tucks you in and kisses your forehead then shows you my knuckle tats that say SEEP TITE

Ursula K. Le Guin

The statement shouldn't be taken as Ford being unhappy with the animals nammed after him, BTW. He actually loves snakes and what he said about this most recent one, which has bright copper eyes, was reminiscent of the genuine love of animals shown by people like Steve Erwin exhibit: “The snake’s got eyes you can drown in, and he spends most of the day sunning himself by a pool of dirty water — we probably would’ve been friends in the early ‘60s,” Ford said in a characteristically dry statement.

me when I'm caving in minecraft and hear ambient.cave

@badatwritingstuff

MY BLACK ASIAN ASS HAS BEEN TRYIN TO TELL YALL ABOUT THE BEAUTY OF SPAM EGGS AND RICE FOR DECADES ITS SO CHEAP IT COST LIKE $5 AND U CAN EAT IT FOR WEEKS. THATS LIKE 25 CENTS A MEAL 🍳 🍙

I guess I’ve been lied by Monty Python...

I don't know about where y'all live but Spam is pricey here. Like I could just buy MEAT. I feel like I'm living in the darkest timeline.

facts about The Fear, after 20 years of life with her

The Fear is NOT:

• an intruder, invader, or some other entity from "outside" You
• inappropriate, wrong, or incorrect
• a responsibility
• a punishment
• "irrational" or otherwise able to be understood through a relationship to "rationality"
• an "inaccurate" representation of reality

The Fear IS:

• an innate part of you
• extra-rational—she exists outside and completely independent from "rationality" and does not respond to being judged according to that lens
• self-love—her purpose is to protect you and keep you safe
• self-sufficient—fear is a 100% whole, complete entity that doesn't "represent" or "reflect" something else
• earnest—fear is always a 100% real experience that is exactly as it is felt, and, needing no comparison or reference to any external reality, it is not "dishonest" or "inaccurate"— it asserts a claim about only itself
• subversive [not quite the word I am looking for but it will have to do]— is not necessarily beholden to social and cultural norms of what should be feared, how much, and how you should respond. She does not stop existing in the absence or suppression of vocabulary to describe her.
• a demand for care— she does not just communicate to you but to the community you are part of; she calls attention to an obligation that this community has toward you, to make sure that you are safe within it and that your experiences are heard and understood.

yeah, so, i've had severe anxiety for my whole life and the way it's been treated and dealt with, and the way I've been taught to understand it, has really fucked me up so I am trying to lay the groundwork for understanding it differently

I think it's pretty fucked up that we're taught to see anxiety as deceptive or inaccurate. Now, obviously the images or projections in my fearful thoughts do not usually "reflect reality," but I have come to see this as...not particularly important?

Teaching an anxiety sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict "irrational" fear is, in my opinion, the same as teaching a chronic pain sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict pain with no clear physical source. You might as well speak of "irrational" pain, and pain has the same relationship to rationality that fear has.

"Irrationality" is a quality assigned to fear that is judged by an outside observer, or by the collective cultural biases and hang-ups of a society, as not appropriate to a given situation. This is total fucking nonsense and we should be talking about that, because...well, the first reason is that it implies some kind of fixed standard for what fear ultimately is and isn't for. i like to tell people to watch one of those Coyote Peterson videos where he's going to get a tarantula hawk wasp to sting him, because he's obviously having a strong physical fear response, even though he knows it won't kill him. Is it "rational" to fear suffering and not just death? How much suffering? Sit with that one a little while.

The second reason, which is even more convincing, is that the "rational" brain is not consulted at any point, ever, when a person feels afraid. It's just a response. The fear response is not routed through the conscious, sapient, reasoning brain. And thank God, because if we needed to hear back from an upstairs executive before we could decide whether to run from a lion, our species would be extinct.

Techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy were absolute fucking shit at making my life any better, but fantastic at wrecking my ability to identify my own emotions, because Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety basically amounts to trying to brainwash yourself into thinking you don't feel the emotions that you do. It's a really neat way to develop bizarre psychosomatic symptoms and start experiencing anxiety through constant body pain, swollen lymph nodes, and digestive issues.

For an institution that pathologizes having "alters," psychiatry sure loves to encourage a suffering person to view normal and ultimately good parts of themselves as distinct, intruding entities to be shoved in a closet somewhere.

And yes. Fear is ultimately a good part of you, a part of you that loves you.

What began to set me free was feeling that acid terror and sickness and rage course through my body and realizing—really realizing—that I was being illuminated with this ancient, powerful force driving me to LIVE.

