[adhd-alien]

I stream at http://twitch.tv/adhd_alien/ You can pre-order my book at http://adhd-alien.com/ or most book stores!

[catchymemes]

[roachpatrol]

ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy. 

[measuredwithcoffeespoons]

For whatever reason, I am going through the archives. Tumblr says I initially reblogged this nine years ago. So, 2017.

A lot has changed since then. I am no longer an aspiring infectious disease expert, but a fully-fledged RN with years of critical care experience. And I still believe this now more than ever.

In the trenches of COVID, I came across a phrase that summarized this sentiment quite nicely. It has since become my mantra:

"The horrors persist, but so do I."

[miseducatedmelanicmuse]

[populationpensive]

Honestly, this is a form of self care. I didn't realize it until later in life but it is.

[untilghosts-deactivated20211029]

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”

— C.S. Lewis (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

[l2g-deactivated20240513]

[snakesonacartesianplane]

[Begin transcription:

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

End transcription.]

[letsboldlygomotherfuckers]

“and when I turned to face grief, I saw that it was just love in a heavy coat”

- Shannon Barry

[corvid-language-library]

Remember that if you want to do more of something, you have to do less of something else. It's that time of year where people set goals for the new year and they have plans and hopes and it's always focusing on what they want to do more of. More studying, more exercise, more crafting, more socialising, more making things from scratch. Okay, great. What are you going to do less of in order to have the time and energy to do more of those things you really want to do?

[corvid-language-library]

And if your answer to this is "less doomscrolling" or "less bedrotting" then great, but please think about why you're doing those things. No one's doomscrolling or bedrotting because they don't have things they'd rather be doing. Actually, I'm willing to bet you have a lot of things you'd rather be doing and you spend your life internally screaming at yourself to do literally any one of the many things you want to be doing instead, but you don't have the energy for them all and you can't work out how to prioritize them, so doomscrolling spares you from making that decision. Or perhaps you're burned out from taking on too many projects and you need to rest your brain, so you lie in bed because you don't even have the energy to get started anymore.

This is going to be a really hard pill to swallow, but the truth is you might not be able to balance all your hobbies and all your projects the way you'd like. If you want to finish writing that book, you might have to reduce your daily drawing habit to a couple of times a week. If you want to do yoga every morning, you might have to accept not cooking from scratch as often. If you want to spend more time with your family, you might have to cut down on your yearly reading goal. I'm not saying give up on your hobbies; I'm be realistic with your time and your energy and be kind to yourself. Stop expecting yourself to do more and do better every single year. You don't have to constantly be growing upwards and reaching for the stars; you can be content with where you are, or even cut parts of yourself back to make space for other things in your life to bloom.

Think about what your priorities are and make peace with doing less of other things. Less is okay. Less is not failing. Less is self care.

[generic-art]

Vintage Girl Scouts of America ‘Brownie’ pocket knife

[assassinationtipsforladies]

We really need to go back to giving six year old girls knives to carry everywhere

[theatricuddles]

[ID: A red pocket knife that reads Brownie on one side and “be wise, beware, use me with care” on the other.]

[thestrawberrydreams]

Inclusive language is for everyone!!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Their boyfriend is their partner why is this hard to understand

[korben600]

Also, “partner” is just a good word? It implies an equal relationship where both of your work together in pursuit of something, whether that be life goals or just having fun together.

It’s a good word. People should use it more.

[transgender-rex]

[rhokotela]

Rhokotela’s Intro to ECGs

Please don’t repost or use without crediting the source. Otherwise, happy interpreting! 

[measuredwithcoffeespoons]

this has become particularly relevant for me lately

[boethiah]

no such thing as wasting your 20s your 20s are for recovering from whatever the fuck happened to you as a kid so that youre ready to get weird with it in your 30s

[closet-keys]

I remember reading a study once that asked people in their 90s to rank the best to worst decades of their life, and the overwhelming majority were like “my 70s were the best” and ranked their teens and twenties as near the worst, and I think about that a lot when people act like if they’re not living their best life at 25 they’ve lost their chance. like nah, the longer you’ve had to learn about yourself, the more you can love yourself. there’s no expiration date on joy until you’re dead

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[headspace-hotel]

people get specific as they age

:O

[sweetoothgirl]

harvest apple ginger spritz

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[sexybritishllama]

the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

[sandersstudies]

I am OBSESSED with people telling me how they met the love of their life. Just found out my director met his wife through a misdirected email - that’s fate right there.

[sandersstudies]

“I saw her last name was Jewish - and I’m Jewish, so when I corrected the email I told her Shabbat Shalom with a smiley face — this was the very beginning of the emoticon era, you understand. She had a watermark of a dog rescue at the bottom of her email, and I love dogs, so I found her website and there she was — all these videos of her rehabilitating dogs and talking about the organization. I fell in love with her just from those videos.”

😭😭😭

[sandersstudies]

“I asked if we could meet for coffee, told her I was looking for volunteer opportunities — which was halfway a lie — and she said ‘okay, but just so you know I have a boyfriend, so this is strictly business,’ and I was so disappointed, but I did want to meet her. We sat in that coffeeshop until they turned the lights out on us, and she broke up with her boyfriend the next day.”

[sandersstudies]

MULTIPLE people in the notes have told me how important these tags are to them so here’s to keeping it in the main post.

[hyrude]

is the world really such a terrible place? yesterday i asked if oat milk was extra and the barista said yes so i said ok just regular milk then and when she gave me my chai latte she whispered “i used oat milk ;)” doesnt that make u want to live another day?

[hyrude]

here is my life philosophy: next week there might be someone ahead of you in line at the store who’s short a quarter and you have a quarter and you can give it to them. if you weren’t there, they’d have to put something back. the week after that you could be getting lunch and the waiter might ask if you want some pancakes someone else ordered and never picked up. you could find someone’s lost cat. you could watch someone’s bag while they go to the restroom. there are so many ways you are going to touch other people’s lives and they are going to touch yours and there’s no way to know when it’s going to happen. so you have to keep living!!! i wouldn’t want to die knowing that tomorrow the barista will give me free oat milk just to be nice. 

[elaninrecovery]

When I was 11 years old - we went to Sea World for my birthday. This was to avoid the realization I had no friends, and no one to come to a birthday party and probably because someone gave my mother free tickets at work. It was kinda a shitty day despite being at a theme park full of cute animals. There was a new roller coaster there that had just opened so we decided to go on. I was nervous. I’d never been on a roller coaster.

A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.

Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.

But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.

I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.

It’s stunningly lovely to be human when we’re kind to each other.

[lymmea]

OH THIS CAN’T BE LEFT IN THE NOTES