they say you can't pour from an empty cup but i've been doing it my whole life and aside from all of these mysterious ailments it's working out great for me
I wanted to talk a bit about my experience with it so far. (If you are a stressed loved one of mine, this is okay to skip).
Today marks a week since I have been able to leave my bedroom for anything other than the bathroom. The isolation is almost violently crushing.
And I am one of the lucky ones.
I am lucky because I can tolerate sunlight in my room most days. I am lucky because I can sit up and draw for short periods of time. I can occasionally call a friend, I can tolerate screens, I can listen to upbeat music. On a very good day, I can leave the house in a wheelchair.
These things are not accessible to people with very severe cases.
Despite the gifts I can still access, I struggle. I struggle to feel real or alive, with most of my time spent in complete isolation. When I speak aloud, sometimes I forget others can hear my voice. I do it reflexively, to no one, just to hear the sound.
I feel as if this illness punishes me for being human.
My body needs to weep, to process the grief that comes with being chronically ill. Yet doing so makes me sick. A cathartic cry one morning means days in bed afterward.
Joy is not even spared. Every action, every emotion, needs to be recovered from.
I can't sleep, eat, move, think, or use the bathroom normally. The basest mechanisms of survival have warped into painful challenges. Caring for myself is a full-time job, and one that I feel barely equipped to do.
My body always feels sick. There are better days and worse ones, but there is no break. My heart rate spikes by 30-60 BPM when I stand. I feel shaky and nauseous much of the time. My muscles are constantly tense and aching, which also causes headaches. I struggle to regulate my temperature. Often I am exhausted but too wired to sleep. Yet other times, I will sleep my way through multiple days. Everything I eat seems to exacerbate my gastrointestinal issues.
Where I used to pride myself on my cleverness, these days simple words elude me. Language stops making sense. Steps that should be simple become tangled and confusing. Sometimes I am amazed at just how dense brain fog can be.
And of course, all of this is dynamic. Today I can formulate sentences easily, I can think clearly, but my body is much less tolerant of movement than it was just a few days ago. Some days it is the opposite, and some days neither go well.
This makes it difficult to make plans, and to follow through with them. I can look forward to a visit or an outing all week, only to wake up too sick to sit up, or tolerate sound.
It never gets any less heartbreaking.
Lately I find myself crying out of nowhere, at least once a day. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that this could be the rest of my life. I am grieving dreams that I could not access even in the best-case scenario's distant future.
But I also have hope.
Some of my symptoms could respond to treatment. My case could go from moderate-severe down to moderate-mild over time, with luck and care. I have certainly not given up, and I don't plan to.
This illness is very difficult to live with. My quality of life has decreased significantly. Yet I still have so much to be thankful for, I still have so much joy.
I have people who truly love me doing their best to support me. I have a comfortable bed, and window hangings that make rainbows everywhere when the sun shines in. I have a mobility aid thanks to the generosity of an anonymous stranger.
And I have my heart, which I will never let despair. 💚🔆☘🌱
you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?
Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.
Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.
A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.
He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.
Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.
Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.
The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.
The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.
Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.
They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.
And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.
Little update: people keep donating despite the stream being over. We're at 280 million in the fight against cancer.
Łatwogang refuses to collab with companies that only reached out to him now because of popularity or give interviews. He said any medals people wanna give them should go to the doctors and nurses and the cancer patients.
Someone offered to renovate that shabby little flat for him as a thank you. He refused.
Someone counted up how many people appeared in that room during the whole thing - it was 319 total.
Very fascinated by this Walmart shirt. Could they not use the actual phrase or something? It's not even specifying "when you're mean to me" it's just when you're mean in general this particular bunny gets hurt. She carries all suffering. This bunny experiences all evil in the world.
there was a tiktok I made a while ago basically saying "your abusive ex boyfriend is more likely a misogynist than a narcissist" and while most people agreed some said I was victim blaming(?) and that I couldn't know what their ex is like, and while obviously I don't, every fucking person describing their narcissistic ex is describing a typical misogynist. ask yourself, is this behavior you associate with narcissism directed at women or does he treat his male friends the same way? is his general functioning in life impaired?
many people don't seem to know this, but a mental disorder is NOT based on symptoms alone, it's based on how much the symptoms actually impair you in daily life. most people could look at a list of mental disorder symptoms and identify either themselves or someone else with them. as far as a narcissistic personality, we all know people who appear more self absorbed than others, but this is typically subclinical narcissism (presence of narcissistic traits without significant impairment of functioning) which is not a disorder. there is also a misunderstanding of what npd is. a narcissist is not a supervillain invincible to emotion. npd is a defensive reaction to trauma that lead to deep insecurity and fear of being seen as weak or vulnerable. so narcissists aren't actually "in love with themselves" at all and often are diagnosed when seeking help for other issues such as substance abuse resulting from their struggles.
this focus a lot of abused women in online pop psychology have on narcissism is particularly concerning because it completely glosses over misogyny which is literally a huge factor in violence against women. people really only know misogyny as a surface level thing. they don't know it can lead to family annihilation, for example, and is one reason most family annihilations are committed by the husband. it's always "this man is a sociopath" "this man is a narcissist" when the man's behavior is driven by ideology. I am so fucking tired of everything being tied to mental illness and left at that. you know what this leads to? courts "fixing" abusive men by...giving them anger management therapy. guess what? it doesn't fucking do anything because the problem isn't mental instability leading to anger, it's targeted, purposeful abuse. we are getting nowhere
Tuvok: offers protest, still runs out trusting her as deeply as he does
Janeway: I'm apparently impervious to death or we are asleep
Tuvok: how dare you risk your life to run science experiments
Janeway: Tuvok, you love me
Tuvok: *stern Vulcan face while internally screaming about adoring her*
I really love that even when she walked out of engineering right before saying that you can see the moment Tuvok has a "of course she survived" thought. That man trusts her to survive anything at this point. He will risk anything and everything to save her but if she's got some crazy theory or willing to risk her life he is either 1) going down with her or 2) willing to bet she'll survive
kids' candy ads: this candy tastes good and you'll like it
adult candy ads: you are a dirty, filthy sinner who's going to hell for your indulgences. but god, don't you want it ? don't you feel the call of the void ? don't you finally want to finally fucking feel something in the middle of your stupid, pathetic, miserable life ? yes, you feel satan's hooks pulling at your flesh. you can't hold on any longer. give in and enjoy a $17 bar of chocolate with 98% cacao
sense of self-worth so low that it loops back around into being totally dismissive of everyone else
a warm-hearted kind center beneath 200 protective walls of bitterness that doesn't actually make the bitterness better in any way at all even a little bit
bisexuality
crushing feelings of responsibility
zero understanding of own bodily autonomy that bleeds out and affects how they treat others
a lil petty vindictive sadism they maybe don't wanna look at too hard or acknowledge
full self-awareness of all their most negative traits without working to fix those traits at all
internalized misogyny
a mysterious undefinable hunger that cannot / should not / must not ever be sated
as it gets warmer let's all remember the two most beautiful accessories a girl can have this summer are hairy legs and a bunch of bruises from bangin around
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