🧮 abacus emoji 🧮

18+ to follow pls | adult | he/it | call me Pesto! vampirebutterflies is my fagwife 💕 formerly gremlin-soup

[herpsandbirds]

This is easily one of the CRAZIEST videos I've ever gotten. I was rafting down a river when a Yellow Jacket came, landed on my bright pink waterproof phone pouch, and started drinking from the water droplets that had gathered there.

The most amazing part is how the water droplet magnifies the Hornet's mouth parts, so you get to see them up-close!!!! It was FASCINATING to witness!

Here's some of my favorite still shots from that video:

What do you think? 🥰

[lemonsweet]

Your job is to crawl around on all fours through the aisles and scare all the customers

[autism-thoughts]

The anti-vax and anti-science propaganda is very real - and also, frankly I think doctors and nurses would've had an easier time getting people not to fall for it if they spent less time treating people like fucking shit

[autism-thoughts]

This post is about a lot of things but it is especially about racism, medical abuse, and eugenics

[sourcarmellia]

i can't be the only person who hates being called neurospicy. it's such a weird term. i'm neurodivergent. i'm disabled. call me that.

[needygooose]

I was cleaning out my computer and I found a bunch of screenshots of text posts from 2013-2014. The golden age of tumblr.

I take no credit for these posts.

[quietlyrebelling]

God they don’t make em like this anymore

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

Shitposting these days is more anguished.

[headspace-hotel]

I think it is very helpful to be able to distinguish between a level or type of fear where it is acceptable or worthwhile to "push through" and "do it scared," and a level or type of fear where this is harmful.

The idea of "anxiety" as a disorder of a person having inappropriate fear responses to harmless or safe things causes a framework where the impact of fear is measured by the person's ability to "function" and outwardly respond in "normal" ways, not their internal experience of suffering.

At a certain level of fear, "pushing through" or "doing it scared" loses its power to alleviate fear and instead creates another acutely negative experience of helplessness that increases the fear in future.

Likewise, if a person is extremely, inescapably afraid, telling them that they must "get better" by learning to tolerate and push through fear encourages dissociation and judgmental, domination-based attitudes toward the body, and reinforces the idea that existence itself is negative and scary

I've been given a lot of ideas for how to sense this distinction from notes on my posts, but i have to refine them.

Characteristics of "manageable" fear where "pushing through" might be productive:

Breathing exercises and other "coping skills" calm you down to some extent.

You still feel somewhat connected and responsive to your surroundings and your body, and you can drift between paying attention to different things.

Your memory of the event feels relatively normal (?)

The negative feelings and bodily symptoms resolve quickly do not last after the event is over.

Characteristics of fear that is extreme and severe enough that it needs to be addressed in a different way:

"Coping skills" do not help you to feel any better.

Paying attention to anything is difficult; it's hard to hold a conversation with someone and comprehend what they are saying to you.

Your memory of the event is extremely fixated on a small detail or aspect of it, or you can't remember the event clearly at all.

You feel like you're being pulled out of your body or that your body is limp and being dragged through the scary thing.

The way the fear is making you feel in your body is extremely distressing and unpleasant in of itself (severe nausea, sensations of suffocation, painful bodily tension)

The sensory memory of the event is extremely vivid and keeps replaying itself in your mind.

You do not experience a sense of relief after the event is over.

not sure how to expand this list but I think it's a good start

[headspace-hotel]

I think that feeling a sense of power/agency vs. powerlessness is key here. This is something big in my own experience, feeling like I was making a choice vs. just feeling like I was suffering through a terrible thing.

Think like, doing something challenging/taking an action vs. getting sick with the flu and being miserable.

Another important thing was being able to look forward to some kind of positive outcome when I did the thing, even if just gaining confidence, vs. the badness of the thing being the only recognizable quality to the experience.

I think that having a severe crash from the adrenaline/energy expenditure of panic probably prevents the sense of "something positive happening afterward" from occurring, and additionally, the feeling of being limp/helpless/just letting a bad thing happen to you prevents the sense of confidence being built up.

[headspace-hotel]

I think it's likely that I'm just inherently more susceptible to being strongly, lastingly affected by experiences of things happening to my body.

It's impossible to make provable statements about experience, something that is inherently private, but humans can communicate about their experiences, and humans' experience affects their behavior. In these ways I have concluded that in some way bodily experience is unusually intense, and sensory memories unusually enduring, for me. I have read some research saying that this is true of many autistic people and that we may be more susceptible to PTSD because of it.

Slight changes are very noticeable, minor novelties are very captivating, and the feeling of "What it is like" gets very deeply embedded in my memory. Experiencing something in a slightly new way can make me feel incredibly mentally stimulated and energized. One example is walking barefoot in a place where I normally wear shoes. Doing this gives me a new perspective on "What it is like" that I really enjoy.

One of the most common comments I get on my writing is that my descriptions of feelings and bodily experiences, whether pain and fear or comfort and pleasure, are vivid, visceral, and intense in a unique way.

I think this is cool! It's like I'm deepening and enhancing the flavors and colors of reality for people.

