Rainy Revision 🌧️

Future psychologist. Thesis, coffee and becoming the woman I want to be

[rainyreevision]

Post #005

“It is a joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.” - Donald W. Winnicott

There is a place within each of us that no one has ever seen. A thought we keep to ourselves, a memory we never tell, a wish we guard like a hidden treasure. Winnicott called this the core of the True Self, the most intimate and private part of our identity.

Hiding there brings a quiet kind of joy. It means having a space that belongs only to us, untouched and free from the eyes of others. A child playing alone, completely absorbed in imagination, is experiencing this silent form of freedom. An adult writing in a journal that no one will ever read is doing the same. There is a part of us that needs to remain unseen in order to breathe.

But there is a delicate boundary. When that hiding place becomes a prison, when no one ever comes looking, loneliness turns into abandonment. A child who is never sought begins to believe they cannot be found. An adult who has never truly been seen starts to question their own existence.

That is why being found matters just as much as being able to hide. It means someone notices us, senses what lies beneath the surface, and waits without forcing the door open. A parent who hears the silence in their child and stays close without intruding. A friend who asks for no explanation, yet remains present.

A good life may lie in this fragile balance: being able to disappear when we need to, without remaining lost forever. Knowing we have a refuge, and knowing that, sooner or later, someone will come looking for us.

[rainyreevision]

₊˚⊹♡ thesis diary #001 (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) ♡⊹˚₊

POV: you finally finish writing your first thesis chapter… and your supervisor politely says: “Great. Now rewrite it.” (╥﹏╥)

Currently surviving on articles, coffee, and the illusion that my bibliography is finally under control.

She sent me new references to read and asked me to send back the updated outline, bibliography, and revised chapter by the 16th.

One revision at a time… (ง •̀_•́)ง

Let’s do this. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ 📚

[rainyreevision]

I’ve been absorbed by a book.

See you in a few chapters. ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ )📖☁️

[rainyreevision]

Your brain needs rest just as much as it needs learning.

Happy Sunday, everyone. ♡

Today we recharge.

[rainyreevision]

₊˚⊹♡ Study Diary #003 ♡⊹˚₊

Today’s study session felt a little different, and honestly, I think I needed that. (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

✿ My mom helped me review several developmental psychology concepts, and explaining them out loud made everything feel much clearer.

✿ Later, I met up with a friend… which somehow turned into another Book Buying Therapy session. 📚♡ Needless to say, I came home with even more psychology books.

✿ Once I got back, I kept reviewing by speaking everything aloud.

✿ I practiced active recall, writing down every concept I could remember before checking my notes. It’s challenging, but it’s one of the study methods that makes me feel like I’m actually learning instead of just rereading.

✿ Reviewed my flashcards and made a few new ones for tomorrow.

✿ Ended the day with a walk with my dog, then curled up with a good book before bed. Honestly… I can’t think of a better way to finish a study day. 🐾📖♡

Some days don’t feel incredibly productive while you’re living them, but looking back, they’re made of lots of small steps. And I guess that’s how real progress happens. 🌱

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎♡ Good night, and see you in tomorrow’s study diary!

[rainyreevision]

₊˚⊹♡ Shelf Therapy #001 ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ ) ♡⊹˚₊

Buying books together is our love language.

Some of these were gifts, some were impulsive purchases, and some definitely weren’t planned…

My TBR keeps growing faster than I can read, but honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way. 📚♡

(Book-buying ban starts tomorrow. Probably.)

📚 My toxic trait? Thinking I can stop buying books.

(…I can’t.)

✿ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — Oliver Sacks

A fascinating collection of neurological cases that reads more like literature than medicine.

✿ Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond — Judith S. Beck

Pretty much the CBT bible. A must-read if you’re into psychology.

✿ The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins

Evolution, genes, and why nature doesn’t always work the way we think.

✿ So Quel Che Fai (I Know What You Do) — Giacomo Rizzolatti & Corrado Sinigaglia

An accessible introduction to mirror neurons and how our brains understand other people.

✿ Veronika Decides to Die — Paulo Coelho

A gift from my friend. A novel about depression, hope, and rediscovering the desire to live. ♡

✿ Lord of the Flies — William Golding

One of my gifts to my friend. A classic about human nature, fear, and what happens when civilization disappears.

