the bad thing about having unhealthy habits due to mental illness, is when you DO do something healthy style you can't brag about about it because then people will then know you've been doing it yucky style all along. Like you can't brag you changed your sheets or brushed your teeth because then ppl will be like oh did you not brush your teeth regularly before? Thats yucky disgusting! So you just gotta keep it to yourself. And be proud alone, I suppose.
Tell me when you get bored. A story about doses. [x]
I posted this on twitter and had a variety of aggressive ableism thrown my way.
This is a story about changing what I can in spite of what I cannot for the comfort of my loved ones. The thing that others find to be hurtful about me is that I like to spend time in silent solitude. People who love me often feel hurt that I tend to solve my own problems instead of leaning on them.
When we spend too much time together, people find my neutrality to be concerning, and it becomes too much for people to be unable to read me.
To show the people I love that I enjoy their company in ways they can understand, I pool my energy together to be high-energy, peppy, and social. Since this is not my natural state of being, it takes effort, which can only be expended in small doses. I amplify the things people like in me while filtering out everything they dislike about me when I am in their company.
I change my behaviors for those I love, but at the end of the day, I cannot change my neutral state of being, which is the thing that they want most out of me.
This is a story about me accommodating people in the best way I know how, not the other way around. I would truly appreciate it if people don't misconstrue this anecdote as me asking for dismissal of hurtful behavior when in reality, people find hurt in the fact that I simply exist, and I must change for them.
i have a coworker who does great work and is mostly nice but is very negative. they remind me a lot of myself, the self i am trying to no longer be. the other day i heard them say "i always assume the worst, because then when things turn out badly i'm not disappointed, but when things turn out fine i get to be surprised", and it's of course work inappropriate and i would never say this to them unless they asked or we somehow got on the topic, but i wish i could impart to them that i used to have this mentality and it almost killed me.
you have to have hope. you have to be willing to look for the good things or you will forget what they look like. or by the time you recognize them, they are gone. or, if you do recognize it in time, your body and mind are so accustomed to hypervigilance (because let's be real this kind of cynicism is borne of risk aversion often due to ptsd, speaking from experience) that you cant feel joy, only relief. that 'surprise' is still a kind of anxiety response, still a kind of being caught off guard that circuitously perpetuates the hypervigilance: youre always assuming something will turn out badly, which puts you on high alert for trouble/conflict/risk etc; if it ends up being okay, there's the tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop, that there must be some caveat/something you missed, or it results in an anxiety in spontaneously losing the stressor.
terms like 'mindfulness' and 'gratitude' get overused by very annoying people but generally that's what these concepts are trying to address. everyone talks about how people thought they were smarter than everyone else and 'saw things for what they really were' and it turned out that they were just depressed; i think there should be more discussion about how many times a person is not smarter or more perceptive or aware, they more often than not are just experiencing hypervigilance.
even if i could tell my coworker this i doubt they would be receptive to it if they are anything like me. because this shit used to piss me off especially in the thick of my depression, i'd recall all the times where i clearly saw danger coming and the people around me didnt, and i got to feel the confirmation bias of assuming shit would go down and then it did. and again yeah i feel like theres a temptation to conflate anything less than cynicism as a kind of naivete (especially in our current climate of everything) but i promise you that you have to at least in personal or domestic affairs be willing to entertain the idea that sometimes things can turn out okay. if you dont, then they never will.
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