burnt-out atelier

she/her, 21 | anonymous journal & some poetry from a young woman in academia, mostly writing about mental health & mainly from the perspective of trauma

[ysolt]

They call it the never afford anything and kill yourself economy

[aurpiment]

“It’s easy to assume”: someone’s misconception is about to be amiably corrected

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

“It’s comforting to assume”: someone’s assumption is going to be read for filth

[json-derulo]

it sucks that the overwhelming majority of medical messaging around salt/sodium is "evil poisonous substance that you're definitely already eating way too much of," because like. you do still need it. (trust me, as a POTS-haver, I've had to completely rewire my own brain about salt.) and you need more salt when the entire northern hemisphere is hot enough to fry an egg on. ever tried sucking down the recommended 64oz of hydration per day entirely as water, only to find you're peeing constantly without any of the purported benefits of being "hydrated"? assuming you don't have another medical condition that causes frequent urination, your body probably needed more salt/electrolytes to be able to hold onto that water and make use of it. if there was ever a time to keep a sports drink/pedialyte/etc within constant reach, it's when the heat index is 110°F/43°C.

[burntoutatelier]

i get this so much with pots and low bp, im also on some diuretics. I crave salt so bad sometimes I just get up in the middle of the night to grind it into my hand and eat it

[draconym]

It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.

[castformi-deactivated20241025]

dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth

[peppylilspitfuck]

Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth.  The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts. 

[slightlykylie]

Children are color-coded according to their binary assignment. 

[darkersolstice]

One of the genders is seen as inherently inferior.

[yothobro-deactivated20200505]

This all sounds really effing creepy when you put it that way

[rooksandravens]

#BECAUSE IT IS

[fuckyeahfeminist]

And if you deviate from the assigned gender you can be disowned by your family, fired from your job, and beaten by authorities.

[rodserlingofficial]

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

This is like one of those YA dystopian novels where you’re born as one of the bads or one of the goods

[mediasideblog]

[patricia-taxxon]

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[patricia-taxxon]

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

[patricia-taxxon]

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

[ship-of-fools]

[burntoutatelier]

[imjunebitch]

i hate when ur arguing against age verification online and some asshole goes "oh so u want little kids to be watching PORN then huh" cuz like. no obviously I don't want that in the sense that yk. I'm not sitting around hoping a 12 year old is watching porn. I just remember not even knowing that something that had happened to me WAS sexual assault until I was like 13, because I had restricted internet access and my parents had given me a very vague unhelpful and evangelical description of sex. kids should know what sex is so in the worst case scenarios like what happened to me they can at least know what happened and what to do next. sorry.

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

Any plan for combating CSA is going to have to reckon with the fact that teenagers are often horny and feel a desire to explore and express their sexuality and if they don't have a safe avenue for that which doesn't involve interacting with adult predators they will find an unsafe one which does

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

This is not a hypothetical this is not a piece of rhetoric I was a horny teenager who had safe avenues for expressing my sexuality without the involvement of adult predators closed off to me and so I found the unsafe ones

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

+ if your conception of why CSA is wrong is in any way based on a notion of childhood innocence your actions and rhetoric are contributing to CSA, not fighting it.

The harm that is done to a child when they are sexually abused comes from the fact that they are being placed in a vulnerable situation with a pernicious power dynamic, not from the destruction of some illusory victorian notion of purity

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

Like idk it's really fucked that for some people the rhetoric of "that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn't the aggressor, I'm not in the wrong" is only wrong because they think 15 year olds are like constitutionally incapable of wanting to seduce someone when that's just like categorically incorrect, when I was 15 I very much actively desired to seduce people and even made attempts at doing it. The reason "that 15 year old seduced me, I wasn't the aggressor, I'm not in the wrong" is wrong is because you as an adult have power over that 15 year old regardless of what they are or aren't trying to do and as such if they are trying to seduce you it is your responsibility to not take actions you know to be wrong. It's not wrong because it's describing some kind of impossible desire that a 15 year old would never have, it's wrong because it's seeking to invert the power dynamics of the situation and place all the contextual agency on the minor while rhetorically disempowering the adult to project an image of innocence. It's just garden variety DARVO, not some kind of Metaphysically Incoherent Assertion.

