Rick’s got one weakness - well, one weakness aside from crippling ETOH withdrawals.

Morty.

The Zigerions stage it so that Morty is on some platform somewhere, or a ship, or a balcony. Somewhere elevated. Morty is there, and Rick knows that he’s there, and hell, maybe Rick at this point is actively looking for Morty, or maybe he’s starting to have some misgivings himself. Either way, this platform, this elevated place... it just fucking explodes. Like huge massive cataclysm, ash and viscera littering the atmosphere, no survivors kind of explosion.

And Morty was on this platform.

(except, duh, he wasn’t. he was busy trying to get to rick)

But Rick’s gonna go nuts, right? He’s just watched Morty die, and fuck, somebody is gonna pay dearly. Many somebodies. No holds barred, teeth bared, sword flashing, blood and bits repayment. Rick is like a thing possessed, kicking ass and taking no names and absolutely wrecking shit... until he’s darted in the neck by an assassin with a tranq gun.

Meanwhile, Morty is terrified, cowering beneath or behind something, watching all of this happen.

Rick’s body is dragged away, and Morty is lost, right? Let’s cut Morty a break and say they took the ship to get here, but still... these guys have Rick. We know that Morty has the ship, but Rick has the portal gun. Rick has everything.

What is Morty without Rick?

And man, here’s another trope that I just go nuts for - anxious, codependent, terrified Morty trying to hack it in a world without Rick. We’ve seen Morty grow a lot throughout the show, but what if we stranded him with limited resources on an alien planet? Like, long term. We know he’s a little badass (it’s my personal headcanon that Morty really isn’t all that stupid, either). He’s got a quarter of Rick’s DNA, none of Rick’s chemical dependancies, and a guilt complex the size of Seattle. Morty is exactly the kind of fucked up that would assume that he owes Rick enough to devote his entire life to rescuing him.

(also, morty just watched rick go ape-shit in response to his ‘death.’ that kind of visceral, emotional reaction from rick would probably awaken something fierce in morty)

I want this to go to dark places. I want Morty to have to learn the hard way how to survive in a universe that has very little regard for a half-grown human. I want him hurting and hungry and hunted. I want him forced to compromise his morals, but never his drive. I want to see what reality spits out when it chews up Morty. Most of all, I want to see how Morty is the same, but also how he is fundamentally different from Rick. Not just a difference in innocence and experiences like the show suggests, but in the substance of their souls. Where does Morty draw the line? Where won’t he?

Also, hot damn, I want to see Morty modify or improve on some of Rick’s gadgets. Maybe he’s not the innovative genius that Rick Sanchez is, but he’s no moron, and he’s helped Rick through enough shit that he can pick things apart and cobble them back together. Trial and error (mostly error) is a good teacher.

Meanwhile, Rick is held hostage on the Zigerion home world, or maybe on a station that orbits it. I don’t know and I don’t care. Basically, Rick’s stuck in suspended animation - a simulation within a simulation.  Queen Z is forcing Rick to relive the day he lost Morty, over and over and over again. It’s like this nasty, really fucked up groundhog day experience. No matter what Rick does, he fights with Morty that morning. And no matter what Rick does, he ends up losing Morty in the most horrific ways. Every fucking time.

This goes on for years, okay? Maybe even a decade. Long enough that Morty can hardly even remember the sound of Rick’s voice or the smell of the booze on his breath, he just knows that his whole purpose in life is to rescue Rick.

And he manages it one day, finally. Morty dispatches the guards, waltzes into the high security chamber, and sure as shit, there’s Rick, lying there as if he’s just sleeping. Time hasn’t touched him. He hasn’t aged a day. After Morty has sacrificed his whole life to get to this point, it sure seems anticlimactic.

He wakes Rick up, disconnects him from the machines, but it’s not an instant thing, right? Think Han Solo recovering from carbonite. Rick’s not used to a physical body anymore, even though the suspended animation has left him intact. Morty is like massaging his arms and legs and talking to him in this low voice.

And for Rick, shit, that’s disorienting. Like, say Zigerions don’t really have a sense of smell or something, like they can’t replicate it perfectly or whatever. So imagine Rick waking up slowly from this awful nightmare and suddenly being bombarded with senses that he hasn’t experienced in a decade. Is this real? What is real?

And, naturally, once his brain boots back online, Rick’s not gonna recognize Morty.

Now, Rick’s smart. He knows he’s been captured and trapped in a simulation, but he’s not sure for how long. The last real memory he has (and you better sure as shit believe that Rick has held on to that last memory) is of Morty going up in a ball of flame and the carnage that occurred afterward. Rick got jabbed in the jugular with a huge needle while in the middle of a full blown cognitive meltdown, and now he wakes up to some fuckwad running his callused stinking hands all down his thighs.

Rick’s pissed. He’s gonna come up swinging.

So I want this blood-rage fueled fight between disoriented!Rick and badass mofo!Morty, in which Rick thinks he’s fighting for his life, and Morty is just trying his best not to die (and also, not to kill Rick). And man, it’s awkward. Morty has mad skills, but he’s handicapped in that he is also trying to protect his opponent. And Rick is all adrenaline and cybernetic modification, but blinded by bright lights and bitterness, and held back by this shaky, shitty, wrung out body. It’s gritty and intense, and also, there’s this looming threat of they are still in the belly of the enemy’s ship.

I don’t know how Morty is going to get through to Rick that he’s being rescued, that it’s been ten years, that ‘hey, remember me, i’m you’re dweeb grandson.’ Honestly, I think Morty is just gonna have to incapacitate Rick, sling him over his back, and hope for the best.

They get out, Morty hauls Rick back to whatever bolt hole he’s crawled out of, and then... then the real work starts.

Convincing Rick is probably gonna be hard in itself. This man has lived in a simulation for ten years. But never in his wildest dreams (or darkest nightmares) would Morty have survived and thrived... without him.

There’s a reckoning here for Rick. Learning to trust this stranger, this capable stranger who says he’s Morty all grown up but acts like the survivor of a nuclear apocalypse... it’s an insane sort of cognitive dissonance. Rick is going to be forced to recognize Morty for who he is, to know him by the substance of his soul, and that realization (though obviously not in those words) is huge for Rick. Morty has changed, but really, not all that much. There are some physical similarities - under all the scars and facial hair, Rick recognizes the set and shade of Morty’s eyes, maybe the expression he makes when he’s annoyed or thinking hard. But it’s more than that. Physically, there are infinite Morties. Somewhere along the way, Rick comes to recognize his Morty.

And with this is gonna come a truckload of self-loathing and resentment. Morty is independent now. He grew up. He doesn’t need Rick anymore. The dynamic of their relationship has shifted irrevocably. That’s gonna leave Rick reeling.

And Morty? Fuck, Morty is gutted. This man that he’s devoted his entire life to, the object of all of his pain and sacrifice and hero-worship... is really just an embittered, drunken asswipe. There’s really nothing holding them together anymore... Well, nothing but just one thing.

Rick and Morty both need vengeance on Queen Z.

Finding her, taking her down, it becomes Morty’s new ambition. Morty is the kind of man who always needs a higher purpose, and he finds his in retribution. Rick is just petty enough not to take this shit lying down. Not by a long shot.

Working together is hard. Rick is eaten up with guilt (he’s watched this kid, this stuttering, useless, ridiculous kid that he - gag - loved, die over and over again). Morty would do anything for Rick, would have always done anything for Rick, and Rick still can’t manage to make things right between them. Morty has to accept the fact that really, he’s more disappointed in himself than he is in Rick anyway. He’d idolized this man for all of the wrong reasons.

But fuck, I want these two to reinvent themselves. This is a relationship of equals now, or damn near it. Halves that complement a whole. I want Rick to map all of Morty’s scars, scars that Morty earned for him. I want Rick to nitpick the modifications Morty made to his portal gun, and to (secretly) be a little impressed. I want Morty saving Rick’s ass, over and over again, and Rick (finally) getting a chance to get even and ribbing on Morty for it. I want drunken confessions and knife fights and sloppy emotions. I want these two to find common ground again as strangers, as comrades, and then,fucking finally, I want them to reconcile their past with the present. Rick has always needed Morty, has always cared for Morty, and Morty has always, always, always been completely and unquestionably devoted to Rick. Time and distance could never annihilate the bond that started this whole mess to begin with - Rick and Morty, forever and ever, for a hundred years.

That’s all, folks. That’s all I want.

Oh, and I also want a fuck-ton of smut.

#pricklerick original #vapor morty #rick and morty #rick sanchez #morty smith #rickorty #tw incest

[giancarlonicoli]

December 13, 2019

Scott Galloway

@profgalloway

5-min read

The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that dumb people are too stupid to know they are dumb. They are not perplexed by difficult situations but overconfident — not knowing what they don’t know. As few people believe they are stupid, or a bad driver, a more relatable component of Dunning-Kruger is incorrectly believing one area of skill translates to another.

I suffer massively from this. I’m smarter than your average bear when it comes to marketing, so I’ve come to believe that makes me an expert on pretty much anything. I don’t know much about physics but constantly reference Galileo despite knowing little besides the fact that he dared challenge the church.

There is evidence of this all over the marketplace. Great P/E guys believe they would make great VCs and vice versa. Hedge fund managers believe two years of above-market returns means they are also great operators. To disabuse anybody of this notion, take them to a Sears. Billionaires running for president, actors starting skincare lines, and tech CEOs founding media firms. Being rich also naturally makes you a great film producer.

Masayoshi Son created $64 billion in shareholder value, mostly through deft acquisitions. Mr. Son can also boast of perhaps the best venture investment in history, $20 million into Alibaba that became $100 billion. That investment is tantamount to Michael Jordan hitting a grand slam on his first at bat wearing a Birmingham Barons hat.

Mr. Son has mistaken luck in venture investing for the ability to responsibly allocate billions based on a gut feeling. The size of SoftBank investments, relative to the diligence, now looks stupid, if not negligent. A writedown on an investment in a dog-walking app may have been avoided had someone in the SoftBank diligence team taken the time to discover they were investing $300 million in … a dog-walking app.

Conflating luck and talent is dangerous. As I get older, I’m struck by how big a part luck played in my life, and how much I mistook it for skill, well into my forties. The Pareto principle shows that even if competence is evenly distributed, 80% of effects stem from 20% of the causes.

Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: the notion that success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy. This leads to regressive policies that further reward the perceived winners and punish the perceived losers based on income level. The most recent example of our belief that poor people are guilty: The US now has the fourth-lowest tax rate in the world, and billionaires have the lowest tax rate of any cohort.

First Base

I constantly humblebrag that I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. But truth is I was born on third base. My parents got me to first base before I was born, immigrating to the US. This took courage, desire, and a dose of selfishness. Both left families that needed them. My mom left London when her two youngest siblings were still in an orphanage.

In Europe I’d make much less money being an entrepreneur and challenging institutions. In China I’d likely be in jail. Having one of my companies fail would have bankrupted me in Europe, as the tolerance for risk or failure is scant. I have no idea what would have happened in China. In the US, a tolerance for failure meant a lifestyle my parents couldn’t have imagined crossing the Atlantic on a steamship in 1961.

Second Base

I have some talent and have worked really hard, but mostly my success is due to being born in the right place at the right time, and being a white heterosexual male. Coming of professional age as a white male in the nineties was the greatest economic arbitrage in history. Today’s 54-to-70-year-olds saw the Dow Jones increase an average of 445% from 25-40, their prime working years. For other ages, it doubles at most.

Economic liberalization (globalization, technology, market deregulation) coupled with social norms that clung to the past meant 31% of America (white males) were given license over a lion’s share of the spoils. In nineties San Francisco, I raised over $100 million for my start-ups. I didn’t know a single woman under 40 who raised more than a million. And it seemed normal. Even today, white men hold 65% of elected offices despite being 31% of the population.

Third Base

Rich, fabulous people are the ideal billboards for luxury brands. Our nation’s best universities have adopted the same strategy. Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world. Another trait of a luxury brand is the illusion of scarcity. Over the last 30 years, the number of applicants to Stanford has tripled, while the size of the freshman class has remained static. Harvard and Stanford have become finishing school for the global wealthy.