When I was little, this aspect of me was much more negative. I knew as a child that I was more "sensitive" than other people and I hated my own sensitivity. I felt that I deserved to be punished and to experience pain because I was unable to withstand the things that others did. This feeling of deserving punishment was like a sadistic urge toward the "weak" parts of me. It was vicious.

And it has been hard to get entirely past this.

Recently I thought: maybe I am weaker than everybody else, and therefore get traumatized by something that would not traumatize any other person. So what?

If that is factual, it is simply a fact. There is nothing bad or wrong about it, any more than there's anything bad or wrong about how any creature happens to evolve.

There are fish that can only survive in a stream that has the cleanest, purest water, and nobody is fantasizing about harming and causing pain to the fish because they are unable to live in a stream with pollution. It would be silly.

And in some ways it is proven: some people are more susceptible to trauma, and factors like social support and feeling understood by others are a stronger influence on whether trauma develops than the nature of the event itself.

What is the alternative interpretation? I guess it would be that my medical fear is instead a "phobia," which as a diagnostic label comes with certain judgments: that the fear is "irrational," and that the level of fear is inappropriate for the feared thing.

When I first judged that my fear was not a "phobia," it was initially on the basis of the diagnostic criteria themselves: instead of being triggered by the presence of the bad thing or related stimuli and going away when the thing was taken away, my feelings of fear and dread were intrusive and lingering. It felt like they were always there to some extent and I was shutting them out, and when a trigger occurred, the reaction in my body was often delayed, making me feel exhausted and sick hours after. I also had strong compulsions to seek out content I knew would be triggering. I would start to follow these compulsions even without realizing it.

Like I said, it felt like a constant effort to keep the bad things "shut out," like I was trying to push a hundred doors shut at once to keep some kind of foul ooze from leaking in. I would frequently mis-read words as words related to triggering "medical" things, or even misinterpret images as being medical equipment that they didn't even look that similar to.

I also realized that there were no cognitive distortions associated with the fear at all. I wasn't catastrophizing or imagining a bad scenario that might or might not happen, it was simply the fact of the thing itself that was so terrifying. There was no judgment or really cognitive commentary at all associated with it. It was just pure disgust and horror.

But the main thrust of my judgment that it was not a "phobia" is that it did not feel "irrational" at all. My fear felt as fundamental and primal and instinctual as a fear of extreme pain. I balked at the idea of getting therapy to be okay with going to doctor appointments, because it felt to me exactly like getting therapy to be okay with hammering nails through the soles of my feet.

Okay. That is not what I thought. What I thought was "like getting therapy to be okay with being raped," and I FELT this, viscerally, but I changed it to the thing about hammering nails into myself when explaining it to others because...I don't know. I don't know why I changed it when explaining it to others.

I guess the hammering nails thing does better communicates what I felt, in the sense of being forced to be actively complicit in your own torture. Not just to dissociate, but to actively apply extreme willpower to endure extreme suffering.

I know I used this metaphor with a therapist. I don't remember what she said.

I think that during this time of puzzling over the definition of phobia and "irrational" fear, I was coming up with defenses for myself, reasons why the fear is rational. The best I could come up with was "I feel that I want to have control over my body," which seemed like a fairly basic need for a human being, but my therapist at the time asked "Why do you feel like you need to have control? Do you have a need for control in other aspects of your life?" and it made me feel like she misunderstood me on a fundamental level.

I was talking about "control over my body" in the sense of a fundamental safety need: rape is essentially the annihilation of safety in a person's body by invading it. I understood my own needs and feelings pretty well even if I didn't know why I had them.

But I couldn't articulate the idea of a "safety need" for myself at the time, because up to this point, every article and workbook and therapist and every idea passively absorbed from society treated "safety" as something so obvious and self-evident that it didn't even need to be discussed.

As a person with Anxiety, the mental disorder, I was assumed to be "safe" by default, and the treatment of anxiety was all about beating down and dominating bodily and mental responses communicating that I was unsafe, because they were wrong.

Not even that: it was about forcing my instincts about safe and unsafe to conform to an external, socially and culturally determined judgment of what is "safe" and what is "unsafe."

I was taught my entire life that my fear, my body's instinct to protect itself, was somehow fundamentally broken and that it did not communicate accurate information. In some ways, I was taught that human instincts of fear in general were fundamentally inaccurate and wrong, and we needed to use the "higher" parts of our brains to force the "lower" parts under control. Like, I was told over and over again something to the effect of "your body evolved to deal with threats like predators, but we don't deal with that anymore, so your survival responses basically don't work for the modern world."

I believe two things at once that are contradictory: feeling unsafe and being unsafe are completely different things, and on some level, I'm not entirely sure you can truly be safe while you feel unsafe all the time.

Maybe the synthesis of the two is this: despite being different things, feeling unsafe and being unsafe can wreak the same havoc upon the body.

Whether or not I am capable of explaining or justifying why, I was terrified for my entire childhood. I fear sometimes that I am being melodramatic about the amount of Scared that I was, but I know that if anything, I'm understating it. That level of fear doesn't even go into words.

And there were several things that I did not receive:

understanding that my fear was something terrible happening to me, not just a terrible mistake in the way I was assembled as a human that prevented me from doing What I Was Supposed To

assurance that it mattered how I FELT, entirely independently of whether I was able to "function" through the fear or "control" it

recognition that it was even possible to feel safe or not be terrified, ever (I'm pretty sure I internalized the opposite message, given how often people told me that My Anxiety Was Not Going to Just Go Away and that I Would Always Need To Use Coping Skills)

Speaking of "coping skills:" I do not feel that any of the coping skills I was taught to use as a kid fucking worked at all. Breathing exercises have never done anything for me. I have tried and tried and tried them and I fucking hate them. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques did "work" in the sense that they eliminated fearful thoughts, but the fear was still very much physically present in my body, and in fact the effect on my body became much worse after the cognition aspect was eliminated.

Likewise, I did train my body out of having panic attacks, but this was so horrible that I sort-of had to teach myself to have panic attacks again. Like, I would spend days feeling like I was hovering on the cusp of a panic attack but I couldn't release, it just stayed there, and god it was awful.

I think a big reason why coping skills didn't seem to work was how relentless and fundamental the fear was. It was just THERE, this black monolith hovering over me.

And so much of it was so clearly linked to my "medical fear," and it wasn't until I started actually processing The Medical Fear that I stopped feeling like there was some evil Something taking up most of my brain that I was unable to think about and constantly shutting out. I can actually think all the thoughts that are in my brain now, I don't feel like I'm a thin facade of normal thoughts over top of an abyss that I can't acknowledge.

And I'm thinking maybe something could have happened differently. And I don't know if the thing that needed to be different was for someone to see where my fear came from, or to see how pervasive and all-consuming and severe it was, or to acknowledge it as "trauma" and not "anxiety," or just to understand that something not okay was happening, or...what.

Why did I feel so much like it was my fault? Why couldn't I imagine it getting better? Why didn't anyone wonder if there was a deeper reason than my brain being put together wrong?

[notecardpasta]

I think when you correctly identify a trauma that is the base of a woe of yours it should just disappear. It should be like "aaahh. you got me" and vanish and leave 100 dollars behind

[mananabuffins]

Like a row of blocks in Tetris

[tboy-cock]

trans clown getting top surgery and the surgeon pulls out his breast tissue and pulls out his breast tissue and pulls out his breast tissue and pulls out his breast tissue and pulls out his

[iamaine]

my most Millennial trait is that i want big screen to think properly. to compose my thoughts. app exists for your thing but no website? bad bad bad not good for think, need big screen for think. i wrote this post on the small screen btw

[robotslenderman]

I read somewhere that one thing that really pisses off companies about Millennials is that we won't make big purchases on our phones, we always feel compelled to get out a laptop or hop on a desktop for it

[traegorn]

Hell, I won't make SMALL purchases on my phone unless I'm forced to.

If money's goin' out? I want a full keyboard and a screen.

[tragediegh]

stay vigilant. there are still people out there who will try to convince you that eating fruit is somehow bad for your body

[hellenhighwater]

Something just occurred to me in the category of "experiences I feel are universal but are probably not." So here's a poll!

Have you ever been tent camping?

Yes, but not since I was a child

Yes, I have camped in a tent as an adult (possibly also as a child)

No, I have never gone camping in a tent.

Remaining time: 5 days 9 hours

We're including any kind of tent, but not RVs, campers, or cabins. Open-air camping (with no tent) or with tarp tents counts as tent camping for purposes of this question.

[mutantrenegade]

You know Jones soda cap, as a tumblr user i can actually say i think I have.

[itheginger]

i love the linguistic trend of expressing something difficult to describe by just not including an adjective where there usually would be one. “i had a day today,” or “he’s definitely one of the characters of all time.”

it’s like i can’t describe this so i just won’t. you get it tho.

[sillywormz]

once you get used to dinosaur/bird bipedalism and thinking about how they move, then human bipedalism starts to seem soooo weird. we're so upright...... we're like walking jenga towers......... just balancing on top of ourselves no tail for counterbalance or anything. honestly it's impressive that most of us learn how to walk and manage to do it without falling over ever 5 minutes. also it's no wonder abt all the knee and spine issues like yeah that's what i would expect from a fucking monkey doing the equivalent of tightrope walking on its own hips 24/7. goddd

[sadclowncentral]

seething about the fact that i will never experience photosynthesis in my own useless cells. i bet it feels so good when the light of the sun both warms you and fuels you at the same time. a bone-deep satisfaction mixed with a heated sugar-rush and endless brightness. not that i would fucking know

[wren-kitchens]

happy disability pride month and once again, FUCK lazy subtitles. fuck the [speaks foreign language] instead of actually transcribing the words, fuck shortening sentences and changing whats been said for no reason, fuck censoring swearing in captions but not in audio and fuck anyone who says youre being 'too sensitive' for being upset about a lack of accessibility