Everything That Kills Me Makes Me Feel Alive

what's up im Azura and only 2% of my blog is original content just like milk

[mitch4tune]

What I Discussed with My Therapist About Selective Mutism Today

Exposure therapy for selective mutism didn't work as well when I was a child because it was the specialists' rules rather than my own. I didn't have the vocabulary to explain back then that it felt like I had to agree to their plans to appease the adults, which meant the ball was never in my court and why I "failed" so many times. I'd also get asked "Did you try?" to the point I'd question if I did at all, even though I was overloaded with stress almost 24/7. My reason for wanting to be able to speak wasn't even for myself; it was because I wanted to be able to help better if there were ever a situation where I was the only one who could speak with emergency services on the phone.

Exposure therapy was only effective when I was in control, which is why I succeeded without the help of specialists more often. When I was eighteen, my then-partner suggested playing games together with the loose objective (not full-on goal) of making a few sounds or saying one or two words. I succeeded the first time. This was because he came up with exposure therapy ideas and I understood that the choice to go with them was always mine alone. He's the reason I'm able to verbally communicate as an adult.

What the specialists didn't understand was that it's not a matter of how much I wanted to speak or how much I tried; it's the timing. When selective mutism prevents me from speaking, I'm able to feel that my mouth is there but don't have access to the control panel. You can't tell someone with asthma to "just breathe because there's air all around you" or someone who has legs but is in a wheelchair to "just walk because you have legs." This is how selective mutism works. My key to wrangling it was getting a word or so in before my anxiety blocked me from the control panel, which would then reduce my anxiety and override the control panel getting closed off. It was still hell, but it was leagues more effective than when the exposure therapy was shoved in my face.

Even if the specialists had family members who were diagnosed with Selective Mutism, they couldn't understand my situation because 1) they aren't me, and 2) every case is different and requires more than a simple "Let's make a generic plan and stick to it, then you'll be able to communicate." Rewards didn't work on me, and if I did succeed and earn them, I'd feel so much shame to the point of accepting those rewards because looking at them was a way to punish myself since I thought my shame was an indicator that I didn't really succeed.

It sounds odd to say at first, but I feel good about being able to get angry about this because it validates younger me's emotions and tells me that I wasn't a clueless child. I didn't have the vocabulary and hindsight at the time to be able to explain all this to others. It also feels really good to finally have the answers to questions that have been burning holes in my brain for decades.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I don’t think we talk enough about how, despite the presence of multiple globes, PotC takes place on a flat earth, ice wall included.

[patrickdiomedes]

I'm gonna need some elaboration here

[thatdisasterauthor]

They literally sail over the edge of it after passing through a hole in a wall of ice. They fall off. They get back to the other side by passing through the whole ocean.

But also there’s a globe on, like, everyone’s desk.

[andthentheywilleatthestars]

#it's like lord of the rings#it's only flat for pirates

[thatdisasterauthor]

You get it.

[finalvortex]

No, but this is actually (sort of) canon.

See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.

Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World's End with the death of the kraken:

Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world's still the same. There's just... less in it.

The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack's compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma's map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.

The pirates world isn't flat, it's round - but because the edge of the world exists in myth, it therefore exists in reality. The pirates are able to find it through supernatural means, but if, say, someone like Norrington just sailed in the same general direction, he wouldn't end up in the same place.

[nitewrighter]

“Pirate” is a mage subclass fueled by word of mouth, rule of cool, The Power of Belief/Love/Friendship, and rum.

[dailyadventureprompts]

If you look at it in a particular way, the Pirates specifically function by FAIRY RULES: obscure codes of law and formality that they are irrevocably bound to abide by...except when you get the wording wrong.

When we go to Tortuga (or any pirate controlled space) we leave behind the sensibilities of the real world and enter this bizarre perpetual revel of debauchery and violence that could never sustain itself in a world bound by sense.

That makes Jack our Puck character, a trickster of tricksters who can invert your fortunes just by letting him talk to you.

It also makes Will into a changeling, born of the fairyworld, adopted by mortals, and fated to return to it in what makes for a doomed love story. Hell, one might say that the reason Will's swords are SO GOOD is because they contain an element of myth about them: they're the IDEA of swords, true to how they would be in myth.