In the class of 2013 in the Ivy League, five of the eight colleges (Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Brown) had more students from the top 1% of the income scale than the bottom 60%.

Fast and Slow Thinking

According to @thetweetofgod, intelligence looks in the mirror and sees ignorance; ignorance looks in the mirror and sees intelligence. The sectors that have enjoyed the greatest prosperity spread across increasingly few people — technology and finance — have created an unprecedented level of arrogance among people born on third base.

When we feel threatened, we are more prone to see each other as an enemy, rather than someone who has a different opinion. We want to dismiss and fight the whole person, rather than just what they said. From primeval times, our brains have been set up to identify “enemy” or “one of us,” that simple binary distinction. Do I trust them as a person or are they not “one of us.” When we are in our more evolved, slow thinking mode (Daniel Kahneman), we evaluate arguments. When we are in our knee-jerk, threatened fast thinking, we decide the person is our enemy and argue from our amygdala, not our forebrain.

When we are threatened, we are also less empathic. Altruistic behavior decreases in times of greater income inequality. The rich are more generous in times of lesser inequality and less generous when inequality grows more extreme. When the poor need our help more, we are less likely to offer it, because we don’t see the poor as one of us. They become “them.”

Michael Lewis writes, “The problem is caused by the inequality itself: it triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.”

Old Age

My dad is not doing well. We think it’s dementia, but it’s more just that he’s 89. He has never asked me for much, but he needs me now. I don’t do as much for him as I did for my mom at the end of her life, as I don’t feel the same goodwill toward him — my mother raised me. It’s easier to be generous with him when I look at his life. He was physically abused by his father and had no education. Despite this, his courage and wits (immigrating to America) put his son and daughter on first base.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Last week I wrote a letter asking the board of Twitter to replace Jack Dorsey. On Wednesday, Mr. Dorsey announced Twitter is possibly moving to an open standard. This is a good strategy. However, assigning five developers to a project with no timeline feels like big-tech delay and obfuscation (“we’re working on it”) and reflects an unwillingness to make the requisite investment of time and resources in open APIs. His other actions confirm he isn’t willing to make the requisite investment of time and resources in Twitter.

[hyperfixatin-blog]

HOW TO WRITE A SELECTIVELY MUTE CHARACTER.

I’m seeing a lot of writers making the decision to make their character what is called ‘selectively mute’, and while I’m so happy that the S.M. community are finally getting some representation, I would much prefer that it could be portrayed as accurately as possible. I’ve found a lot of ‘how to write mute characters’ guides, but I’ve yet to find many that specifies completely on this disorder. This guide is written by someone who has personally suffered from selective mutism as a child and somewhat as a teenager. If you wish for your character to have this condition, I’d encourage you to read on and perhaps learn a few things about it.

Please bear in mind that most of what I’ve written below are from my own personal experiences and that everybody deals with the condition differently! I am also not a doctor or a health professional, but I hope that this guide will at least be of some help to you!

WHAT IS SELECTIVE MUTISM?

Selective mutism is defined by wiki as: “an anxiety disorder in which a person who is normally capable of speech cannot speak in specific situations or to specific people. Selective mutism usually co-exists with shyness or social anxiety.”

So yes, for me it was the acute and intense phobia of socialising, or more accurately (and perhaps the most important aspect to distinguish) the crippling fear of being mocked and ridiculed. It is not a fear of speaking. I, for example, could talk quite comfortably to very close friends and nuclear family, but was suddenly rendered speechless when surrounded by my school friends, teachers, and most of my extended family members – however it must be noted that for my extended family, I would eventually warm up to them after a day or two.

DESTROYING THE COMMON MYTHS:

“So you basically couldn’t speak?” – Now that is a different kind of mutism, one that is usually caused by a health condition or likewise. If you wish for your character to be rendered speechless because they are physically unable to (for example, if your character is hard of hearing etc.), then this isn’t the guide for you and that isn’t selective mutism – although it is completely possible for your character to have both! Just as long as you recognise that they’re two completely different conditions. There was nothing physical preventing me from speaking but my own crippling social anxiety, a little ‘voice’ in my head that told me that whatever I said would be stupid and therefore not worth voicing.

“It sounds quite cute/adorable” – That whole stereotype of the shy girl who’s adorable because she’s quiet and blushes needs to die, right now. Selective mutism almost completely ruined my childhood. As a kid, bullies would seek me out at school because they knew I couldn’t ask for help. It got so severe that I had to move schools.

“You obviously went through some trauma in your life” – In some cases this is true, other times (like mine) I was just very socially anxious and belonged to a family with a history of diagnosed (and undiagnosed) mental disorders, which just so happened to include anxiety. There have been cases where certain individuals have been through a traumatic event and perhaps they feel they are unable to speak to the person involved in that event – whether that be due to the fact that they were part of the trauma, or the cause of the trauma, and speaking to them would stir up a fear of the event repeating itself.  

“You were just being defiant/stubborn” – FUCK NO. I don’t think a lot of people understand that we didn’t choose to become selectively mute; it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain like all mental disorders. It’s literally like saying to someone with a broken leg to ‘get out of their wheelchair because they’re just being lazy’. I can’t stress this enough. I honestly can’t tell you what it was like being a kid and wanting to fit in and talk to people, yet believing that whatever I said would cause havoc for myself. It’s possibly one of the lowest forms of self-esteem you can have.

“So you chose who not to speak to?” – Yes and no. Like what I said above, I didn’t choose to be selectively mute, but there was definitely a pattern of which individuals I found myself not talking to. These were either strangers/people I didn’t know well, because I had no way of predicting how they’d react to my comments and that terrified me; most of my friends from school because I cared about their opinion too much to supposedly ‘ruin’ it; and then a collection of extended family members which is a combination of both my reaction to friends and strangers, which really depended on who it was. If you watch The Big Bang Theory, Raj’s inability to talk to women is a perfect example of what I’m talking about (although please note that he is not the paramour of selectively mute characters).

SOME COMMON SYMPTOMS:

Avoiding eye contact – For me it was always this weird superstition where I thought that looking into someone’s eyes meant that they could judge me harder? It’s also just a natural sign of submission AKA I really didn’t want to fight anyone. I still can’t look people in the eye and I haven’t suffered from the condition in years.

Fidgeting – Ignoring the fact that I also have ADHD, I’ve heard cases where fidgeting (mainly with the fingers, hair, clothing, or by wiggling the leg while sitting) can be an effective way of expelling that nervous energy when finding ourselves in social situations, or just in an attempt to distract ourselves from our own shitty thoughts. My fidgeting were mainly oral fixations (which also helped my ADHD – so hitting two birds with one stone) like chewing on literally everything: my sleeves, my nails (and the skin around them), my lips, the skin inside my mouth (which has caused some weird internal Joker-like scars), and stationary like the ends of pens and pencils. All of these habits have stayed with me into ‘adulthood’. Your character can have all, some, or none of these! It’s entirely up to you.

Blushing: Good evening, my most hated side effect. This occurred pretty much every time a person of authority (that weren’t my parents) talked to me. The worst part was that I could feel myself flushing, and since I knew what it looked like combined with my social phobia, only made it worse. Let the vicious transformation into a tomato begin.

SEEMINGLY UNRELATED SIDE EFFECTS:

Difficulty expressing emotions

Fear of change (feeling most comfortable with a routine their familiar with).

Difficulty with facial expression

COMMUNICATION:

Gosh, there are so many ways you can communicate with someone who is non-verbal and it really depends on the person and their personal preferences. But here are a few suggestions and what your character could use:

Flashcards: this is what I used. I had little pieces of laminated cards which I’d use at school. They didn’t have masses on them as you can imagine, but simple sentence starters and words like the basics greetings (hello, goodbye, good morning, good afternoon etc.), a card that requested ‘help’, yes and no, and whether I had brought a lunch or required food from the cafeteria. So it wasn’t exactly a full blown conversation, but it was enough to communicate the basics.

Sign language: I’m not saying your character should be able to know sign language off by heart (I certainly didn’t), but even just a few words that would communicate what was on my flashcards helped a lot. To be honest, for me the only reason why I picked up bits of sign language was because my younger brother, Sam, was autistic and didn’t start speaking full sentences to anyone until the age of four. So it also helped me and my parents to communicate with him as well as me.

Written communication: pretty self-explanatory. Whenever there was something I wanted to say but couldn’t communicate through my flashcards, I’d get a piece of paper and write it down.

Once again this is totally flexible. Your character can use all of these, some of these or none of these! It all depends on personal preference and the environment they grow up in. I’ve also not included every single way to communicate non-verbally because that would be a hella long list.

SCHOOL:

Okay, so my school experience was pretty shitty because of my selective mutism and here are a list of reasons why:

TEACHERS: I couldn’t ask for help. Yeah sure, I had a flash card with the word ‘HELP’ scribbled across it but, uh, I had severe social anxiety y’all I wasn’t always comfortable with drawing attention to myself. Especially since it was usually followed by the most painful few minutes of trying to communicate what I didn’t understand without words. It got so bad that I didn’t know how to add, subtract, multiply or divide at ten years old, and had to do Kumon (an intense Japanese tuition styled programme to help me get back on track). Having said that, I did have undiagnosed ADHD so that would have made everything 10x worse in the education department as I wasn’t always, y’know, listening.

BULLIES: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, so this was a biggy. I’m not going to go into my sob story but it got so bad that it was one of the main factors in why I moved schools when I was seven.

MISUNDERSTANDING: okay, so I was thinking about this last night and remembered something really fucked up. I was told by a qualified teacher at the end of year 2 (I was seven years old) that if I didn’t speak by the start of year 3, I would fail school. Yeah, fucked up right? I genuinely remember the crippling anxiety I felt when she told me that and how mad my parents were when I told them. ANOTHER THING: my teachers did not tell all the staff about my mutism. I was queuing up for lunch and I pointed to the thing I wanted and when I didn’t say please, they almost refused to give me lunch and called me rude in front of my entire year. It’s this misunderstanding that caused me anxiety that could have easily been prevented if everyone had been better educated about the condition.

WHAT I’VE GAINED FROM THE CONDITION (positive):

Strong empathy

Above average perception/inquisitiveness

A strong sense of right and wrong

So there you have it, selective mutism. I really hoped this helped give a better understanding of what the condition is. Please don’t take this disorder lightly because it’s an ugly, ugly thing to have and it should never be a cute ‘quirk’ for your character. Also I must stress that you shouldn’t take this guide as your only research. Google it, look on the selective mutism/actually mute tag, research research research; it’s the best way to portray anything accurately. This guide is very basic and does not involve everything because that would take me forever. 

If you have any questions regarding selective mutism or this guide, send me a message and I’ll be happy to direct you the best I can! <3

#feel free to reblog !!! #rph #rph guides #writing guides #character guides #selective mutism guide #how to write a selective mute character #mute guide #mine. : guides. #tw: anxiety #tw: mutism #my posts. #my guides.

[wisecharlie]

Inversion

The write-up below starts with examples and a short definition followed by historical examples and detailed analysis. The analysis ends with a list of applications to which the inversion model can be applied.

Scenario 1: Do you remember when you mistakenly touched an electric fence or a hot stove? And, you never touched it again because it was a painful experience.

Scenario 2: Jeff Bezos (Founder/CEO of Amazon) approaches the problem inversely. Instead of saying “what is it that my customer wants?” he will approach the problem asking “what is it that my customer does not want?”

Scenario 3: Instead of asking “How can I become successful?” ask “What are the things I should avoid that will prevent me to achieve my goals?

What is Inversion?

These scenarios of inverting two sides is the basic premise of inversion. In scenario 1, one makes a mistake and then never goes in that direction again. That is an example of inverting. The thinking in which you want opposite — not only thinking forward but also thinking backward. This trick is a powerful idea because it de-biases us from having blinders. The goal of this exercise is to envision the negativity in any event so that it can be avoided.

History — let’s cover a few historical examples:

Source: Wikipedia

Stoics (early 3rd century BC)— followed the inversion process to eliminate the worst case scenario by thinking backwards and avoiding any failures. While the Greeks may have developed the philosophy of Stoicism, many Romans also adopted the philosophy. It was a practical philosophy used as a pathway through life by many early Romans, including slaves and Emperors. The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to “premeditation of evils.” The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless. Or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed. Or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.