[rainyreevision]

Post #004

“Anyone can be transformed by the situation they are in.” - Philip Zimbardo

Stanford, 1971. A basement is turned into a mock prison. Healthy, psychologically stable college students are carefully selected because they show no signs of mental illness. Some become guards. Others become prisoners. It only takes a few days.

People always talk about the guards, the power that corrupts them, the cruelty they discover within themselves. I want to look at the other side of the bars.

The prisoners arrive with a name, a story, a personality. They are stripped, assigned numbers, and forced to wear stocking caps over their heads. Their names disappear. All that remains is a number sewn onto a smock. Zimbardo called it deindividuation: the first step toward no longer feeling human is no longer being called by your name.

One of the prisoners begins screaming after just thirty-six hours. He cries, trembles, speaks incoherently. He isn’t pretending. His body has accepted the situation more completely than his mind could withstand it.

The others stay. They obey absurd orders, line up for invented punishments, and endure humiliations that, in their ordinary lives, they would have rejected without hesitation. None of them was weak. None of them had been chosen because they were especially vulnerable.

This is the part that moves me the most. A victim is not born a victim. A person becomes one within a context that slowly strips away the very tools needed to resist. Resistance requires energy, clarity, and a stable sense of self. When a situation is designed to wear those down, breaking is not weakness. It is the psychology of survival.

I think about how many times, in real life, someone has been asked, “Why didn’t you leave sooner?” How many people silently endured a relationship that diminished them, a job that humiliated them, or a family that reduced them to a role. Zimbardo reminds us that courage is not a fixed trait, carved forever into someone’s character. It is something that any situation can erode, even in the strongest person you know.

There is one part of the Stanford Prison Experiment that few people remember. Christina Maslach, a young researcher, walks into the basement for what should have been a routine visit. She sees the prisoners being marched to the bathroom with their heads lowered, their hands restrained, their eyes empty. She bursts into tears. She tells Zimbardo that what is happening is terrible. Alone among dozens of people involved, she is the one who sees what the situation had made invisible to everyone else.

The experiment ends because of her, after six days instead of the planned fourteen.

Perhaps the real lesson is not only about those who surrender to the situation. It is also about those who are able to step outside it and break the spell. To see the person beneath the number stitched onto their clothes. To say, “This isn’t right. We need to stop.”

Each of us carries both possibilities within us: the capacity to bend under a crushing situation, and the capacity to become the person whose gaze restores dignity to someone who has lost it. Understanding how deeply we are shaped by our circumstances is not a condemnation. It is an invitation to recognize ourselves as more fragile, more human and, because of that, more capable of looking with compassion on those who fell before us.

[titsay]

[remanence-of-love]

[rainyreevision]

₊˚⊹♡ study diary #002 ♡⊹˚₊

Today wasn’t about studying for as many hours as possible. It was about understanding things a little better than yesterday. 🌿

✿ I reviewed several chapters of Developmental Psychology. Some topics were more challenging than others, so I slowed down instead of rushing.

✿ While studying the Apgar Index, I became curious about what my own birth had been like. I ended up opening my medical records and reading through them. It felt strange - in a good way - to connect something from a textbook with my own story.

✿ I reviewed my flashcards and created new ones for the concepts I kept forgetting. Little by little, the pile grows… and hopefully so does my memory. 📚

✿ I also took my little dog out for a walk. Sometimes the best study break is simply fresh air, a wagging tail, and a few quiet minutes away from the desk. 🐾

I wasn’t chasing perfection today. I was just trying to understand one more concept, remember one more detail, and become a little more prepared than I was yesterday.

🌼 Small progress is still progress.

[rainyreevision]

“What if one of the most influential minds in psychology was, at the very end of his life, gently rejected by his own dog?”

Sigmund Freud spent the last sixteen years of his life in extremely difficult physical conditions.

In 1923, he was diagnosed with a carcinoma of the palate, likely linked to his heavy cigar smoking (reports suggest up to twenty cigars a day). Despite the diagnosis and medical advice, he continued smoking for most of his life.

Over the years, he underwent more than 30 surgical operations. These procedures did not resolve the illness and instead led to a progressive loss of function and chronic pain. He was also fitted with a complex prosthesis that separated the oral and nasal cavities, making speech and eating extremely difficult.

In the final months, the disease was in an advanced stage: tumorous tissue had become necrotic in several areas, infections were frequent, and pain was almost constant. To this was added a particularly distressing symptom related to the progression of the illness: a strong and persistent odor.

It is in this context that a frequently mentioned episode from biographies takes place.

His dog, a Chow Chow named Jofi, used to accompany him during analytic sessions. Freud even observed her reactions as part of his clinical work, believing that the animal could reflect the emotional atmosphere of his patients.

Towards the end of his life, however, something changed: Jofi began to avoid Freud. According to several biographical accounts, the worsening of his physical condition and the associated odor had become so intense that the dog, despite her strong attachment to him, started to keep her distance. Freud experienced this as a deeply painful sign of his deteriorating condition.

In September 1939, by then with no prospect of recovery, Freud reminded his personal physician, Max Schur, of a promise made years earlier: to avoid unnecessary prolongation of suffering.

Schur administered doses of morphine that gradually led him into a deep sleep. Freud died on September 23, 1939.

[nunhauntology]

First page of Granta’s “Therapy” edition

[rainyreevision]

“Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?”

There’s a photograph that often circulates on Tumblr, taken from an issue of Granta devoted to therapy. It features a sentence from a letter Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte on August 13, 1937. It is not the kind of aphorism you hang on the wall of a psychoanalyst’s office, nor a polished quote to impress people at a dinner party. It is a private letter, written by a man who was dying—by then, Freud had lived for years with cancer of the jaw, and a prosthetic palate made even speaking painful. Yet within the span of just a few sentences, he moves effortlessly from clinical theory to the darkest kind of irony.

Read it carefully:

“The moment one inquires into the meaning and value of life, one is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; one has merely confessed to possessing a store of unsatisfied libido, and something must have happened to it, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.”

Up to this point, Freud is being quintessentially Freud: the existential question reduced to a symptom, the meaning of life dismantled as though it were nothing more than a faulty hydraulic mechanism. No consolation. No metaphysics. Only libido that has failed to find an outlet and, left unexpressed, has fermented within the psyche like wine forgotten too long in the barrel.

And then, without any shift in tone, without the slightest warning, comes the punchline:

“An advertisement keeps running through my head that would make an excellent American slogan, bold and successful: Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?”

This is Freudian irony in its purest form. It is not humorous because it seeks laughter. It is humorous because it cuts.

Freud takes the emptiest, most relentlessly optimistic language imaginable - that of advertising, of American capitalism selling inexpensive solutions to every conceivable problem - and drives it straight into the most serious question a human being can ask: Why live? That contrast is the blade. On one side stands philosophy’s oldest question; on the other, the jingle of a bargain funeral. Between them is Freud himself: eighty-one years old, gravely ill, on the verge of exile from Vienna, writing not words of comfort to Marie Bonaparte - his patient, disciple, and friend, the woman who would later pay the Nazis to secure his escape to London - but this chillingly dry remark instead.

This is the aspect of Freud I admire most. His irony is never decorative. It never softens reality or shields anyone from it. It is as clinical as his theories themselves. He uses it the way he would use an interpretation in analysis: not to comfort, but to reveal. Even as he approached death, he remained the unsparing observer of his own condition, capable of looking at his mortality with the same analytical distance he once applied to the dreams of his patients. He refused sentimentality. At most, he allowed himself sarcasm.

Perhaps this is the most radical aspect of psychoanalysis itself: it does not promise happiness, nor does it promise meaning. At its very best, it promises only what Freud famously described as transforming “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.” The joke about the ten dollars is simply the compressed, razor-sharp, almost unbearable version of that same idea.

Freud’s theory offers no redemption. At most, it offers lucidity. And for Freud, black humor was the only dignified way to look that lucidity in the eye.

[rainyreevision]

Post #003

"People are disturbed not by situations, but by the way they construe them." - Aaron T. Beck

Beck, the father of cognitive therapy, discovered something the ancient Stoics had already sensed: suffering does not arise from events themselves. It arises from the stories we tell about them.