[ganondorf]

i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way

[tedcruzisthezodiackiller]

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

"I'm only criticizing the people who are lazy on purpose" is just not the reassurance people think it is when nearly every disabled person has been accused of not really being disabled and just being lazy on purpose

[ryan-sometimes]

I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor

[arschfrech]

[ryan-sometimes]

I know his tailor is stressed bro look at this man wearing a suit to fix a pothole

[perception-filter]

staring at the dessert menu and twirling my hair and going "should I be baaaaddd" until the autistic girl I'm eating with says "there is nothing bad about eating dessert. it is a morally neutral action"

[from-mars-to-venus]

The year is 1986. The head of dramas at the BBC thinks Dr Who sucks ass and is eager to put it on ice. Your mission is to appeal to him by creating a devastatingly unlistenable charity single. Your allies? A creative team comprised of people who have never heard a song in their life.

[importantcatpics]

[rickybabyboy]

secret methods

secret reasons

[fairycosmos]

theyll show you an unskippable advertisement and expect you not to do something drastic to solve the big problem

[kaelio]

[t4tvampireisms]

FREE MY ETHNIC GIRLIES FROM RHINOPLASTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOUR NOSE BUMP IN FINE LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[t4tvampireisms]

YOUNG BROWN AND BLACK GIRLS: IGNORE THE WHITE INFLUENCER TELLING YOU TO GET BOTOX OR A NOSE JOB!!!!! YOUR FACE IS BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE JUST AS YOU ARE ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

[primulaceas]

PEOPLE NEED TO GET MORE ANTI PSEUDOSCIENCE.

[diaryofaphilosopher]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[lamignonette]

[rose-of-pollux]

[pangur-and-grim]

someone accused me of feigning a sexual attraction to spiders for clout. there's easier ways to get clout, man.....

[bananonbinary]

weird take about fiction: sometimes, actions that would be abusive in real life, hit different in a story. and sometimes i see people react very very strongly to those actions, and i totally get it, because like, that can be extremely triggering and ymmv on whether its handled well or not, but it always makes me a bit. hm.

like, i think the most obvious one is slapping/hitting. in real life, there is basically no situation where that is acceptable, unless you're actively defending yourself/someone else. but fiction is inherently larger than life, its about how it feels, subjectively, over what actually happens, literally. sometimes a character who has never before been violent will hit someone, and it's intended as like, an indicator of how fucked up everything is. that shit is going down. or, a character will trash a room, throwing things and destroying everything in their path. and then its never mentioned again, everything just continues as if they HADNT destroyed their own and other people's property in a frankly terrifying display, because it was just a cathartic moment to represent the storm of emotions the person was feeling. and when i see people like 'this character is an abuser, the story needs to address this,' i think maybe its actually okay for fictional characters to do shitty things and not have it framed as shitty, by the story itself or even on any sort of meta level, with the intended audience reaction. sometimes the point is just to resonate with your emotions, not to dissect the literal sequence of events.

[bananonbinary]

like obviously ive been on the 'you can portray whatever you want in fiction, its all a pretend game' train forever. but i think the important thing to me here is that, you can also defend bad things in fiction. not just 'they did everything wrong and i love that,' but even 'they were 100% justified when they did [thing that would be extremely bad irl].' cause its like, ok, they did do that, but like it was the only way to tell the story well. dont worry about it.

[mikkeneko]

related but tangential, about villains.

by now i've been through a lot of fandoms, seen a lot of different kinds of villains, and met a lot of fans of villain characters. and one theme that seems to surface over and over again, is that the stories and arcs of villain characters provide a very specific fantasy of... hm...

Of your pain matters. Yes, it does. Even if it was overlooked at the time, even if the cops didn't care or your friends excused it, what you felt in that painful moment matters. The villain's big plan is a way of reflecting that pain back on the world. Making everybody look at it and share in it and say yes, this was awful, this should never have happened to you, in a way that nobody can overlook and dismiss.

and in real life, obviously, someone deciding to blow up the moon because their relationship melted down or wife died and now they'll never look at the moon with her again would be Bad. Duh. But it's a story and it's fucking fine because it's not the real moon, so for a moment you can go yes, that's right, I want everyone in the world to feel this grief with me tonight.

[computer-voiced-by-majel-barrett]

Shoutout to my favorite genre of TOS episode: