Tag: depression

mentalmentalhealth:

girlwhorpsalot:

I needed this.

Thank you to all the people who posted this so I ended up seeing it. I really needed this right now. Thank you!

Transcription of the image:

[A screencap of a caption above the image of a poster]

I’m a therapist and keep this poster in my waiting room, apparently it’s saved a few lives

[Poster with a blue background and an owl motif to the upper left and lower right around the text. Text is in all capitals]

I don’t like the phrase “a cry for help”. I just don’t like how it sounds. When somebody says to me, “I’m thinking about suicide, I have a plan; I just need a reason not to do it,” the last thing I see is helplessness.

I think: Your depression has been beating you up for years. It’s called you ugly, and stupid, and pathetic, and a failure, for so long you’ve forgotten that it’s wrong. You don’t see any good in yourself, and you don’t have any hope.

But still, here you are; you’ve come over to me, and banged on my door, and said, “Hey! Staying alive is really hard right now! Just give me something to fight with! I don’t care if it’s a stick! Give me a stick and I can stay alive!”

How is that helpless? I think that’s incredible. You’re like a marine: trapped for years behind enemy lines, your gun has been taken away, you’re out of ammo, you’re malnourished, and you’ve probably caught some kind of jungle virus that’s making you hallucinate giant spiders.

And you’re still just going, “Give me a stick. I’m not dying out here.”

“A cry for help” makes it sound like I’m supposed to take pity on you. But you don’t need my pity. This isn’t pathetic. This is the will to survive. This is how humans lived long enough to become the dominant species.

With no hope, running on nothing, you’re ready to cut through a hundred miles of hostile jungle with nothing but a stick, if that’s what it takes to get to safety.

All I’m doing is handing out sticks.

You’re the one staying alive.

Bedtime, 19 June 17

Either my sleep window is shifting again, or I’m struggling more than I think I am. And I suspect it’s more likely the latter than the former, because good days when I am engaged with things, I stay up later. And regardless of when I’m to bed, my wake up time is remaining fairly consistent.

I have a thing that I would love to be able to do. That I have discussed with more than one person as a dear dream. That the latest discussion has involved actual looking at potential costs and places and planning. It is a thing that would make it so much easier for more than one person to keep from going under. And I am at an utter loss on where to actually start, and more, absolutely terrified of asking for help to maybe make it real. Even though I know I’m not the only person who thinks the idea is fucking fantastic.

And yes, I’m being vague. See also, terrified.

I should probably write up something for it, though I don’t think I will have the ability to post that more specific stuff to tumblr at first. But maybe, maybe, if I start with a post that is locked to a much smaller subset of people, I can get myself to start trying to put things together. Because terrifying as asking for help might be, the idea of the thing is just.

I want to be able to be a person again. To not end up struggling like this with no one around to reach out to (without using a computer or a phone or having to travel several hours), and with no other way to cope with it but sleep.

No, I am not alright. I don’t know if I will ever be. But I want the chance to be. And I’m not going to have it staying in the holding pattern my life seems to be right now.

Writing update and brain weasel related melt down/word vomit under the cut because it got long.

My drafts folder on here currently contains a half dozen non-fic posts, a dozen and a half of mixed old-fic-posts and fic-rec-posts and a dozen unfilled prompts. Approximately, anyway.

The fic rec posts mostly need me to queue them up and make sure they’re tagged properly. I might do that tomorrow.

The old-fic posts need me to go rummaging on my hard drive and copy-paste fic, and for me to queue them up, and then they’re ready to go. Another thing I might do tomorrow because it’s pretty simple.

I don’t know if I will ever fill those prompts. At least one of them I’m fairly certain I won’t fill, because not my AU, I just was happy to do some world building and let other people use it. It’s marked for art, but I have no idea what I’d even do for that.

The rest of them. Some of smut-prompts, and those aren’t getting filled any time soon (my ability to deal with sex in fic, writing or reading, fluctuates, and has been on a seriously nope for the last several months; if interest returns, I’ll get to those prompts).

The non-smut prompts… I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

I mean, I’m fairly sure a lot of what’s made it hard to write is I’ve been so damned tired for months now, because I am constantly fighting my brain and body to just keep going, and there’s been extra fuel for the brain weasels since November, and it’s making it that much harder to get them out of my way. Just for things like eating and getting enough to drink on a regular basis.