Think about sending a message that never gets a reply. The fact itself is neutral: a silent screen, a moment of waiting. But then the mind begins to write a story.

"They don't care about me."

"I must have done something wrong."

"I'm not worth anyone's attention."

And suddenly, your chest tightens, your stomach knots, your breathing becomes shallow. No one has actually hurt you. You have told yourself a story of pain, and your body has accepted it as true.

This is the heart of Beck's discovery. Between an event and our suffering lies a subtle, almost invisible space: the automatic thought. That inner voice that interprets reality before we're even aware it's speaking. A boss's frown becomes criticism. Silence becomes rejection. A mistake becomes proof that we're fundamentally inadequate.

Recognizing this mechanism can change the life of someone who suffers. Not because problems disappear. They remain real, concrete, and sometimes deeply painful. But between the person and the problem, a new possibility emerges: the possibility of observing one's thoughts instead of simply being carried away by them.

There is something profoundly liberating in this idea. If suffering came only from events themselves, we would be prisoners of the outside world, at the mercy of whatever happened to us. Beck gives us back a small but genuine space for choice. The chance to ask ourselves:

"Is this interpretation the only possible one? Or is it simply the fastest path my mind has learned to take?"

This doesn't mean denying pain or pretending everything is fine. It means something far more delicate: learning to distinguish between what happens and the story we tell ourselves about what happens.

And within that tiny, precious space lies the possibility of suffering a little less—and living a little more freely.

[rainyreevision]

🍃 So excited to finally see a uni friend I haven’t met in a long time…

it feels like the perfect excuse to slow down a little and breathe again.

✿ Fresh mountain air 🌿

✿ Long walks ⛰️

✿ Quiet mornings ☀️

✿ Beautiful views 📷

✿ Good food 🍝

✿ New memories 🤍

I think I need this trip more than I realize.

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎♡

[rainyreevision]

₊˚⊹♡ study diary #001 ♡⊹˚₊

Today wasn’t my most productive day, but I’m learning that progress doesn’t always have to look impressive. Sometimes it just looks like showing up. 🌷

✿ 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm → Developmental Disorders lecture

✿ Today’s topic: programming & coding 🧠

✿ Reviewed everything with my flashcards 📚

✿ Read and repeated a few more pages

✿ Drank way too much coffee ☕

✿ Motivation: 5/10 (but that’s okay)

I kept waiting for motivation to magically appear… but it never really did. So instead, I opened my notes anyway.

Not every study session has to be perfect. Not every day has to feel inspiring. Some days the biggest achievement is simply refusing to give up.

One day, I’ll look back at these ordinary afternoons and realize they were quietly building the future I dreamed of. 🌱

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎♡ See you tomorrow.

[rainyreevision]

Post #002

Mirror Neurons

Discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team in the 1990s.

Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the motor neurons of a monkey. He wanted to understand what happens in the brain when an arm reaches out to grasp an object.

Then, by chance, something unexpected happened.

One of the researchers on his team picked up a banana in front of the monkey. The monkey remained perfectly still. It didn’t move a single muscle.

Yet the device connected to its brain recorded neural activity.

The very same neurons that fired when the monkey grasped an object were now firing as it simply watched someone else do it.

The monkey’s brain wasn’t just observing.

It was silently experiencing another being’s action.

Think about the last time you felt a lump in your throat while watching someone cry in a movie. Or the moment you saw someone trip on the street and your whole body tensed, as if you had fallen yourself.

That’s not imagination.

It’s biology.

Mirror neurons help explain why yawns spread from one person to another without a single word. They explain why a young child imitates a smile long before understanding what a smile truly means. They explain why, when someone you love is suffering, that pain somehow finds its way into you, without permission, without warning.

Rizzolatti gave a scientific name to something poets had always known.

None of us is truly confined within our own skin.

The boundaries between one person and another are far more porous than we like to believe.

Watching someone live through an experience allows us, for a brief moment, to live a part of it ourselves.

That’s why a well-told story can change you.

That’s why empathy isn’t simply a moral choice we make with our minds.

It’s something our brains, and our bodies, begin to do long before we consciously decide to.

[rainyreevision]

Some people collect memories. I collect books that change the way I think.