Source: Internet

Carl Jacaboi (1804–1851) was a German mathematician, who made contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations and the number theory. These theories are still applicable in our modern age. How was Jacobi able to contribute so much to scientific fields during his career? He was known for his ability to solve complex problems by following a simple strategy: “Invert, always invert(man muss immer umkehren), conveying his belief that the solution of many hard problems can be clarified by re-stating them in an inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was trying to solve. In doing this, solutions came to him easily.

Deep Analysis

The power of inverse thinking is a rare and crucial skill that all great thinkers employ to their own advantage. You will often hear “How can I be successful in xyz?” This mantra is a modern ideology that dominates reality. In order to think independently, one needs to learn how to think critically and make unbiased decisions. This is where inversion comes into play. Being positive and negative is complimentary. One does not need to pick one side. Everyone wants to be a winner and be successful, but many, if not all, forget to think about how they can avoid failure. Chasing success is overvalued. Avoiding failure is equally important in being successful (for a lack of a better term).

However, do not confuse the idea of experimenting with failure. New ideas often requires experimenting until the solution is no longer falsified.

Subtractive Knowledge is when you envision negative things and then subtracting what is not important or what is wrong. Additive measuresmanifest in form of an urge to do something about a problem which may not need any intervention. Subtractive measures adhere to the philosophy of “don’t try to fix something which ain’t broken.” Nassim Taelbo also employs “subtractive epistemology.” He argues that the greatest and most robust contribution to learning and knowledge consists of removing what we think is wrong. What does not work, that is negative knowledge, is more robust than positive knowledge.

Avoiding stupidity is another way to apply inversion in your life. It’s a choice between avoiding stupidity and seeking brilliance. You can avoid a bad marriage by being loyal to your significant other. Or in life, you can avoid death by staying away from alcohol and drugs. Another way to apply inversion is to not only find role models but also find anti-role models — people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up. You want to avoid the path they took. Ambitious young people can find a lot of success in this type of thinking.

Another great implementation of inversion was by the CTO of Pandora. Pandora faced immense competition from Spotify, Apple Music, Google, and Amazon. However, it still managed to stay alive despite the heavy competition.

“90 days is the length of one quarter. That’s how far you can reasonably think and plan ahead when you’re in hyper-growth,” Conrad (Pandora’s Twitter) says. “And there’s a question you have to ask yourself at the start of every quarter:

What would be stupid for us not to do in the next 90 days?”

Charlie Munger is one of the greatest thinkers alive today. He is Warren Buffett’s business partner. Charlie Munger has adopted an approach to solving problems that is the reverse of the approach many people use in life. He avoids misery. Munger once gave a speech where he spoke about a famous Johnny Carson talk in which the comedian described all the ways one can be miserable. Munger said:

“What Carson said was that he couldn’t tell the graduating class how to be happy, but he could tell them from personal experience how to guarantee misery. Carson’s prescriptions for sure misery included: 1) Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception; 2) Envy; and 3) Resentment. What Carson did was to approach the study of how to create X by turning the question backward, that is, by studying how to create non-X.”

“Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc. Develop good mental habits.” “A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.”

Charlie Munger is famous for using “Invert always invert.”

“Think forwards and backwards — invert, always invert.” “Many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward.” “The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve, if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not “how can I help India,” it’s “what is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?” “Figure out what you don’t want and avoid it and you’ll get what you do want. How can you best get what you want? The answer: Deserve what you want! How can it be any other way?”

“[The great Algebra pioneer Jacobi] knew that it is in the nature of things that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward. In life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems.”

“Let me use a little inversion now. What will really fail in life? What do you want to avoid?” “Having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control.” “When you have a huge convulsion, like a fire in this auditorium right now, you do get a lot of weird behavior. If you can be wise [during such times, you’ll profit].”

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage [we] have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

“The secret to Berkshire is we are good at ignorance removal. The good news is we have a lot of ignorance left to remove.” “Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.”

“If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question is to answer it.” “We know the edge of our competency better than most. That’s a very worthwhile thing.”

Applications

The type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas in life.

Math: applying inversion to solve complex math problems. Jacobi believed that one of the best ways to clarify your thinking was to restate math problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.

Art: inversion is often at the core of great art. Great artists fight status quo by going in the opposite direction of what society is used to. Great artists break previous rules and unconventional thinking by asking — “How can I invert the status quo?”

Project Management: Amazon employs the Press Release strategy before launching a project. If employees have an idea, they are supposed to write a one-page PR and submit to the executives. The whole process is thinking backwards. This strategy allows to remove blind folders by asking backward questions like — “What could cause the project to go horribly wrong?”

Business Management: in a modern organization, everyone is talking about innovation. Instead what if the management asks, “What are the areas where we do not innovate?” This can address to remove any biases, competition threats and innovation strategy. The same methodology can be applied when evaluating risks. Avoiding risks is a successful business strategy.

Productivity: most people want to get more done in less time. Applying inversion to productivity you could ask “What will decrease my productivity? What will distract me?” Once you find those answers, block those distractions to up your productivity.

Decluttering: inversion can also be applied when tidying yourself up. “What do I want to keep?” Not “What do I want to get rid of?” Inverting the relationship helps you answer tough questions when discarding useless things at home or office.

Relationships: people usually ask “What will make this relationship successful?” Instead ask, “What behavior will cause my relationship to end?” Inverting will help you stop behaving irrationally which can affect your relationships.

Personal Finance: everyone wants to make more money. In personal finance and investing, the hardest job is able to preserve capital. By applying inversion one could ask “How to stay in debt? What can destroy my financial well-being?” Spending too much can creep up and can prevent you from achieving your financial goals. Inversion can help you stay on track and avoid irrational behavior towards money.

Fitness: inversion can also be applied when trying to reduce weight. “How to gain unwanted weight that can cause long-term health issues and obesity? — Eating fried food, drinking sugary drinks, and not exercising” Once you have the answers, avoid them at all cost.

Startup: “How to make a product that no one wants? How to not experiment? What can we do to not talk to customers?” Then find ways to work backwards by building something that customers want and engaging them in the process.

Literature: a literary technique in which the normal order of words is reversed in order to achieve a particular effect of emphasis. For example: “People are computers. Computers are people.”

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Mental models are big ideas from big disciplines, like business, psychology, science, & engineering. An understanding of the key concepts from these multi-disciplinary topics will teach you to be an independent thinker. Visit www.wisecharlie.com to learn more.

[ask-gabbiebry-blog]

Haunted by Depression

Today I'm feeling depressed! It really started quite suddenly. Everything was fine. I was fine for weeks, maybe even happy. But something happened. Actually, to be honest, nothing really happened! I was upset by someone who I actually liked. They didn't say anything or physically do anything, they just ignored me. If someone had insulted me verbally, or attacked me Physically, I might have responded immediately either verbally or physically, but I was ignored and it played on my mind so much I became depressed about it. Now you may be thinking"Oh my God! What is the matter with you?" You are not depressed, you are sulking like a two year old! And yes, I agree, it is a really incredibly stupid thing to become depressed about, I know that, frankly, I REALLY know that!

But that's often how my depression starts. Something pointless, something stupid, something that I should be able to ignore or merely shrug off, suddenly takes on a life of its' own and takes over my mind and switches off the light of happiness, only to replace it with long dark lingering shadows of doom, gloom and despair.

It doesn't matter if you call it"manic depression" or “bipolar disorder" or just plain "sulking", beating depression, or if you want, the symptoms of bipolar, is really tricky. For some people, like me, it happens usually quite naturally after a few days, or in extreme cases, a few weeks. I don't personally enjoy taking drugs like Prozac, but I can well understand why many people do. Chemical or Physical. What is the cause? Many users of these drugs are not aware there are real benefits from substances other than pharmaceuticals, such as Black seed oil.

When the problem with depression is a chemical thing like hormones in the brain, why would it be triggered by an off the cuff remark from a cruel relative or work colleague?

If it's a chemical problem then surely all sadness would happen at odd moments like while you're watching a really funny movie. One minute you would be laughing your head off and then another minute attempting to jump out of the window and wanting to end it all.

I have no doubt that there are substances involved. All emotions are chemical by nature. Happiness, sadness, love, lust. These are all made possible by chemicals / hormones within our brains being switched on at particular moments as a result of external influence, like seeing a beautiful lady in a short skirt walking bye... POW... Immediate Lust Chemicals flood the brain!

So I guess the "causes of bipolar" are a composite of physical outside influences, causing an internal response which switches on related chemicals to prepare the body for whatever might come next, but for some reason, the responses are exaggerated.

Why does this affect some more than others? My current bout of melancholy was set off, I believe, by simply being ignored by a specific individual, maybe at a specific moment in time when I was feeling vulnerable.

Someone else might think that I am just being a wimp. Perhaps they, and maybe you too, would not be the slightest bit affected by this incident. You might, if you're a depression sufferer, even feel that what I'm feeling doesn't deserve to even be called depression!

You may even feel that I must re-name this article"Living With a Demon Called Sulking!"

It is a matter of personal opinion.

Whether or not my depression is better or worse than possibly your depression or someone else's, does not really matter. It certainly does not matter to me. So far as I am concerned, I'm depressed and nothing that you or anybody else thinks will change that.

Last night I felt terrible. I mean REALLY bloody awful. I hated the world, I hated people... yes, even you! And I hated myself. I hated myself because of all of the things mentioned previously.

When you are depressed, or when I'm depressed, I start by blaming the individual or people, or the event, which I think is the cause of my current depression. But soon, once I have finished ranting and raving, or sometimes just sitting quietly (as if sulking), I go on a guilt trip and begin to blame myself. I blame myself for not reacting more favorably. I blame myself for not speaking my mind. I blame myself for not sticking up for myself. I blame myself for putting myself in a stupid situation. I blame myself for not learning lessons from similar past events. I blame myself for blaming myself and not punching the person responsible for my depression on the nose.

The more I think about it, the more depressed I become. Until very soon, what was possibly a very small event which triggered a mild depression, becomes greatly exaggerated in my mind and the mild depression expands like a huge dark storm cloud stretching over the horizon casting its' shadow over what I see and know.

Is there a cure?

How do you drag yourself out of a depression? (Perhaps we should ask the authorities!) Well, it ain’t easy! Now I pulled myself out of bed early. I went shopping. I didn't really need anything but I ended up with several packets of biscuits. Now, you see, I am a few pounds over weight. But I have managed to lose over a stone in less than three months, which is excellent! However, I have found that doing something naughty is a great way to clear the clouds of melancholy. It isn't simple, it isn't straightforward by any means, and it might take several packets of biscuits and chocolate chip muffins with copious amounts of tea, before I begin to get better.

I don't recommend it for everybody, especially when you have a weight problem. If you are on a diet and think that eating five packets of biscuits might actually make you more depressed, then I suggest that you do something else naughty instead.

You might find that going into a secluded wooded area, taking off all your clothing, then running around shouting"I hate the world but I really like my fat arse!" Might only be enough to start to clear your melancholy. Always bear in mind that things WILL get better!

I know it's not easy. But you must keep in mind that no matter how bad things seem to be right now, that they can't stay this bad for ever!

That is something which I constantly keep telling myself when I get depressed, or just a little fed up with the world.

EVERYTHING is temporary. Even mountains get reduced over time. Your problems, my problems, the countries problems, are all temporary.

If there's absolutely nothing you can do right now to ease your situation, if there's absolutely no action you can take to alleviate your dark feelings, if running around naked shouting that you hate the world but love your fat arse has had no positive effect on you whatsoever... then all you have to do is have patience and wait... long ... and I promise that whatever the problem is that you have right now... barring cancer or any other terminal illness... it will pass. But obviously, if there is some action you can take, like maybe making an apology to someone, or talking to someone who has upset you, or any action at all that will help to address your present problem, or at least bring the issue out into the open so you can deal with it physically or verbally, then that's much better than sitting in a dark room festering over it.