Yeah, I get things done, but right now, it feels like so damned little, and I haven’t gotten more than a handful of words most days for the last two months, if any at all, and just. It feels like I’m going nowhere, no matter what I get done.

(Right now, the brain is being horrible enough that even the getting a doctor’s appointment feels like it’s a pointless achievement. I’m aware that it’s not, it just feels like it right now.)

And when my brain gets to a point like this, reminding myself that I have achieved things, and recently, doesn’t actually help. Might help tomorrow, might help in a week, but right now, tonight, no. Tonight is a night of holding on by my fingernails and refusing to let the brain weasels win, but fuck, it’s hard.

(I don’t even know if I’m trying to ask for help or just venting right now, though I am definitely venting. Get it out of my head before it runs in circles and blows itself even further out of proportion.)

I’ve been on this hellsite two and a half years now. I can look back, if I’ve tagged shit well enough, and see the ups and downs of my mental health and physical health and living situation. I can look at it, and put my finger on certain things that have helped, and things that definitely have not. I’ve gotten words for things I didn’t have words for before (agender, aromantic, autochorisexual), I’ve found people I am willing to call friend, and who reach back when I reach out. And you know, that does help. Putting that into words helps, as well as the people and the words and the documenting of shit.

(Heh. I can look at this post and see the meltdown and the hopefully-not-momentary recovery. It’s still hard, my headspace is still not good, but that wrenching, hungry pit of despair at the futility of everything isn’t trying to chew its way out from my rib cage at this point. It’s still there, nestled at the base of my sternum, gently gumming at my stomach and diaphragm, but it’s not gaping hungrily and trying to swallow me whole any longer.)

Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.

We don’t normally think of games as hard work. After all, we play games, and we’ve been taught to think of play as the very opposite of work. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”

When we’re depressed, according to the clinical definition, we suffer two things: a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity. If we were to reverse these two traits we’d get something like this: an optimistic sense of our own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity. There’s no clinical psychological term that describes this positive condition. But it’s a perfect description of the emotional state of gameplay. A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.

Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal

This book is fantastic and well worth reading even if you only play games and aren’t interested in making them. It’s about how games make us better and how they can change the world, by making it more gamelike and thus more motivating and rewarding. 

You can also watch her TED talk about the same subject here!

(via thecindercrow)

Bedtime 22 Mar 17

Hugs for everyone, and I hope you sleep well when you get there.

(The post got long, so the anxiety word-dump is under a cut.)

Have to adult tomorrow. Specifically, I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, and the anxiety is in fine form tonight, spinning out all the horrible ways this could go, and how it’s not like any doctor is going to listen to me and all they’ll tell me is lose weight and everything will be fine, or that they’ll decide that I’m just there to get high.

Which, brain, what the ever-loving fuck, with how zealously I tend to avoid pain medication of any sort, even over-the-counter, and all the rest of my issues regarding medical shit, how the hell do you even decide that’s a thing?

… Oh, right, because I’ve read a bazillion and one stories and articles about how the medical industry fails women and female-presenting and generally anyone they decide is a woman or girl, and how it fails people with chronic pain, and people who are transgender, and people who are fat to any degree whatsoever…. all of which are applicable. And any one of which is a potential problem with anyone new, much less someone who is supposed to be helping me with this shit.

Eh. One thing to add to the things to be proud of today – I actually wrote down and articulated one of the things that has been a problem for twenty years and I spent most of trying to repress the thought. That I do have a certain amount of dysphoria about my body. Namely, the floppy bits of fatty flesh on my chest that I didn’t want when they showed up instead of muscles (and then tried to forget that I didn’t want them, because that’s what you’re Supposed To Do, right? Not question what you’re given, and accept the gender you’re told you are? … I have been a long time getting to the point where I can say and believe that that sort of thing is bullshit).

Even the internal organs don’t cause as much dysphoria (trouble, yes, and irritation and frustration) as the external bits. I just want it all gone, though. Internal reproductive bits that I have no desire to use and never have and only cause a desire to destroy everything. Boobs, because they get in my way, and were never supposed to be there according to my internal map of life, and I’m tired of pretending that I’m fine with them and they’re not an issue.