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

Like idk I feel like it should be pretty easy to point out what's wrong with the logic of "the child told me to commit rape so I did" without inventing a rationale about how children are constitutionally incapable of formulating the idea of telling someone to commit rape

[nilkadnaquada-deactivated202307]

This absurd notion of childhood innocence serves only to put minors in more danger by denying the basic facts of how they experience and interact with the world while simultaneously functioning as a justification for depriving them of useful and necessary information that they could use to protect themselves from predators if they were allowed to have it. When you deny children information about how the world works with regards to sexuality, and deny yourself information about how children work with regards to sexuality, you are putting both yourself and children in a position of having to build a plan on faulty information and you shouldn't be surprised when the house you build this way crumbles under a stiff breeze.

[64mpg]

guy who has a mental health condition that comes and goes: i’m cured this time actually i can feel it

[64mpg]

same guy when they start having symptoms again: what the fuck is happening and why

[burntoutatelier]

i call this the anosognosia express. it's like the scene in the polar express where the train goes up and down really big hills, but if the people in the train weren't and couldn't be aware that hills existed.

[burntoutatelier]

been thinking about this one a lot recently, *remember the moon survives* by Barbara Kingsolver

[anarqueeen]

yeah the doctor said they found the source of my guilt and quiet agony deep within my core. Yeah turns out there really is something physically and fundamentally wrong with me that I've been carrying my entire life. No they said they're not gonna remove it. Said its an "elective surgery" so insurance won't cover it. Anyway how are you

[tpwrtrmnky]

I think it's important to keep in mind that trans women and cis women are the same gender, and in fact, have a lot in common. Queer cis women in particular will tend to be able to relate to trans women's experiences because like. That's two groups of queer people of the same gender.

That doesn't mean queer cis women experience transmisogyny. It does mean that misogyny without the prefix actually affects all women.

[tpwrtrmnky]

When people bring up various cis women getting the "she's [like/actually] a man" thing thrown at them saying "see, it's not just trans women who get targeted by transmisogyny" that's backwards. Women getting characterized as "mannish" is regular misogyny, often deployed specifically against various multiply marginalized women but it even gets used to attack, say, white straight women in politics.

The transfeminist angle is to notice this and say "it's actually not substantially different when you do that to trans women. It's the same attack angle. It's not a different tactic just because a transphobic person would say it's 'true', the potential for harm is just amplified by transmisogyny."

[revacholianrobot]

In hindsight it's very insulting to be told that flunking out of college due to adhd is actually "quite common"

[revacholianrobot]

just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.

[yourheartinyourmouth]

only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!

that should disgust and enrage you.

if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening

when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.

but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student

at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.

but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus

[jecook]

Pulled these from a couple articles really quick but yeah the statistics are not kind. I remember writing a scathing essay about my issues with ADHD and college as part of an assignment for academic probation. I got back an email calling me entitled and lazy. Somehow, this thread helps me feel a lot better. I still have about a semester of school unfinished that I’m unsure if I’ll finish but… yeah. Makes me feel better to know it’s not just me.

[lady-harrowhark]

PSA: The Job Accommodation Network maintains a searchable database of accommodation suggestions for a wide variety of disabilities.

The full database can be accessed here and the ADHD page is here. The full database can be filtered by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation. Many of these accommodations are applicable to academic settings as well as the workplace.

Here are the section headers for ADHD accommodations ideas to give an overview of what the page contains - this post would become Do You Love the Color of the Accommodation if I attempted to list them all here

The ADHD page linked above also includes case examples and strategies for determining what sort of accommodations might be necessary. More broadly, the JAN website as a whole is a treasure trove of information related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and resources for both individuals and employers.

[trambrosia]

Oh fuck that's really nice, I will read it

Also just heard a podcast interview with a software developer who had good suggestions

Being a developer with ADHD

Do you feel like ADHD is holding you back? Maybe you don't personally have ADHD but you work with folks who do and you'd like to support the

[dandelionsresilience]

The head of disability accommodations at my college just kept ablesplaining to me that “accommodations are to level the playing field, not give you an advantage,” and that her job is to “protect the school’s rights” rather than help disabled students. The only accommodations they would offer me were 1. extra time on tests, and 2. an alternative test-taking location - neither of which I needed. I ended up getting (most of) what I actually needed by unofficially asking the individual professors, but it should have been legally protected.

[sarroth]

Job Accommodation Network?! Filters to find what might actually help? Shit that organization rocks.

Helping people is certainly @wholesomepostarchive right?! This makes my day.

[wholesomepostarchive]

1/30/2026

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.

I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.

And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.

And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.

That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.

[starlingsongs-deactivated201608]

I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, I’d appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.