Writing this article has done me some good. I don't feel as depressed now as when I started it. I certainly don't feel happy and cheerful, yet. But I'm in recovery. And I sincerely hope that at least one sentence has made you smile or given you some idea as to how to start your recovery. I am sorry there is nothing scientifically proven in this report. It is just a load of stuff in my depressed mind. Perhaps I will read through it in a few days and choose to delete it, I don't know.

So, is there a response? Can depression be cured without stuffing yourself with harmful tranquilizers, or munching on figure ruining biscuits? Is it possible to simply laugh yourself from depression?

I honestly and clearly have no idea. Once this depression leaves me I will most likely be OK for some time to come. I don't suffer from depression regularly. It just happens sometimes. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be a reason for it... it just takes over. And then, just as suddenly, it could be gone and I am left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Maybe I'm a wimp. Maybe your depressions are far worse than mine. Perhaps you thought this article was useless since it was written by a vain, useless, fat, sulking nobody! Well, at the moment, I would have to agree with you. But hopefully tomorrow, or perhaps next week, I will not give a damn what you believe, unless you have been helped by it in some manner, in which case, my depression will have been worthwhile!

Depression can be a life destroying, energy sapping, illness that affects not only every area of your life, but, the lives of those people you associate with. Friends, family members, wives and husbands, and yes kids also, can all be severely affected by your depression. So it's important to not forget, depression isn't just a problem for the sufferer, it's a problem for everyone who has contact with the sufferer. I use subliminal recordings / CDs, when I am depressed. I think the positive affirmations can help to raise my mood over the dark clouds of depression and the soothing music helps me to relax. Or sometimes I just post things to my Blog.

[gobigorgohome2016]

Refreshed.  Kind of.

 This week is only my second week back to running after my two week break.  I started to write a blog about it last week (titled simply, Refreshed), but it felt really forced.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I DO feel physically refreshed.  In fact, this recovery period was better than ever before!  For the first time that I can remember, I didn’t get sick during my break.  I also returned to running with legs that felt fresh, as opposed to legs that were heavy and still suffering from the effects of healing.  I ran 34 miles my first week back, which is a testament to how good I felt.  I typically only start with 15 – 20.  

But I have felt very off, mentally, and it has taken me about 10 days to unpack why.  

Mostly, this feeling is confusing because I do feel emotionally ready to start training again.  I always know when I’m not 100% there, because I try to talk myself out of boring base mileage.  Instead, I’m actually looking forward to getting out the door every day.

I think my funk began with a visit two weeks ago to see my dietician.  I have been working with her for almost a year and a half now.  I am very happy that I waited until after the training cycle to see her, because I’m still not where I should be, both nutrition-wise and immune system-wise.  Perhaps what was most sobering for me is that I shouldn’t be where I’m at with my food sensitivities, and I certainly shouldn’t be developing new ones (like chickpeas.  Somewhere along the line I started developing symptoms towards chickpeas. Wtf.)  During our discussion, she said that all of my symptoms have led her to believe I have a genetic link to more serious gut issues, and asked if anyone in my family had any intestinal problems.  As a matter of fact, my dad had his colon removed in his 30’s because of ulcerative colitis.  She listed a few other symptoms that I would likely have if that were the case, and they did apply to me.  Without going into too many details, it is likely that I have a malabsorption issue. Food isn’t being fully digested, and when combined with leaky gut, it is probable that my immune system does not recognize undigested food particles and attacks them.  

So, that was a bit of a wakeup call that left me a little unhappy for a few days.

BUT, the good news is that I am not my dad, there is a wealth of information on gut health that was not available 35 years ago, and I only have pre-cursor symptoms.  She suggested I take zinc carnosine and Restore. After a week, I can already see and feel a difference.  While I am annoyed/sad/angry/frustrated about these problems, I am happy because there is a solution, and it should lead to better health and better running. Win-win, yes?

However, I think a good way to describe my general attitude right now is salty.  Towards everyone.  And everything.  

Part of it might be the fact that I am really bored.  Dave has been out of town for 3 of the past 4 weeks.  During my two weeks off, it was *kind of* nice.  I read a lot, started a garden, tried tons of new recipes, watched copious amounts of tv, and didn’t feel the need to get off the couch to do trivial things, like shower.  But week 3 was when I started to feel particularly bored.  When I’m running a normal mileage load, my days are filled with training, writing, walking the dogs, cooking, cleaning, and feeling grateful if I get to watch an episode of House Hunters before I fall asleep.  

Yesterday, I ran 6 miles, took the dogs for 65 minutes worth of walking, baked muffins, dusted Dave’s pint glass collection, started a painting, cooked a couple meals, read, watched tv, worked, and gardened….all by 6 PM.  

I’m also trying to non-judgmentally assess how I feel.  Interestingly, the facebook memories function has showed me that I feel salty every year towards the end of May.  What do the past 10 years of late-May have in common?   The only thing that I can think of is that I am typically on a running break. But, I’ll be honest:  the last thing in the world I want to admit is that not running affects my mental state.  After all, I pretty much pride myself on being a Type-B person, not prone to obsessively needing or wanting to exercise.  

I’m frustrated with myself that I have been feeling so negative, especially about very stupid things.  

However, I’m trying to give myself grace and accept the way that I feel.  I guess it’s important to remember that there’s also a chemical component to it that I can’t control.  My brain, biochemically, is simply going to be different after a 3-week, 300 mile stretch than a three week, 34 mile stretch.  That’s just part of the amazing manner in which our bodies are dynamic machines.  

Something that I’ve had more time to meditate on:  the power of words, both external and internal.  I have always known that words are important.  Ever since I was chastised for saying I have “bad” (meaning inflexible) hips during yoga a couple years ago, I have made a conscious effort not to use negative words when describing myself.  But, I realize that my brain has found a workaround:  to project how I feel about myself onto others, as if someone else is saying something negative about me, when I think it’s just how I feel about me.  AKA, I think running keeps my generalized anxiety under control, and taking a break lets it all creep up.  This is something I never in a million years would want to admit (not the anxiety part, I don’t care who knows that I’m an anxious person) but the fact that running – and the subsequent exhaustion - might be a crutch for it.  

You know what else happens when I take a break?  Tons of FOMO [fear of missing out].  But, FOMO for things I don’t even (normally) care about or want to do.  Suddenly I’m jealous that so-and-so liked a friend’s Instagram post but never likes any of my Instagram posts.  Aren’t we friends, too?  Was there a party I wasn’t invited to and they suddenly become much better friends and have a secret Instagram connection that I don’t know about.  They probably DM each other to talk shit about how many times I post about my dogs and talk about food sensitivities.  

Seriously.  

So, why am I sharing this? One of the coolest things about blogging way too much information about my life is that – as it turns out – I’m not a unique and special snowflake, after all.  Lots of people experience the same neuroses as me, and one of the most humbling experiences has been when people contact me to say thanks for making them feel normal.  So, folks, if you’re struggling with weird feelings of jealousy and FOMO and a general funk after some time off from running….you’re not alone!

[creepylittlemarvelgirl]

Just some thoughts of a real disturbed person

Hey! My name is Domi, and I suffer from major psychic deseases, such as anxity, depression and self destructive tendencies.

Trying to live a normal life is harder for someone like me than for average people. And I can’t help myselve anymore.

I’m too anxious and mistrusting to talk to doctors and my so-caled friends left me all by myself, misundestanding and disapproving, thinking I’m weird because I’m too sensitive… I feel all alone in this world.

My family is awesome, but can’t help me. I refuse to take pills which change my character and put my brain into a blender working at the highest level. Feels too squishy inside, feels wrong, feels just like being pulled out of myself and something else is being stuffed in, like riding a strange human-shaped vehicle with no real connection to the world around, not being able to think or feel… no pills for me…

All my ‘friends’ - those people I was at school with - are successful, have families, children or a great carrer in wonderful jobs. Someone who loves and appreciates them, or even enough money to travel, or to live well, or at least to buy health - physic and psychologic.

I’m all alone. Every one I had in my live, every man I loved left me. I used to think it was because they were too weak, but it was because I am too sick. Not only psychological but also physical.

I never had much luck in my live. Sometimes I think I consumed all the luck of my life when I was a kid. Or more precisely a tomboy. I allways tried to keep up with the elder boys, trying stunts with the bike - hell, I think I was five or six years old - oh god, I was so fearless. I never thought of consequences, I… just… sort of… DID things. Because I thought it could be fun. Other kids were fun. Being active was fun. Just doing without thinking was fun. I was in hospitals quite often to get stitched together again. Fingers, an eyebrow…but that wasn’t so scary at all.

At elementary school - I suppose - I began to fear other kids. I lived in a small district of a small village. They called it the ghetto of the village, 2 kilometers away from the main provincial town. We were outsiders, aliens, just moved here from another part of the country. We? My sister and I. We’ve allways had a tough time. But she came out of it as the winner. Me instand…I am a real loser. We both were bullied, but she is strong. I am not.

At the age of 8, the pain I felt for about 2 years in my right hip brought me to the hospital, diagnosis: congenital dislication of the hip. And the doctors telling me not to walk one more step or I will have to live a life in a wheelchair. 2 weeks later and they would never had the chance to help me. It means no sports for a long time. No jumping around. No running or riding the bike anymore.

And I got fat…and depressed. At the age of 14 the last ridge broke. No warning, no trigger, no point at which anything could be changed or be done different. Just deep sadness. Pure loneliness. The feeling of having no control over anything. And the painful fear of people, as well as the deep fear of being alone and isolated because noone seemed to care. It was the years of one of the biggest mistakes in my whole life. Rejecting my best friend - my only true friend - telling me to love me for quite a while. Stupid…hurting the only one who stepped in when the others not only bullied but beat me up.

Secondary school was a pain in the ass. The best school in the next greater town was a catholic girls school. Yay…barbies and I-am-better-than-everyone-attitudes. And more bullying. More enemies. More fear. To wake up, to get up, to lose more and more control of what will come next.

The school psychologist told me I was not ill, but there is simply nobody who likes me or cares about me. Just like that. A teen sitting across the table of the liaison teachers room crying her heart out for chists sake and all this woman told me that I am the asshole in my own sad story. And I believed it. I must have been a realy mean person, from my 4th year of my live up to this moment at the age of 16…maybe 17 years. Fuck. I was a monster because everyone hated me. Everyone despite the outsiders. The lonely ones. The weirdos. I seemed to geather them all around me. They never liked me or loved me…but they tollerated me.

After I finished school - I did my ‘abitur’, not bad for me having depression and dyslexia and poor cognitive performance because of the depression - I was too down to chose a way in live. I lost 2 years because I had to repeat. I was unlovable, stupid, a goth/punk/what ever, a kind of outlaw and I never knew what to do. To fullfill my dreams I was to weak. As a child I wanted to become a singer and actor, I was on stage in school theatre and sang at christmas plays. But for that I was too fearful. Not self-confident enough. Not good enough. I liked sewing but no one wanted to educate me so I could go to design school…to become a fashion designer. I tried to become a goldsmith, applied me to nearly every crearive apprenticeship I could think of. But no luck. Used it up as a child, remenber? So I was bold and tried to study, together with my boyfriend. I was 22. He left me shortly after we started. And I lost my courage. I was so deep in my depression…he was a gamer as well as I was…and still am. After that I started an apprentice at a medical supply shop for patients. They gave me a chance. But what a price to pay… without my next boyfriend I don’t think I would have take the chance. The second year he left me - for my best friend. I was devastated. So deep down in my depression…I wanted to die and tried to achieve this…but my sister rescued me…and took me to an asylum.

I was too smart to talk about everything in my mind. I talked about some of my fears, some of my thoughts, some of my problems, but not quite each and everything. They would have never let me go again, I’m quite sure of that. I did all the exercises I had to do and after 5 weeks I could go back home and work again. I fought…again…and again I won. But this struggle exhausted both my last bit of luck and cosmic favor AND my last fighting spirit. I simply never wanted to be forced to fight anymore. I was so tired.

My life went on. My friends who saw what heappened and pulled me out of my deep hole of sadness and disgusting self-pity are long gone now. I never gained the trust too love somebody or to let somebody in again. I am still a lonely child, stuck in a hostile world. About 7 years has passed. And I got nothing quite to live for. I loved to sew, to paint, to tinker, to collect…but I never seem to have enough energy to do both, to live AND to work. My work consumes all my energy.

I cry allot. In the evenings, when my brain runs out of chemical messengers…out of serotonin and other body’s own happy-substances…when I’m all alone in my flat that depresses me even more. The low ceilling, the missing sunlight, the location too far away from my work place. I don’t even have a pet being allergic to cats, dogs, rabbits, birds…and I love animals so much…

Why I write this? I don’t even know! Perhaps because it is much easier to write to an anonymous audiance than to speak to 'friends’ who you know never will understand a thing…a word…and you know will say: don’t be so sensitive! Stop whining! Are you like 4 or what? …I think I write this because I know there are others like me, struggelling every flarking day to just stay alive because of all the problems, the downs, the sorrows, the anxity, the depression…we love life. And some people just see crybabies whining… sure, could be worse… could be homeless, hungry and… well deadly ill… but who says I/we am/are not? I’m living in a cruel world without anyone who wants to provide a shelter. I’m hungry for love and paitence and hugs and cuddling kittens and puppies and the man I love… if there even was one. And having suicidal tendencies IS a fucking deadly illness despite everyone thinking it isn’t. So go fuck yourselfe! We are no crybabies, we are strong BECAUSE we still live! And we simply don’t know how long we can affort the strength to stay alive. That’s just tha way I feel. One girl (or rather a women despite me feeling like a teen anymore) out of 7.5 milliards of human beings. Who knows. perhaps someone will read this. and cries. And smiles. And fells accepted and undestood.

I don’t know you, but you are stong and wonderful. Stay alive and kicking. I know you can. I hope you can.

Love and appreciation from a real disturbed person

#100% mentaly ill #hungry for life #thinking out loud

[spiritualgravity]

The day I left.

A few months back, I shared a story with my husband that fascinated me. A friend from high school, who I reconnected with over Facebook, told me that once a month, she leaves her home and checks into a hotel. It’s usually out of town, too. She’ll get in the car, and drive a few hours to a city she’s never visited before. The twist? She’s a Mother of two girls and is married. 

She literally leaves, escapes, for mental health. Once a month. By herself. To sleep. And to do whatever a Wife and Mother of two girls does by herself for an evening in a hotel room.

I thought that was the most brilliant idea, EVER. And when she told me this admirable life-saving monthly decision, I was pregnant and had absolutely, unequivically no clue how monumental this idea actually is for a stay-at-home parent, much less any parent at all.

Fast forward to 2018, Mother’s Day arrived. One would think I gloated from all of the “First” Mother’s Day attention messages, cards and texts. Soaking up the well wishes and getting to wear an invisible crown for the day. My sweet husband spoiled me with two dozen roses and special jewelry from our favorite shop. Instead though, I was a hot, hot mess. I cried countless times. And I didn’t really know why in the moment. I think in retrospect it’s because deep down at a subconscious level, all I truly wanted in the depths of my core was some time to myself. To sleep, uninterrupted. To not only take a shower, but a long shower. To pamper myself at the salon. I realize that time is now priceless and always will be from this point forward.

I guess when you’re going through the thick of being a new parent, particularly to an award-winning challenging baby, you’re sorta just, numb. You go through the motions, trying your best, trying to forgive yourself for all of your mistakes. For saying things at 3 o’clock in the morning that absolutely mortify you. Your marriage suffers. Your undereye bags suffer. You just...get by and push through the suffering. That’s what I have been doing. 

Surviving the suffering. And Mother’s Day inadvertently caused me to look in the rear view mirror and face all of it.

My daughter turns 8 months old tomorrow. Day one through month 5 were...

I can’t even type the words because I don’t want to appear ungrateful for the gift of being a Mother. But I’ll just say it, they were awful. She wouldn’t sleep, she wouldn’t be placed down in any contraption, she was up every 2 hours breastfeeding throughout the night vs. stretching out longer feeding periods like “normal” babies do {and the word “normal” is a joke, I realize}, she was fussy, colicky, and generally unhappy. She hated car rides, and took 30 minute naps. She had countless allergies that forced me to cut out countless foods as her sole source of nutrition. 

It was awful, yes — pretty much all of it. My clinical postpartum depression sucked me dry from the inside-out. I generally consider myself a warrior. I am competitive, I like to do good at whatever I put my heart into, I am disciplined, and try to make myself proud. But the depression was a dark cloud. The depression was just a disguise for sleep deprivation. By the grace of God, a sleep coach entered our lives and she saved us. Our daughter learned how to sleep {literally}, and she’s been relatively happy for the past three months.

I generally stick to reading non-fiction books, and have fantasized about being a published non-fiction book author for several decades. The one and only fiction author I have followed is Emily Giffin. She wrote a book that was made into a movie, “Something Borrowed.” I registered for a women’s blogging conference years ago in Atlanta just to meet her {and I did, and it was awesome}. I learned that she checks herself into a hotel when she’s on deadline to finish her books. Ever since I learned this insight about her, I fantasized about writing a book in a hotel room. Locking the door for 48-72 hours, drinking delicious red wine, and ordering room service.

My original excuse was that I didn’t have time to write, I was too busy. Then I quit my full-time job and became an entrepreneur — my new excuse was that my original book topic was outdated and I needed a new one. Now I have a baby and she’s my new excuse. 

And I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on myself this time around because now I literally don’t have time. To take a shower. To go to the gym. To eat a meal sitting down. To go to sleep, and wake up, whenever I want. To pretty much do anything that I used to do daily and took it for granted. 

There is no more free time, ever. Breastfeeding has been all-encompassing. It is something I have been incredibly passionate about since staying up reading literature on my phone for hours on end {while breastfeeding} about the mindblowing benefits to babies. But it came with challenges from the start. Inverted nipples that required a miniature plunger to perk them up for her first week of life in order to eat? I didn’t see that one coming. A baby who is lazy and doesn’t eat much unless it’s in a bottle? Drops in milk production whenever I was acutely stressed? 

At her 4-month Pediatrician’s vist, we were advised to feed her an ADDITIONAL 1-3 ounces in a bottle to “top her off” as she was underweight {per the pressure cooker 1 in 100 average baby weight guidelines that can make a breastfeeding Mother feel inadequate and like a shitty failure}. This meant that after every single solitary breastfeeding session, I had to then immediately pump for 20-30 minutes. I couldn’t store or freeze the pumped milk, I had to turn around and put it right back in her belly through a bottle. I would have been happy to use formula at this point to nourish my child, and save my sanity, but her soy, egg and dairy allergies made that nearly impossible. I was trapped. I already felt like a prisoner in my own home with a colicky baby who screamed bloody murder in a motor vehicle, but now I was strapped up to the damn breastpump around the clock.

In some of my lowest moments, half asleep and delusional, I had visions of leaving. Laying down in the back seat of my car and sleeping. Not actually leaving the driveway, but just temporarily escaping to pretend I didn’t have to personally be responsible for keeping her alive for more than three-to-four hours at a time. On three occassions, I’ve had 24-48 hour out of town excursions in eight months, and everytime leading up to the trip, it was like I was training for a milk marathon, trying to pump extra-extra above and beyond what I already was just to keep her alive while I was gone. I understood why the average woman I’ve chatted with stopped breastfeeding after six weeks.

All I know is, this baby hasn’t been sick one time since her birth day. Sure she’s been a prison cellmate with me in our home together, but I’d like to think that my magical milk has been a contributing factor {at least I tell myself that to ease the pain}.

Today was a pivotal day. I checked myself into a hotel.

My daughter is evidently going through some kind of 8-month sleep regression because her baby brain is growing at warp speed and teeth are piercing through her top gums with vengence. She still feeds once a night, anywhere between 2 a.m.-4 a.m., which I was hoping to phase out soon — since according to a professional sleep coach — baby girl is 100% ready to do so. However, instead, she’s done a 180 degree tap dance in the opposite direction. Last night she woke up at least 6 times — twice to eat and the others were simply random, unexplainable cry fests. 

Meanwhile, my adult brain has felt hungover all day today, but I haven’t had a drop of alcohol to drink. I am so exhausted, it physically hurts. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since my second trimester pregnant. My husband overheard me crying to a friend on the phone. A bit later while he was gone out of the house, he texted, “Would you like to get a hotel room tonight and I’ll take care of the baby? I can’t stand seeing you so upset. I haven’t seen you genuinely happy and smiling in too long.”

My heart simultaneously sank, and soared. The text was both disturbing and comforting. That my husband believes I’m unhappy; that breaks my heart. And it’s incredible that he remembered the hotel story; that makes my heart swell.

I drove 4.8 miles away from our home after we put the baby to bed, and will be sleeping solo in a King size bed, on the executive floor, and so far have been treated pretty damn good thanks to my husband’s Hilton Gold Status, thank you very much. 

Forget showering. Have I envisioned myself covered in a bubble bath many-a-times? Yes. For tonight’s escapade, did I strategically pack Epsom salt and bath oils in Ziploc bags? Yes. Did my hotel room only have a stand-up shower? Yes. Did I laugh out loud? Yes. Have I been pumping while typing this blog post with my elbows at a 45-degree angle? Duh.

Serendipity is something I whole-heartedly believe in. Earlier today I received an email from my girl Emily {Giffin}. Are you ready for this? She’s releasing another book, ha! I wonder how many Hilton rewards points she has by now.

Also, today, the fancy-schmancy, lactose & chemical-free, stupid-expensive formula made in Germany arrived on our doorstep for the first time. My breasts took a collective sigh of relief to have some tag-team partners on deck.

I think it’s safe to say that today, the Universe conspired to give me a get out of jail free card. And for that, I am grateful. 

#mother #daughter #grateful #marriage #husband #wife #emily giffin #non fiction #baby #hotel #hilton #writer #blogger #mommy #staycation #fiction #sunshine #truthteller #entrepreneur

[researchreportproposalprojecthd]

Dyslexia and mental health

During my research, I found that a lot of the articles mentioned what impacts the stress can have on dyslexia and that people with dyslexia are more prone to having stress, These are some of the things I previously found when researching:

Dyslexia induces tiredness, and dyslexic people can be prone to working very close to their stress and exhaustion thresholds for long periods. Conditions that are commonly stress-related are again more common in dyslexic people 

Schools need to provide counsellors for children who experience difficulty learning at school, as the emotional effects of failure can lead to social exclusion, depression and self-harm.

Dyslexics, unless diagnosed and helped early on in their school career, will suffer from varying levels of emotional pain. Be it low self-esteem, self-doubt; withdrawal or running away from home. It is important to recognise that secondary bad behaviour is commonly covering up for primary difficulties, but most teachers are just satisfied by mislabelling pupils as troublemakers and try to move such needy pupils to a different teacher.

However I wanted to dig deeper in how stress can impact dyslexia and how this can lead to other mental health impacts as this can severely impact how, as I previously researched, dyslexics perform in the work enviroment:

After ‘surviving’ school, maybe without any qualifications to their name, dyslexic young adults are faced with finding a job, or going to college to gain the qualifications they need to start an apprenticeship. They see their peers leave school with 8-10 GCSEs, and all they have is one or two qualifications in unvalued subjects, such as Art or Drama. They see their peers go to university or train up to any career that takes their fancy, but what can the dyslexic do? Do they have a choice? Not with the lack of qualifications they have. Their dreams of being lawyers or doctors are just that, dreams.

Do they either start on a low-level college course to develop their basic skills, take a job in manual labour, or be unemployed – they begin to question their place in society. Can they take their place, or are they excluded from a society that highly values those who can read and write? Once again, they see that withdrawal is a good option to protect their self-esteem, and again depression looms. Many find completing application forms so exhausting that they give up even applying for jobs or benefits, and some even turn to crime to make ends meet.

But don’t some dyslexics survive school and succeed in life?