I’m tired, full stop, honestly. Just. I want my body to function well enough to complete tasks of daily living on an actual daily basis. I want my brain to stop trying to kill me (and trying even harder in the winter, and with more gusto one week out of four). I’d be ecstatic to be able to do it without pain meds ever. But realistically, I’m going to need at least something for the worst days (which, right now, with my habits, would be maybe a handful of days out of the year).

Anyway. Bedtime. Twelve hours and fourty-five minutes until show time.

Responses, and Morning 3 Feb 17

norcumi
replied to your post “Bedtime 2 Feb 17”

::careful hugs::

lacefedora

replied to your post

“Bedtime 2 Feb 17”

Sleep well!

*hugs you both* I slept ok, even if I woke up going, “I have too much to do and if I have to deal with people in brick-space, there is waaaay too much risk of meltdown, so. Noping out of swimming today.”

… And my brain decided that today was a day to do word vomit that could well be TMI.

Warning: My mom’s family leans very right on the political spectrum, with very few exceptions that I am aware of, with all the bigotry and hate that implies.

It doesn’t help that the depression piles on over the winter, too, and both depression and anxiety for me involve a shit ton of anger as well as exhaustion, and just. I’m going to be away for a month and a half starting Monday, and different environment might help some. (That it involves a lot of close contact with mom probably won’t.) After that… I don’t know. I might take the first real vacation I’ve had in fifteen years.

No mom, no expectations, no worries about relatives showing up to “just check in on you (and make sure you’re still an obedient little heterosexual girl who’s going to be settling down with a white man to make babies any day now and scold you if you don’t play nice with the bigots who treat you like you’re a piece of shit on their shoe)”

… Ok, so I have some serious issues with my mom’s side of the family, and their intense pressure to conformconformconform, and their fondness for emotionally abusive cult-like churches and absolute rabid racism, misogyny, hatred for all sexual identities not heterosexual, cissexism, and their disgust with anyone who doesn’t espouse their ideals. At least, as of the last time I bothered to talk to any of them. It has been fifteen years. Some of them might have changed. I’m too terrified of what they might do if they haven’t to even find out.

Anyway.

Have fed the cat, took mom over to the pool, ran errands, picked mom up from the pool, got food, got home. Collected two weeks worth of papers from the driveway (Sundays only, so only two papers), two days worth of mail out of the mailbox (grrrrrr), and fixed the paper jam in the printer for mom (she could do it, but me doing it let her sort mail).

To do list for today:

Feed cat (10 am hour, 10 pm hour)

Feed me (one, two, three, four)

Clean litterbox

load of dishes

put away clean laundry from yesterday

prep tomorrows laundry

attempt to write 100-1000 words

call my PCP to schedule a physical for after I get home – that was pointless, because they claim that she doesn’t exist, and since medicaid won’t cover anything non-emergency if it doesn’t come through the PCP that I chose, I’m screwed.

Beyond that, I am probably going to play computer games, and plug in my mini lights for pretty little lights, and poke around getting things prepped for the queue for during a hiatus, which I think I need to do while I’m out of town. Just. Spend some quality time with my only internet stuff being games and webcomics and clearing my email periodically. And write, as best I can.

toomuchhappening:

Be careful or else your mind will play tricks on you. You can have a great day filled with celebration, laughs, happiness, loved ones, friends, family, food, movies etc… And then all of a sudden something like misplacing something will ruin everything.

Your anxiety will build into worry. Your worry matures into self blame and before you know it you’ll have a full on depression episode riddled with disappointment, even when you know you shouldn’t feel that way.

Your mind will play tricks on you. It can make you forget all the good things and that’s when you need to hold on the the good things even tighter.

If given the chance, your mind will play tricks on you.

It is difficult, but do not give it that chance.

meabhair:

tuntematonkorppi:

to all the people out there romanticizing the fuck out of mental illnesses and especially mentally ill artists: kindly fuck off. 

it’s not romantic to be depressed and an artist.

depression (or other mental illnesses) doesn’t help creativity.
quite the contrary.

i usually draw two to three pieces a week on top of multiple sketches, even with my work for school. 

my depression and some other not fun stuff have gotten way worse since december and guess what? 

i didn’t create more. 

i’m having trouble doing the simplest things on photoshop or on paper. some days i can’t even think of drawing without having a panic attack. i’ve been working on pieces for weeks, pieces that usually take me a day to complete.

the artistic part of my brain is literally buried under depression, anxiety, dissociation and morbid thoughts. 

so fucking stop with this.

This, so much.