Every writer on Tumblr: “I would combust out of love if someone ever drew fanart of my fic!!”
Me: “oh man I wanna draw this scene BUT THEY WOULD PROBABLY HATE IT AND HATE ME FOR THE NERVE”Dear artists.
We, the writers, will accept any of your fan arts.
We don’t care if it looks like shit to you, or you think your art skills are not good enough.
We will love any fan art, because it’s the most beautiful way to say “I love what you write”.
Pleaaaaase!
Absolutely.
Tag: this
What people who aren’t victims of parental abuse don’t realize is that we’ll talk about our abusive parent like “I fucking HATE MY MOM so much, she should be in prison, etc” then 5 seconds later be like “well she’s trying her hardest, she doesn’t mean it” “My mom just bought me ___ she’s so cool”
Because with most of us our mentality is “that’s still my mother” and having mixed signals of love and hate thrown at you from your own mother since you been born is confusing and scary. Sometimes we can’t help but forgive her over and over. Especially if you have no one else.
When we say “executive dysfunction”, I think it’s important to acknowledge to ourselves (and make clear to those who don’t struggle with it) that we’re talking about a basket of different struggles that we’re labeling with one name for convenience. One person’s executive dysfunction may not look like another person’s, even though the outcome (not being able to complete a task) may look similar from the outside.
Some people with executive dysfunction struggle to break down tasks into their component steps. Others struggle to connect cause and effect (’if I do this, this other thing will likely happen’), which makes daily life a confusing and sometimes terrifying black box. Still others can break down steps and parse out cause and effect, but they can’t start the first task (hello anxiety my old friend), or they get partway through and get distracted by a tangent or forget what the next step was because there were more than three (ah add i never miss you because you never leave), or they run out of energy before they can finish (tons of situations can cause this, both physical and mental). Sometimes people have a poor sense of how long it will take to do tasks, never seeming to budget enough because they don’t track time internally well. Others can only complete a task when they have sufficient adrenaline to spike their brain into focus, which usually means working in panic mode, which associates those tasks with Bad Feelings and further reinforces any anxiety the person may have.
And this isn’t just a few people. This is large-scale, across many groups struggling with different issues, from heavy metal poisoning to autism to add to chronic illness to anxiety to schizophrenia to mood disorders to traumatic brain injury, and more.
What we need, as a society, is to build better structures for supporting those with executive dysfunction, structures that acknowledge the multiple different types and causes. Because we cannot keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. We throw away incredible human potential that could help all of us because our society is set up to require a single skill which a large percentage of our teen and adult society doesn’t have and can’t easily develop (or they would have, trust me), or previously had by has temporarily lost due to injury or illness.
Instead of treating executive function as something that some people have developed and others haven’t, like artistic skills or a talent in maths or the ability to visualize systems or managing people, we treat it as a default that some people haven’t mastered because they’re [insert wrongheaded judgment here].
What if we treated the visual arts that way? If you can’t draw skillfully, you must be deficient in some way. How can you not draw? Anyone can draw. You start as a young child with crayons, what do you mean you can’t do this basic task?
Never mind that it’s a really complex skill by the time you’re expected to do the adult version, rather than the crayon version. Never mind that not everyone has been able to devote energy to developing that skill, and never mind that not everyone can visualize what they want to produce or has the hand-eye coordination necessary to accomplish it.
Now, I have friends who say that anyone can draw, and maybe they’re right on some level. But it’s hard to deny that it helps that drawing is optional. That you can opt out and no one thinks any less of you as a person. Executive function is treated as non-optional, and to some extent, since it’s involved in feeding and clothing and cleaning and educating oneself, it’s not entirely optional. But we make all of those tasks much harder by assuming by default that everyone can do them to an equal degree, and that no one needs or should need help.
If we built a society where it was expected that I might need timed reminders to eat, I would probably remember to do it more often. I certainly did as a child, when the adults around me were responsible for that task. Now that I’m an adult, the assumption is that I somehow magically developed a better internal barometer for hunger. Many people do. But I and many others did not. Recognizing that there are many of us who need help and treating that need as normal would go a long way toward building support into the basic fabric of our society.
But then, I guess that’s been the cry of disability advocates for decades; just assume this is a thing people need help with and build the entire structure with that assumption in mind.
executive dysfunction
I can never tell whether I have it or I’m just lazy (via spurisani)*waves* I don’t want to be an awkward turtle, but I noticed these tags and I kind of want to address this, since I stumble over this type of comment all the time online and off.
Sometimes writing is like having an enormous lake in your head, and you want to get it out of your head and into a proper place for a lake so other people can come and go swimming and ride jet skis and stuff, except all you have to move the lake is a teaspoon. So you’re just sitting there frantically flinging water out of the lake with your teaspoon and telling people, “Guys, this lake is going to be so cool when it’s done,” but it will never be done. There is so much lake.
I didn’t really expect this to be relatable, but if you wanna reblog, go wild.
It’s taken me a long time to realize and accept that it probably isn’t ever going to go away, and that there’s a way to live alongside it. (I wasn’t sure about posting this, because it’s pretty personal but screw it because I’m all about the destigmatization of mental illness) ❤
I love this.
(Chronic illness is the anchor you’ve suddenly realized you’re dragging and nobody seems to understand how to get the chain off of your ankle, but then it’s a decade later and you’re so used to pulling that fucking thing around that you don’t even notice the scraping noise anymore.)
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
Barbara Kingsolver (via padshiy)
Something else I’ve been thinking about, wrt Pacific Rim and its resonance with millennials.
It’s a disaster movie, an apocalypse movie, that’s not afraid of technology. Machines, computers, the work of human hands–they’re going to save us all.
This isn’t a story about robots turning on their creators. This is a story where the most intimate connection you can experience with another person, the Drift, exists because somebody built a machine to make it happen.
You get so many apocalypse movies that are a little bit afraid of technology, of robots, of science. Where the too-proud scientists went too far and called disaster down upon us, or humanity tried to play god and created a plague/a weapon/woke something bigger and greater than us.
This is an apocalypse movie where (besides one throwaway line about the atmosphere) the end of the world isn’t our fault. Where the things that humanity strives for, to gain more knowledge, to make us greater, don’t all backfire on us due to hubris, they actually make us greater.
And maybe previous generations are used to being told that the end of the world isn’t their fault, but for us? It’s all cell phones, iPods, computer games, bloggers, they’re ripping society apart at its seams. Movies give us zombie viruses and Skynet and Cylons and culture tells us convenience is bad, it’s greedy, it’s wrong even as we’re inundated with new technology on every side.
This is a movie where humanity didn’t accidentally destroy the world by wanting more. Where technology, the sort of thing our generation grew up loving and using and surrounding ourselves with, the sort of thing that older generations are still a little afraid of, isn’t evil.
We’re not evil, as humans, as people who are curious, who want to invent, who like gadgets and wires and talk to each other through machines. Curiosity-technology-innovation may be dangerous, drifting with a Kaiju may be dangerous, but it saves the world. Giant robots save the world.
Score one for the generation that grew up on the internet.
i liked it when the robot punched the monster really hard
I love this post.
current mood: the way boromir says ‘they have a cave troll’ in fellowship of the ring
things to remember:
short responses or no responses are usually due to low mood and intolerance for socializing. not because they hate you and would rather you disappear.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 