Whilst it is true that some dyslexics do well in life (e.g. Richard Branson, Keira Knightley, Mollie King, Jamie Oliver, Tom Cruise), researching them you hear the same thing. School was hell and they left as soon as possible. They also highlight that they found something they were good at early on, maybe not school subjects such as English, Maths or Science, but vocational skills such as selling, persuading, acting, cooking, art and design, etc. This allowed them to balance the negativity at school with their ability to out shine their peers outside school. Ongoing research in dyslexia and success has found that each successful dyslexic has a ‘chip on their shoulder’ to prove everyone who ever doubted their ability wrong, to prove that they are not ‘stupid and thick’. They are driven by their school failure and humiliation to do well in life. Even returning to school for their own children is hard for them, they can have symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder when seeing small chairs, smelling sickly floor cleaner, or seeing drawings pinned up on walls, as theirs were not deemed good enough for presentation.

Many of these points for me are very true. Primary school was especially difficult for me as I was diagnosed at around the early 2000′s where we can see from my research on dyslexia: a myth   dyslexia was still very taboo. I was told many times that I was stupid and they didn’t know what to do with me. However I was very fortunate that I was sent to a specialised school and get the support I needed to be able to give myself techniques to learn for when I moved onto high school. 

And these I definitely needed through out high school, because high school didn’t know what to do with me either! But because I had to support earlier on I was able to pass all of my exams- without the support early on in life I wouldn’t of been able to do this. 

Behavior, Health, and Personality

May have a short fuse or is easily frustrated, angered, or annoyed.

Easily stressed and overwhelmed in certain situations.

Low self-esteem.

Self-conscious when speaking in a group. May have difficulty getting thoughts out – pause frequently, speak in halting phrases, or leave sentences incomplete. This may worsen with stress or distraction.

Sticks to what they know – fear of new tasks or any situation where they are out of comfort zone.

Extremely disorderly or compulsively orderly.

Confusion, stress, physical health issues, time pressure, and fatigue will significantly increase symptoms.

 The Dyslexia-Stress-Anxiety Connection

How does good and bad stress work with dyslexia?

Individuals with dyslexia are confronted regularly by tasks that are, either in reality or in their perception, extremely difficult for them. These tasks might be reading, spelling, or math. If they have experienced success at mastering this kind of task in the past, good stress helps them face the challenge with a sense of confidence, based on the belief that “I can do this kind of task.” If, on the other hand, someone has met with repeated failure when attempting this or a similar task in the past, his or her body and brain may be working together to send out a chemical warning system that gets translated as “This is going to be way too difficult for you! Retreat! Retreat!) That’s bad stress in action. And remember, perception is everything! It doesn’t matter if a teacher, a friend, or a spouse believes that you can do something; it’s that you think you can do it that matters.

What is stress?

Stress is the reaction of the body and brain to situations that put us in harm’s way. The stressor may be a physical threat (e.g., a baseball coming quickly toward you) or a psychological threat (e.g., a worry or fear that you will make a mistake delivering your lines in a play or write a passage that won’t make sense to the reader). Stress, or more specifically, the stress response, is our body’s attempt to keep us safe from harm. It’s a biological and psychological response. When we’re under stress, the chemistry of our body and our brain (and, therefore, our thinking) changes. A part of the brain called the amygdala does a great job learning what’s dangerous, and it makes a connection between certain situations and negative outcomes.

What is anxiety?

Anxiety comes in many forms. It can be situational (that is, specific to one kind or class of worry, like traveling or being in social situations). Individuals with dyslexia may experience marked anxiety in situations in which they feel they will make mistakes, be ridiculed, or made to feel foolish in front of others. Severe anxiety or fears are known as phobias.

When the anxiety is specific to or triggered by the demands of being with or interacting with people, and is characterized by a strong fear of being judged by others and of being embarrassed, it is known as social anxiety disorder (or social phobia). This fear can be so intense that it gets in the way of going to work or school or doing everyday activities. Children and adults with social phobia may worry about social events for weeks before they happen. For some people, social phobia is specific to certain situations, while others may feel anxious in a variety of social situations.

Anxiety can also be generalized (that is, a kind of free-floating sense of worry or impending trouble that doesn’t seem to be specific to one trigger or event). In its more serious form, this is considered a psychiatric disorder known as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, GAD is diagnosed when a person worries excessively about a variety of everyday problems for at least 6 months. Generalized anxiety disorders affect about 3.1% American adults age 18 years and older (about 18%) in a given year, causing them to be filled with fearfulness and uncertainty. The average age of onset is 31 years old.

What’s the connection to dyslexia?

Stress and anxiety increase when we’re in situations over which we have little or no control (a car going off the road, tripping on the stairs, reading in public). All people, young and old, can experience overwhelming stress and exhibit signs of anxiety, but children, adolescents, and adults with dyslexia are particularly vulnerable. That’s because many individuals do not fully understand the nature of their learning disability, and as a result, tend to blame themselves for their own difficulties. Years of self-doubt and self recrimination may erode a person’s self-esteem, making them less able to tolerate the challenges of school, work, or social interactions and more stressed and anxious.

Many individuals with dyslexia have experienced years of frustration and limited success, despite countless hours spent in special programs or working with specialists. Their progress may have been agonizingly slow and frustrating, rendering them emotionally fragile and vulnerable. Some have been subjected to excessive pressure to succeed (or excel) without the proper support or training. Others have been continuously compared to siblings, classmates, or co-workers, making them embarrassed, cautious, and defensive.

Individuals with dyslexia may have learned that being in the company of others places them at risk for making public mistakes and the inevitable negative reactions that may ensue. It makes sense, then, that many people with dyslexia have become withdrawn, sought the company of younger people, or become social isolates.

[essayblogger-blog]

My Crooked Room

OCTOBER 2017

Although I am still a young person, I was a much younger when it all began. I was thirteen to be precise. Along with my adolescence, I was also incredibly naive and insecure. I did not have a satisfying social life as I also did not have many friends. I wanted so desperately to feel a connection with someone, whether it be romantic or platonic, that when I rushed into my very first long term relationship, I had not the slightest idea of how abusive it was. I didn’t even have a clue as to what consisted of an abusive relationship; healthy relationships are not taught in the general curriculum. I’d like to start this by stating my partner never hit me in the four years that we spent together, however, there are many other ways I suffered at his expense. The first year and a half of our relationship, he hurt me with his words. He called me awful names, some too horrible to even type. He said sexist and degrading things. He treated me coldly and always made sure I felt stupid and inferior to him. Then, as if the first 18 months of our relationship weren't harmful enough, the next two and a half years were even more damaging. He began sexually assaulting me. I felt disgusting and I hated him for it, but I never called attention to the situation because he convinced me that that was love. He made me believe that I was not worthy of the attention of other men and that I was lucky that he wanted to have sex with me. And finally, I convinced myself everything was okay because he was my boyfriend and therefore, myself and my body belonged to him. Afterall, boys will be boys. I was not a victim. How could I be? He loved me.

I eventually and only recently escaped the relationship. However, I have not and I am not sure that I will ever be able to escape the horrible memories that still haunt me. The abuse that I endured deeply affected me in so many ways. One of the questions I’ve received countless times is “Why did you stay with him so long?” To be perfectly truthful, I do not have an excuse other than the fact that I truly and wholeheartedly loved him. While we were still together I knew I couldn’t love him, for he was a parasite; cancerous. But the thing about cancer is that it consumes its host until nothing is left. And he was so deeply rooted in my heart that I couldn’t leave him, so instead I let myself suffer. This is an example of how our relationship has negatively affected me. I know that what happened to me is in no way my fault, however, I sometimes I think maybe I share the blame. I shouldn’t have been so promiscuous, I should’ve listened to my friends’ advice, I should’ve told someone before now. Too often I think about the many things that I should’ve done and I tend to forget that there is one thing he definitely shouldn’t have done.

Unfortunately, these conflicting thoughts of who to blame are accompanied by a considerable amount of self-hatred and mental illness. I have been diagnosed with ‘life-endangering depression and anxiety.’ I detest feeling like a wounded animal, because I know that these dark and ominous feelings are just chemical imbalances in my brain; but I am so exhausted and I am so sad. I always feel flat and grey, like I am devoid of color or shape. It is difficult to find distractions, because activities and hobbies I once adored are now so emotionally and physically draining. Often I like to imagine different worlds. Sometimes I think about using substances that would alter my own world; ones that would temporarily erase what happened. Or worse yet, sometimes I imagine a world where I don’t exist. These imaginations terrify me and I want to scream and curse and cry. Many people want material things like the latest iPhone or a new car; I just want my sanity.

Along with mental instability, I have found myself extremely untrusting of others. I live in fear that someone will hurt me again. I have also discovered that I have almost no confidence or self-respect. Sometimes when I’m out in public, men will whistle and yell obscene things at me. Rather than feeling furious at them for objectifying me, I immediately shrink and feel as though I deserve it. In these moments, even I forget that I am more than my curvaceous body. I am a considerate person with complex thoughts and maybe a little too much empathy for others. I am a witty person with a weakness for musical productions and winged eyeliner. I am a person.

I know this may have been very difficult to read, and for that I apologize. Coincidentally, it was also very difficult to type. I considered writing about something else, and even now I don’t know if this was a wise choice, but I wanted to prove that I am in a better place now. For almost three years, I refused to tell anyone. I feel that by typing this out and sharing it with others that I am taking another step towards healing. And I do not want any pity for what happened to me, frankly I just want a good grade on this paper. While I may still have trust and anger issues; while I may still suffer a mental plague, I can now talk about what happened. I am learning to accept joy into my life, and am slowly forgiving myself and my abuser. I continue to push myself in my academics and my extra curriculars. I have the support of wonderful friends and family and the added bonus of medication to aid me. I call this progress. I may still be sitting in my crooked chair in my crooked room, but I have found the key to unlock the door. Soon I’ll be able to turn the knob and walk across the threshold.

[crowsent]

Salt: I Have A Nephew

So I went and picked up my nephew from school, just rolled up to the parking lot and got out the mobile metal machine we humans decided to call cars, at least in English, and walked up to the front of the school to come and escort my fuckass relative. Because I am not having my piece of shit nephew go walk down the street to my vehicle and risk him getting rammed head-first into an oncoming bus or truck or whatever type of transportation the parents/guardians/whoever use to bring the tiny little flesh gremlins to and from school. Tiny little flesh gremlins, in this case, mean the children.

Just because my nephew’s attitude makes me want to go on a lovely hike up the nearest active volcano, set up an olympic-grade diving board, and go for the fucking platinum medal in a needlessly intricate swan dive into the gaping mouth of boiling lava, does not mean that I want the little shit to suffer any kind of injury. Physical or otherwise.

My nephew was sitting on a bench by the front door as he’s supposed to do, kickin his feet up and down since his shoes don’t even touch the ground yet. With how fucking microscopic my nephew is, his feet might as well be on a different fucking solar system from the ground. But he’s kicking, right, and his feet go: up, down, up, down, up, down, over and over again in this senseless rhythm. He on his phone, staring down at it but his fingers ain’t moving. Still as a fucking statue. About as dead as my cold, unbeating heart. To any poor fuck walking down the street to meet face-to-face with screaming children running round like puppies, but not adorable in any way shape or form, my nephew would have looked like any normal elementary-schooler. Just sitting down, on his phone, legs fighting an imaginary monster with how hard he was kicking.

But not me. I have had the misfortune of getting my ass saddled with the responsibility of bringing him back home from school one too many fucking times. At this point in my miserable life, I have become an expert in telling the mood of shitty infuriating nephews and mastered the art of not smacking him in the face every time he did something stupid or irritating. Which is ALL the fucking time. If there was a competition for how much and how quickly any single person can drive me to contemplating into banging my head into the nearest available hard surface: walls, floor, bench, pillar, my dick, whichever, my nephew would be the reigning champion. Bring home a fucking plaque and everything.

So I knew immediately that some shit is going down. Tumblr does not allow me to convey my emotions through the use of sound, but if I can, this specifc fucking paragraph would be accompanied either by me snapping my fingers as a show of superiority to knowing when something’s wrong with my nephew, or that sound that plays on Kill Bill when the Bride is about to fucking stab a bitch.

My fucking pace increased from a casual gait, you know, me just goin to pick up a my nephew, to a full on march of rage. I cracked my damn knuckles when I was walking too, scared some poor child, but I was fucking PREPARED to sock whoever the hell made my nephew like this. I was literally willing to start a fucking fight in the middle of an elementary school because my stupid dumbass nephew was acting like something or someone pissed on him and threw him off the side of a steep-ass precipice, just fus-ro-dah the bitch right off.

