here's hoping

Carrie/everything I have no other place for flickr/photo blog

[whilewestillcan]

say hi 🌙

[geekdawson]

one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have. 

no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation. 

no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying. 

no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.

no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.  

a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age. 

Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse. 

I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships. 

The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery. 

[oaluz]

DBT strengthening statements

[pastperfectcontinuous]

Here is the starting line:

Quit all of your social-media accounts except for your favorite one. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can visit your favorite social media for 15 minutes total. Set a timer. If you can’t stick to those limits, you have to quit that account, too.

When you wake up in the morning, exercise for 30 minutes.

Buy or check out two books every week and read them by the end of the week. Squeeze these books into the time you used to spend on social media. If you want to get audiobooks and listen while you exercise, you can do that, but get the other book in print.

Write down ten words to describe yourself. Then write down one reason each trait might exist in you, given your past. At the bottom of the page, write, “I will accept you as you are.” Tape this to the wall. Do this every Monday, until your wall is full. Notice how the words you use to describe yourself start to change for the better. You need to start taking pride in who you are. That includes taking pride in where you’ve been, and how you’ve adapted in ways you never give yourself credit for.

During the day, when you’re tempted to look at social media, when you’re tempted to go on Tinder, when you’re tempted to do something that will hurt you, when you’re thinking in circles, when you’re trying to DECIDE something, stop. Say to yourself, “My first job is to slow down, to be still. My first job is to enjoy this day. My first job is to accept myself and feel my feelings.” Make a vow not to abandon yourself, the way you did with the sleazy guy and the boyfriends of friends. You don’t have to manage your father. You deserve better. Make that your mantra. You deserve better from yourself. You deserve protection from these things that hurt you. I know you don’t think you do. That’s your disordered mind talking.

You are precious, Directionless. When you slow down, you will feel that in your bones. You will feel disgusting and horrible, but slowly you’ll see that it’s beautiful, this moment of knowing how sick you are. You will find your will to go on in spite of how horrible it all is, how horrible you are. You will find your direction. Stop thinking about it and instead, submerge yourself in other people’s work: their art, their books, their lives. Your brilliance is waiting for you to slow down. Your path is waiting for you, patiently. You have to learn to trust yourself. You have to search for your broken, scared self. Not someone else’s idea of you. Not someone else’s approval. Your broken, scared self is the only self that can lead you forward from here.

I know it sounds impossible. I want you to know that I hear you clearly. You want me to know that everything is fucked, that YOU are fucked. I believe you and I know it hurts. I know it’s worse than anyone else can see. I know how it feels to live there.

I also know that you’re ready to live somewhere else now. You’re ready to face the truth. You’re ready to be who you are, even when no one is there to approve of you or give you love or tell you you’re great. You’re going to give yourself what you need now, and it’s going to feel a million times more satisfying than anything else you’ve ever done.

Ask Polly: “I’m Lazy, Reckless, and Addicted to Social Media. Help!”

[whilewestillcan]

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

— Alice Walker (via loveyourchaos)

[whilewestillcan]

““I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.””

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (via oceanofmind)

[her-moth]

Virginia Valian, ‘Learning to Work’, 1977 

[liviafalcaru]

[soracities]

“You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming – or remaining – the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.”

— Susan Sontag’s 2003 Commencement speech at Vassar–via Jac Jemc (via kafk-a)

[whilewestillcan]

“I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”

— Edith Wharton, on loneliness 

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

“No one is going to rescue you from yourself—your inner demons, your lack of confidence, your dissatisfaction with yourself and your life. Only self-love and good decisions will rescue you.”

— Jenni Young

[filmografie]

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), dir. Griffin Dunne

[whilewestillcan]

[allloversbetray]

"to the bone" by Dorothy Allison

[apoemaday]

How It Is

by Maxine Kumin

Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

[sorrrowfull]

[redlipstickresurrected]

Amu aka Amu’s Vision aka Amritpal Dhaliwal (Punjabi, b. 1999, Punjab, India, based Bay Area, CA, USA) - They Come Out at Night, 2022, Mixed Media