for the record, ‘not feeling anything’ is a valid and not unusual response to trauma or grief
so if you feel empty and devoid of feeling, it’s not because you’re a cold and uncaring person.
Sometimes, not feeling anything is the only way you can cope.
Be prepared for a delayed reaction, too. It’s very common to be totally calm during a crisis, and then days or weeks (or years) later suddenly get hit with a tidal wave of “HOLY SHIT THAT HAPPENED.”
Sometimes your mind waits until it feels safe to start processing things emotionally. It’s a powerful survival strategy, but it can really blindside you, because just as you start to feel like things are okay, you’re overwhelmed by the realization of how not-okay things were before.
This may not happen, and that’s okay too. But it’s something to watch out for when your initial reaction is numbness.
Tag: important
The single most toxic thing I was brought up believing is that being Adult and Responsible and Good starts with doing everything completely alone and without help
What it’s really about is learning where and when you need help, how much help you need, and knowing when to reach out and ask for the help you need to function at your ideal level
People were never meant to live alone
“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”
“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”
That stopped them short. “What?”
“A secretary,” she repeated.
“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”
“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”
They scoffed. “You want to answer phones all day?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Schedule appointments?”
“I like organizing.”
“Be a second banana?”
An affirmative nod. “I’m skilled at helping.”
“I just don’t understand,” they said. “HOW could you be okay with all of this?!”
“I enjoy the work.”
“BUT YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE!”
“I know.”
“Then WHY?!”
She shrugged.
“Because I want to be a secretary.”
Honestly though, this is very similar to my mom’s experience. She’s always been super bright, but has realized as she’s gotten older that intellectual pursuits just aren’t her jam. She dropped out of her PhD program to have kids, and although she has her master’s and was a pretty good school psychologist, she hated having to make huge decisions. She’s a church secretary now and loves it, and she’s GOOD at it; she’s letting her school psych certification permanently expire this year with zero regrets. If you can be anything you want, that includes the things we don’t tend to value as highly as a society. Not everybody is built for or wants the “respectable” careers.
My grandma did this to me, saying that i didn’t want to get stuck on the outside, making coffee and filing papers. The thing is, that’s exactly what I’ve always enjoyed the most, making and organizing things. That would be enough for me.
Nobody seems to realize that if you tell people they can be anything they want to be they will. And not everyone WANTS to be doctors or lawyers or CEOs or scientists. Sometimes, they just want to be a secretary.
it took me a LOT of therapy before i was able to shrug off the effects of the Gifted Child Upbringing enough to realize that what i really wanted to be was a house husband and Local Queerdad who writes novels sometimes. god, i’m so much happier now.
ain’t nothing wrong with an ordinary life. don’t let anybody tell you you have to be the top dog to be worth anything.
MBTI & Youtubers (x)
Simone Giertz: ENTP“I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware.
But building things with hardware, especially if you’re teaching yourself, is something that’s really difficult to do.
It has a high likelihood of failure and moreover, it has a high likelihood of making you feel stupid.
And that was my biggest fear at the time. So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100% of the time.
With my setup, it would be nearly impossible to fail. And that was that instead of trying to succeed, I was going to try to build things that would fail.
And even though I didn’t realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart.
Because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety.
And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play.”
You can ruin almost any social system with enough bad faith.
It takes very little cleverness to go to a toilet with a sign reading “please do not flush paper towels,” flush gravel until it breaks, and then declare victory.
But victory over what? You haven’t debunked the warning sign or the plumbing system; you’ve just abused them. You have not made a persuasive case that the warning sign should read “please do not flush paper towels or gravel,” because obviously your wise ass is just waiting to see that sign so you have an excuse to flush a third inappropriate thing. You also haven’t made a persuasive case that the toilets should be continuously guarded and all visitors frisked for non-flushable objects, because the vast majority of people aren’t as big of a jerk as you.
“This system can be broken by someone who exploits its rules in the most malicious possible way” is true of many otherwise fine systems, and unless the system is safety-critical or there’s a very large group of people motivated to break it, it’s not really an important point to make.
There is nothing original, helpful, or insightful about pointing out that one person with a firehose could ruin a whole sand-sculpture competition. Yeah, it’s true, that is a risk we are taking. Please don’t show up with a firehose just to prove your point.
This is how I feel about people who create fake donation posts, and take actual money from real people, to “teach them a lesson” about being too kind. It’s obvious that they don’t care about people getting tricked out of their money, because if they did, they wouldn’t be so eager to do it to people themselves. What they object to is kindness, and they’ll do anything they can to destroy it where they find it.
Men like to believe theyd be great in apocalypse scenarios but they dont even know how to sew
Some male friends of mine were once talking about how useful they’d be in an apocalypse, and I pointed out that as a weaver and sewer and maker of stuff, I’d be pretty damn useful and they tried to tell me they could just loot clothes from WalMart and they’d be fine. As if WalMart has endless supplies without weekly deliveries.
So just last night a friend of mine was talking about who he’d round up in the event of a zombie apocalypse and how I’m his go-to farmer on account of I know how to keep an entire homestead up and running and we’re talking about what kind of resources I’d need to keep a colony of about 50-ish people alive and i bring up what all goes into processing wool for clothing and such and he just kind of stops me like ‘wait, wait, we don’t need to do all of that because we can scavenge for clothes we don’t need to be able to make them’ and i’m just like, ‘dude, that works in the short-term maybe but if this community is going to be sustainable you’ve gotta have people whose job it is to make clothes and blankets and shit’
also cloth rots pretty quickly when left exposed to the elements and after the first few years or so anything we manage to scavenge isn’t going to be wearable anymore and anywho we’ve got to teach the kids everything or they’re not gonna know what to do some decades down the line when everything’s too rusted or rotted out to be of any practical use anymore, etc etc, and he’s reckoning that things like woodworking and smithing and ranching are more important than say, cleaning or cooking or dairying and meanwhile i’m just smh may all the gods have mercy on this poor fool
He also balked when i brought up how to run a laundry and what all was needed to make everyday shit like soap and toothpaste – like dude, you think this is going to be all about hunting and scavenging and being neato manly-man drifters like in the walking dead let me teach you a thing about keeping a village alive and healthy for more than a week man most of it is shit you keep thinking is non-essential on account of it being “women’s work” or “simple chores” that’re actually pretty labor-intensive and take time, training, knowledge, and practice to do successfully, let alone well, and are 100% absolutely necessary work in order for you to have any reasonably good quality of life after the world ends
Reminders for the Anxious/Depressed Creatives
- You’re more than what you make.
- Your productivity does not determine your value.
- It’s okay to do nothing sometimes.
- Not everything you do has to result in a product.
- Not everything you make has to be important, significant, or even good.
- You can make things just for yourself.
- You can keep secrets for yourself, whether it’s not posting some of your projects or not sharing your techniques.
- You’re allowed to say no.
- You’re allowed to rest.
you have this idea in your head that the only time you’re worthy of being loved is when you’re at your best. you’re still worthy of being loved when you’re at your lowest. you’re still worthy of being loved when you don’t want to go on anymore. you are still worthy of being loved even when you don’t love yourself. you are a human and therefore always worthy of being loved and don’t you fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
a piece of advice my dad gave me and I’ve never forgotten is, “if you won’t worry about it in 4 months, don’t worry about it now.” saved me countless times, it’s a philosophy to adopt and help improve your life. Failed a test? ask yourself if you’ll think about this still in 4 months? Made a fool of yourself in public? I doubt even the people who saw it will remember it past today. Know you could have done better? Ran further? don’t beat yourself up over it, you can do better tomorrow. Don’t overthink things, a lot of negatives matter less than you think they do.
Another great way of thinking is also this one:
Do you have a problem?
– No -> Well, you don’t need to worry then.
– Yes ->
-> Can you do something about it?
– Yes -> Well, you already know the solution to your problem then. No need to worry, get working on it.
– No -> Worrying won’t help you either. You just have to live with it. And I know, this sounds hard, but you’ll have to come to this conclusion sooner or later.
Also: Sometimes it’s also ok to just have a small mental breakdown and just cry your fucking eyes out. It will likely cost you an hour or so, but the world usually looks a lot better afterwards.
And if your problems seem to be coming from within rather than from the outside and that is bothering you, please go and see a psychiatrist/psychologist, call a mental health hotline or use an App like ‘Youper’ which can also give amazing mental support.
Consulting Witch 