Thankfully, before I actually managed to unleash a physical manifestation of my wrath, I noticed why my nephew was all up and upset like a damn mofo. Not far from where he’s sitting, there’s this woman and her daughter. Although we were literally in a public place, able to be seen by any fucking one who decided to so much as glance our way, she was blatantly reprimanding her daughter who seemed to be at the sixth grade, just one year from entering middle school.

Mother Jackass over here was close enough to my little nephew’s spot that I can make out the details of her daughter’s face, but far enough that I can’t read the tiny letters on the side of the uniform. In other words, just the right distance that would give me and my nephew some privacy if we wanted to talk, and them their own privacy. Distance is good enough for privacy islands of our own, while still good enough to canoe the fuck over there. The kind of distance where I SHOULD NOT even hear what the fuck this ho is saying to her kid.

But nah. I fucking hear her loud and clear, as does everyone in the immediate fucking vicinity. Because this bitch ain’t even talking. Talking is a description of a level of vocal communication that is dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of her volume. As in she was fucking screaming. Loud enough that she actually might have shouted this child to death. Awaken the giants sleeping at the core of the Earth. Substitute as a broadcast signal to call in extraterrestrials from beyond the recesses of the universe deeper than the pits of hell.

People were staring at her and her daughter because she was making such a fucking scene, it’s a scene AND an arm’s race. But the winner of “Shitty Mom Award” 2017 does not give a fuck. She gives less of a fuck than I do. And I’m neck-deep in loans from the fuckbank from years of lacking any fucks to give.

From where I was standing, I see her tiny little sixth-grader daughter crying. There is a fucking pair of waterfalls from her eyes; she has nourished crops, flooded valleys, and created a second great flood. Noah ain’t got no ark this time. Humanity has gone extinct. But even if this kid is bawling her little eyes out, the mother don’t care. She continues to chastise the kid and since she’s louder than the damn eruption of the Krakatoa Volcano amplified with fucking speakers, and broadcasted to the entirety of earth. I have gone deaf. Then Shit Mom™ spouted off the verbal version of pancreatic cancer. Don’t remember it exactly, but it went something along the lines of “Your grades aren’t good enough and you’re going to grow up sad and alone and useless” and boy fucking howdy that pissed me the fuck off so damn much.

But then, some distinct part of my brain told me that for some reason, this lady’s inane bullshit fountain of misery affected my nephew so much that I can fucking detect it like a homing beacon IMMEDIATELY. So being the magnanimous aunt that I am, I pretend I actually had more than ten minutes of sleep for the day and go mosey on to him, trying to make my smile look less like I was auditioning for Jack Nicholson in the Shining and more like the nurturing bitch I was actually supposed to be. Theatre prepared me for the pretense I was playing.

Sat my ass down on the bench. Nephew keeps looking at his phone, but his legs stopped kicking. Since I was considerably taller than him (for now since I know this asscactus would shoot up like a fucking weed and be 6 feet or some shit) and I can easily see what he’s doing on his phone, imagine my fucking surprise when I find that his phone was off. Either he ran out of battery or just decided to eavesdrop on the conversation, I don’t know and I don’t care. Because the next thing I see is this slip of paper that my little nephew is sitting on. Didn’t even put it in his back or anything, just sat on it.

Naturally, I asked to look at it.

And boy fucking hell did the look on his face made me want to go hula-dance into an open flame and burn myself to death. He acted like I murdered his mother when I asked for that paper. But still, gave it to me, not much protest there. Completely slipped my mind that that day was report card distribution of mass execution and crushed dreams. And my little nephew had a 76 in some subject, can’t remember which one, and he looked ready to burst into tears.

Ain’t gonna lie, my fam is hyped up on fucking keeping grades higher than the Everest and a 76 is about the equivalent of some depressing face-to-face discussions on the future and blah fucking blah.

Then, the little lightbulb hovering over my head pinged, just shone bright like a diamond as I was slapped with this epiphany that I never seemed to realize until now.

Nephew was upset because he can hear this mother dragging her child for bad grades and ever since the bastard can speak, he’s been taught that any grade lower than a 90 is bad. And he’s afraid that I was gonna start emulating Bitch!Mom too.

And that look on his fucking face reminded me of the one singular time back in highschool when I actually seriously had a fucking plan for suicide, just had an agenda lying around, a full on battle-strategy on the best way to meet death. As in: should I get the rat poison down in the kitchen, jump off the roof, hang myself on the tree outside our house, bleed out in the bathroom, asphyxiate myself, mix some chemicals to create poison gas and lock myself in my room, starve myself to death, list goes on and on in a specific fucking notebook.

It was this tiny yellow spiral. As in tiny. Munchkin-sized piece of dead tree parts. Barely even bigger than my open palm. And in this munchkin notebook, I had fucking diagrams, lists, and methods on how to kill myself. Ideations of suicide were normal for me, stand in the shower, contemplate on how everything in life is devoid of meaning and why I really shouldn’t be prolonging my suffering anymore, but those were just ideations. Never actually had PLANS prior to that moment. And I fucking remember what happened to make me write out complicated suicide strategies that almost had me get swallowed up by the vast nothingness of death.

Back then, in those miserable days of highschool, I was a junior. 11th grade. About to go on Thanksgiving break and enjoying some lax times because NO HOMEWORK and in school lingo, that meant freedom to play games and binge-read fanfiction without the looming threat of homework lingering in the corner and eating away at my guilty conscience for procrastinating. It was also on a Friday which also happened to be report card day. So I get my report card. The bullshit standard of anything lower than a 90 is failing applied to me back then too, so my fucking horror when I see not one, not two, but three grades below a 90. For me, that spelled out as a death sentence.

Because back then, I actually genuinely believed that anything lower than those impossibly inhumane standards was a failing grade. Despite me still being a fucking shithead mcguffin back then, I actually still had some cares left to give in me. And every square inch of those cares were going into my grades. I felt fucking shit about myself, I should not be getting this, these were fuckall worthless grades. But hey, I used to not lie to my mother. Told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I took the death knell home, readied myself for a funeral dirge to give to myself in the wake of my passing. But my mother always preached about being loving and yada yada and there’s this tiny teety bird in my head that’s telling me “hey, maybe it won’t be so bad” and I start to think that to myself.

Even way before in the past, depression has been haunting me like a bitch. My mother didn’t know. Actually, no one did know that I was grappling with the black wolf all the time. And depression hit me hard that day with the grade bit, and I was hoping for a little bit of condolences from the one singular person who was supposed to stick with me through thick and thin, unconditional love, shit that I was told. After all, even if I did have three shitty grades, everything else was at 100s or 98s-99s. Nothing lower than a 97 aside from the three grades of death. So maybe hey, my mother could realize that I am in fact, not disregarding my education and I actually do give a damn.

I get home, show her my report card, and the first thing out of her mouth is “I’m disappointed in you.” Didn’t even ask me why I had considerably lower grades in those three classes, didn’t ask me if I was struggling or needed to stay after school for tutoring, nothing. Just “I’m disappointed in you.” Just that. Like I somehow brought mud to the family name and shot the dog, shot the neighbour’s dog, blew up the niehgbourhood and spat on my dead grandfather’s grave.

Then she proceeded to a lecture about how “this is for you” or that “you should be grateful you’re getting an education” or how I should “think about all the poor children in Africa” or that “you should stop wasting time doing nothing”. Lecture lasted an hour. Nothing but her telling me how fucking disappointed she is that I’m not getting the grades she wants me to get in THREE fucking subjects.

80 in Algebra 2

76 in Art 3

76 in AP US History

She knows full damn well I’m not good at math. She also knows full damn well that I don’t even eat lunch in school to go to lunch tutorials so I can understand what the fuck is going on with the square roots and shit I won’t ever have to use in the future.

I’m not that great of an artist and MLK season was over there. I’ve never been great at submitting art for the MLK contest my city had every damn year and my art grades always took a nosedive during that time.

The US History bolsters my GPA due to it being an advanced course and if it was a regular class, I would be having fucking 90s in it.

But nah. Disregard all that. Didn’t even acknowledge the time and effort I do put into school, an entire truckload of it. Saw the cracks in an entire road I paved by myself and focused on that instead of the fact that I paved a whole goddamn road.

Then I began plotting the great suicide of 20XX

Obviously, I didn’t go through with it, but seeing my nephew so damn terrified of my reaction to his bad grades reminded me how fucking flawed the education system is, and the result it brought upon families like a damn plague of fear and ruin.

My mother wouldn’t have reacted that way if we could have actually afforded college instead of thrusting the full weight of my education towards scholarships (student loans are the bane of existence and leech off you) and the Bitch Mom™ wouldn’t have had to yell if there wasn’t such a pressure to get into the 1% of students getting into colleges.

I also blame the fucking school I went to, and the school systems in general. My highschool was shit. At least my APUSH class was. Teacher did NOT explain shit to us. Basically just handed us a book, told us to read, and gave us quizzes EVERY. FUCKING. DAY. without ever going over the material with us. We were basically in study hall where we can’t ask the teacher to clarify fuckall to us.

Also. I should not have to know the quadratic formula, or graphing linear inequalities. My target career does not involve math, which is why it is my target career. This kind of shit does not help me in any way and frankly, if I could be emancipated from the burdens of studying for a subject that won’t have any real-world application to me whatsoever, it would have made my school life less like I was repeatedly being stabbed with burning knives in the pancreas and more like me having adequate time to care for my mental health and well being.

(Newsflash, humans need some form of relaxation to stay healthy.)

If I was learning how to balance a checkbook, or pay taxes, or where and how to vote, I would probably do a little bit better because I actually need that shit to function in the real world. Algebra fucking 2 does nothing for me.

And my fucking little nephew is going to have to live through this inane bullshit I did. He’s going to have no idea how to take care of his bills, or how to file for a tax return, but by fucking hell, when he is mandated to take that biology course, he’s going to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the fucking cell. On top of that, he’s going to have to sit through a lecture when he gets home.

The execution paper goes in his bag, drove him home, and sure enough, when his mother (and my mother) knew that he had a low grade, they began to fucking lecture him instead of acknowledging the rest of the grades he actually got were fucking phenomenal. Cycle begins again. Hope in the future, if he ever gets the same suicidal ideations I did, that he can also power through it. Because for fucking real, my family needs to chill.

TL;DR: My family has unrealistic expectations, my poor nephew is going to go through hell, some parents are shit, the educational system is a festering cadaver infecting the minds of everyone

#losas #salt #parenting #more like how not to be a parent

[flirting-with-psychology]

Would you convert to a different religion if your fiancé/fiancée was of a different faith? No

The world is ending, and you can save one group of five people: who would be the five people that you save? Mom, dad, best friend, SO if I had one, myself. I wonder if any of them would resent me though for getting 4 people I care about while they only get me

Is happiness a delusion? Is happiness only real when shared? Why or why not? No, it’s as delusional/real as any other emotion caused by chemicals in the brain

What would the cover of your biography (presumably written by somebody else who never knew you, postmortem) look like? Probably a picture of me. Or maybe of me with like 50 guys I like

Write about a really good or creative Tumblr URL that you see frequently on your dashboard. I-run-with-scissors-to-feel-dangerous. I’ve just always thought it was funny

If swear words were not things like “shit” and “fuck” what would they be otherwise? Whatever else society thinks is taboo

Write a very vivid description of what is/would have been your most perfect way to lose your virginity. What is your exact definition of ‘losing your virginity’? Also: will you/would you have liked to save your virginity for marriage? Why or why not? It would have been more perfect I guess to lose it with someone who was also a virgin, and we both cared about each other. My definition is the first time you have penetrative sex (unless you are a lesbian in which case I don’t really know because I don’t know enough about lesbian sex). I would not want to save it for marriage because sexual compatibility is an important part of a relationship that I would not want to leave up to chance

Write a six-word fortune cookie. You will buy another fortune cookie

Why do you think eyebrows exist? Aren’t they supposed to help prevent stuff from getting down into our eyes? Just like eyelashes, even though majority of the time if I have something in my eye it’s an eyelash… but yeah. Also, eyebrows are way of like communicating or expression. Like when you raise your eyebrows out of concern or surprise, or when you scrunch them out of confusion or anger. < What that person said

If you could only have one contact on your phone, who would it be? Crap idk

Your bucket list is limited to three items. Marry someone amazing, sing a duet, win an oscar

Do you wake up first or do you open your eyes first? Uhh wake up probably?

Write a love/thank you/appreciation letter to someone you take for granted. Thank you mom and dad for everything you do which I definitely don’t reciprocate

What makes you feel infinitely sexy? Good eye makeup

Make a video and talk about something for two minutes. Anything. And don’t edit out any parts of it. Lol nah.

Write a poem you’d stick on a refrigerator. Nah. You can look at my poetry tag

Are you afraid of aging? Why? Yes because I feel like I’m not taking full advantage of my youth and it’ll only be harder as I get older. And I’m afraid of getting too old to explore things romantically and just be expected to know what I’m doing

Describe one time you basically thought you were the shit, when your self-confidence was soaring through the roof. This is meant to be a positive thing. It was pretty high the summer before junior year when I was working out more. And it was also high sometimes in grade school when I always got top grades

If there was one person you could get drunk with and kiss and then later blame it on alcohol, who would it be? My friend who I work with on film projects. I don’t like him romantically enough to risk ruining how well we work together, so I’ve never pursued anything. But this scenario would actually be kind of great

Does perfection exist? If the word perfection did not exist, what word would be in its place? What would perfection mean instead? I don’t think perfection exists. Mathematically it could but in actual physics there is always error. And other types of “perfection” are matters of opinion which are not the same for everyone. I don’t know what word would replace it

The next book you see that has over 300 pages, open up to page 136. Find a sentence you like, copy it down, and then write about it. Na I’m sitting

Who makes you laugh the most? Captain

What is one thing that you are proud of, that you think lacks praise/lacks appreciation from the people around you? It could be a simple thing; it could be a secret thing. Most things I’m proud of get adequately praised

If you could accuse somebody of being fake/a bitch and not suffer any repercussions, who would you accuse, and how would you do it? I’d tell one of my friends that their SO is awful and that the relationship is toxic

What is the funniest one-liner Tumblr text post you’ve ever read? Idk bruh 

Rewrite a verse of lyrics from your favorite song. They have to sound good when you sing it out loud along to tune of the song. I wrote an entire Let It Go parody about essay writing. I’m not gonna copy it all here though, you can find it at tagged/frozen parody

If the SATs/grades did not exist, in what way should colleges/teachers evaluate applicants? maybe through actual work? <<<<

Do you feel at home in your home? Is home a place for you? A book? A thing? A person? What would you want your home to be? Not yet. I just moved in a couple weeks ago so it doesn’t feel like home yet. My room is getting there other than when there are spiders and I get all anxious, but the common areas still feel like their space since they’ve all lived there for a year. Home is generally a place. I also have a stuffed dog that makes things feel more like a home

Write your own eulogy. She was cool

What is something you felt like you deserved or should have belonged to you, but you never got? A relationship. It’s 2017. It’s time.

Do you feel ‘connected to nature’? Do you frequent outside? Do you believe that a connection with the earth we live on is necessary in the first place? Nope. Nope. I think that we should respect it but don’t need to feel connected

Your opinion on oral sex? It’s ok. There has only been one guy who really made me enjoy receiving, and giving is ok but I kind of avoid it when I can because I kind of gag on it and if they last too long which they usually do it kills the mood for me

If one TV show could be real, which one would you want it to be? Which one would screw our world over? Not sure. I’d want Harry Potter to be real but that’s not really a show. Something like The Walking Dead would screw us over

How many kinds of love are there? “There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Which word needs to exist (or be used again)? If it doesn’t exist how would I know about it?

What is the absolute hardest thing about staying alive? You need food, and for food you need money, and for money you need a job

What is a book that has been recognized as ‘great literature’ that you dislike? Why? Most of the books we read in school because a lot of them are slow and boring and anything interesting about them gets ruined by having to write stupid analysis papers

What is one change that you would make/have made to your life that will make/has made it better? Exercising more 

Is everything you do for yourself? Can you truly be selfless? I’m not good at being selfless

Are you the same person you were two and a half years ago? No, but similar

Can you possibly conquer the labyrinth? If that’s that shit with the dude with the eyes on his hands then nope

As a hyper intelligent pan-dimensional being, what is the answer to the ultimate question, the life, the universe and everything? What is the ultimate question? The pretension in this question just knocked like a week off my lifespan

#survey

[ourhealthyfoodblog-blog]

New Post has been published on Healthy Food and Remedies

New Post has been published on http://www.healthyfoodandremedies.com/2017/05/23/4-ridiculously-common-misconceptions-depression-change-thoughts-2/

4 Ridiculously Common Misconceptions About Depression (and how to change your thoughts)

It’s the vampire of diseases. It hides in plain sight, waiting to pounce. You don’t hear it coming. It’s too swift and clever for that. It sinks its teeth into your psyche, draining your confidence, your energy levels and your sense of self-worth.

You’re powerless to prevent it. Once it has you in its grip you cease to be the person you used to be.

You’ve been ‘turned’. Your first instinct is to keep this a secret. You mustn’t tell anyone for fear of becoming an outcast.

You struggle to fit in because your basic needs have changed. The things you used to love have been replaced with the ‘True Blood’ that is the confines of your comfort zone.

The sun burns. The darkness is your playground.

You want to tell someone… but it’s just too damn difficult.

So you suffer in silence.

…

There are many different types of depression. I am pretty fortunate that the type that I experience is quite low down on the scale. I mean, it’s enough to impact my day to day life but not enough to overly concern me.

If being Bi-polar is akin to riding a crazy roller coaster then my depression is more like taking a Swiss monorail. I don’t have the highs and the rampant desire to take over the world, yet thankfully, I don’t experience the extreme lows that plague a lot of people who suffer from this debilitating disease.

I just ride along, struggling to find much joy in my journey. Sure the scenery is nice and there isn’t much danger of crashing but dear God, can life get a little dull.

In that sense I feel lucky. Apathy and boredom is infinitely preferable to the alternative. I’ve never been one get too down over a little misfortune just as I tend not to get too over excited when something great happens.

I am just at that line where I can enjoy life in small doses, but it takes effort.

For some people however, this ‘happiness’ is just a façade – a mask that is worn to protect their loved ones from the truth. Revealing too much can feel like a sign of weakness, hence why so little is known about the condition.

It really is the silent killer.

Basically, if you are confused as to what depression is all about then please read on as I am going attempt to peel away some of the myths and misconceptions surrounding  this criminally misunderstood illness.

1. It’s a ‘mental’ illness so therefore it isn’t a serious illness

I wrote an article a while ago that suggested depression is NOT a mental illness.

Of course a lot of people just read the headline, mounted their high horse and proceeded to inform me how utterly stupid I was. You have to love these people – taking the time to leave a lovely comment on my article without reading the damn thing first.

Well, as I write this it has over 80k Facebook shares/likes, so I think I did a good job with it. Check it out if you haven’t yet read it.

Anyway, one of the main problems many of us face is the stigma that comes with admitting that we need a little help. Our illness is hidden away – trapped within the depths of our mind. It cannot be seen, it cannot be heard and the only clue to its existence is when we choose to tell others about it.

Someone with a broken leg is given sympathy because we can empathise with their pain. A cancer sufferer is given sympathy because we can empathise with the fear of death. Hell, someone with a runny nose is given sympathy because we all hate getting snot everywhere.

Depression though? It’s a ghost. People can claim it exists but where is the proof?

It makes no difference whether the cause is a life changing event, an imbalance of chemicals or simply a state of mind – we are physical; every single cell in our body is physical.

You wouldn’t tell someone with heart disease that their illness isn’t real because it only affects one organ, so why is an illness of the brain treated differently?

It kills a lot of people.  How can you NOT take that seriously?

2. People who are experiencing depression can just ‘snap out of it’

Everyone who has experienced depression has also heard these immortal words. To say that it’s frustrating is putting it mildly – it’s not only infuriating, it’s downright upsetting too – and this is because it proves the person you are talking to has absolutely no idea what you are going through.

And even more worrying, they are never likely to either.

I liken the feeling to being underwater and attempting to run. You can try as hard as you want but there is a limit to how fast you can actually move. It’s crushing – it engulfs – it is just… there, and there is nothing immediate we can do about it.

Sure we can seek help, receive medication (if that’s your chosen path) and work on changing our mentality, but this takes time and effort. There is certainly nothing ‘snappy’ about it.

I remember a particular morning a few years ago where it felt like I was encased inside of an electric force field. Every attempt to move was met with a metaphorical shock to my system. I was sitting on my bed, willing myself to move, but I couldn’t.

I mean, I could MOVE, but I couldn’t move towards any of the goals I had set myself that day. I sat there for what felt like hours – I may as well have been underwater because life just seemed so… slow.

“Come on, just open up the laptop and once you’ve done that, start typing. You can do it.”

It seemed so simple, and it was. But it wasn’t easy. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. That simple act of opening up my laptop, something that most people would take for granted, was beyond my capabilities.

I just couldn’t move. So I went back to bed.

Unfortunately for some people, this is their existence 24/7. Just getting out of bed is a bigger task than running a marathon.

Snap out of it? I’ll snap out of it when you perform a similarly herculean task today.

3. You can’t be depressed if you ‘have nothing to be sad about’

This is also a difficult concept for a lot of people to get their heads around. If you’ve never experienced depression then it’s easy to just assume that it is always linked to a person’s life situation. Rich and successful people are happy whilst the poor are wallowing in self-pity and a thousand crushed dreams.

But this isn’t always the case.

Studies have shown that happiness levels around the world are pretty much equal. Joy and sadness are fleeting emotions and we always return to our own base levels given enough time. If your baseline is depression, then all the money in the world cannot change that. Like I said earlier; it is an illness and therefore it requires treatment and help, not deep pockets.

Depression doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care about your bank balance or what car you have in the garage. Your achievements and successes mean absolutely nothing because when it strikes, it does so without remorse.

It’s like the Terminator, but with a little more subtlety… and lot less leather.

What is the ‘go to’ response from the general public when a movie star or an athlete admits to struggling with depression?

“How ridiculous, how can he/she be depressed with millions in the bank? Get a grip. There are millions of people who would love to be in their position.”

The level of ignorance being displayed is astonishing. If you are reading this and you have uttered something similar then please slap yourself in the face.

We are all human – therefore we are all vulnerable.

4. You need a doctor to tell you that you are depressed

I’ve had this one thrown at me a few times in the past.

“But how do you know you’re depressed? Have you been to a doctor?”

Don’t get me wrong; doctors are pretty good with this medical lark. They even went to med school so I would expect them to know a thing or two regarding the human body, but to this day I have yet to meet one who has the ability to give you a brain scan with the power of their mind.

Just as a chiropractor cannot give you an X-ray with their eyes, a doctor is only as good as what they can physically see right there in front of them. Sure they may have a sheet of paper with a list of symptoms and a lovely flash pen to cross them off with, but whether they diagnose you with depression or not is largely based on guesswork.

Well guess what?

The person who is feeling like utter shit doesn’t need to guess. They know how they feel. It’s there tormenting them hour after hour, day after day.

A doctor can lead you into the hazy world of medication but you don’t need one to tell you how you are feeling. YOU tell them how you are feeling. YOU tell them that you are experiencing depression, not the other way around.

Change your thoughts, change their world

If you’re one of those people that believed depression to be a Mickey Mouse illness then please read on. This next part is what this article is really about.

The depression manifesto;

‘I (insert name here), promise to adhere to the following rules and to hopefully help change the lives of those whom may need my help in the future.’

I will treat depression with the respect it deserves. I will consider it as a legitimate illness and I will not look down on those who may suffer with it.

I will promise to keep an eye on any friends, family members or colleagues with whom I have noticed a change in personality.

I will never again tell someone who is feeling down to ‘snap out of it’ or ‘deal with it’ when faced with a difficult situation.

I will accept that it’s impossible to tell how someone is feeling by their outward appearance.

#Depression