I want us to make it. I want you to live.

And you know what, I want me to live too.

I abandoned the doctrine of calming down—Lord knows it had never worked anyway—and started really just exploring and existing in the Fear.

How did that feel? Bad. Very very very very very bad and really not productive or helpful at all initially. Which was unavoidable. Necessary. She had been frantically clawing to communicate with me for so long, and I had been shutting her away, silencing her, resenting her presence in my psyche. I started trying to show gratitude toward the signals my body gave me. I started trying to show gratitude toward her—and i guess the Fear was a Her now, this just seemed more respectful.

And it seemed like nothing happened, but several things happened.

I stopped searching for validation. That was a big one. At some point I just...stopped needing a "reason" or justification for the fear I felt (trauma???? neurodivergence???? neurodivergence trauma????) and the fact that I experienced it became completely sufficient and satisfying to me. So much guilt and confusion disappeared.

I also became steadily more confident about my own boundaries, particularly in regards to recovery.

It's awful now that I think about it, but I think I felt this sense of almost moral obligation towards "recovery," as if I needed to "overcome fear" to be Courageous and Virtuous. It made me feel crushing guilt to feel any hesitation about this.

But then this started to change. It became more real to me that was the only person affected by the steps I did or didn't take toward recovery, and there was no moral dimension to it. A therapist couldn't put me in a box I wouldn't willingly go into.

Freedom from these judgmental frameworks is really important to me. I think that I always hated the idea of getting "better" because it seemed like "better" would mean just getting better at submitting to things I was afraid of while everything felt just as bad as it always did on the inside.

And on some level—even though I could never put it into words at the time—I violently hated the idea of "recovery" from some of my fears because it seemed like the ultimate denial of agency. I didn't want to "become okay with it"—the possibility felt dehumanizing. It felt awful.

And I realize now that this is because The Fear represented something I needed to have a right to. Many of my most life-destroying fears centered around things being done to my body, and if I could have pressed a button and been no longer afraid, I wouldn't have, even though it would have spared me so much suffering, because...I needed it to be okay to want agency over my body. I needed it to be right. The Fear, in this case, was a demand that my body be treated as sacred.

I realized that there were many cases where The Fear was a territorial claim of sorts, a demand that certain needs be honored and met—She needs this. This is FUCKING non-negotiable.

And it really...prompted me to look backward on my life and see The Fear differently: not as a responsibility I had failed to shoulder (me?? a little child??? responsible?? Responsible for being brave, when every day felt like facing a firing squad?????) but as a collective responsibility

Because I was not alone in those memories—I was surrounded by adults that saw me suffering, and often dismissed, ignored or ridiculed it. The Fear grew larger and larger; why?—to protect me. Because teachers, nurses, doctors, and camp counselors did not do any of the thousand thousand things they could have done to make that little girl feel safe. Because my well-meaning parents praised me when I was "brave" but I, a little kid, literally couldn't communicate how awful it always felt.

The Fear was not there to torture me. The Fear was and is doing her best to keep me safe. It's not wrong, there's no need for guilt. It just is.

It doesn't feel good. But maybe one day it will feel better.

This:

I think that I always hated the idea of getting "better" because it seemed like "better" would mean just getting better at submitting to things I was afraid of while everything felt just as bad as it always did on the inside....I violently hated the idea of "recovery" from some of my fears because it seemed like the ultimate denial of agency. I didn't want to "become okay with it"—the possibility felt dehumanizing. It felt awful....The Fear represented something I needed to have a right to....I needed it to be okay to want agency over my body. I needed it to be right. The Fear, in this case, was a demand that my body be treated as sacred....I realized that there were many cases where The Fear was a territorial claim of sorts, a demand that certain needs be honored and met—She needs this. This is FUCKING non-negotiable.

I have been struggling to articulate this for...a decade? I want to scream. You put it into words and now I can finally explain in a way that will maybe make the people who love me and the people I have hired to try to help me actually UNDERSTAND.

It has always felt like trauma and fear and anxiety and all of that is close kin to anger; something else nobody has the right to tell me to abandon as illogical or toxic. I despise that so many people I am forced to see apparently think that I need to get rid of both.

I don't want to be expected to force myself to tolerate torturous conditions and submit to being violated repeatedly by disrespectful people just because my fear and trauma are not "rational" or "helpful" and I "shouldn't" be bothered by things that aren't a "big deal." I don't see how that's a healthy or reasonable goal.

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:

• Tech that can regenerate my old meat legs.
• Robot legs that work just like meat legs and are functionally just meat legs but robot
• Literally anything that would mean I don't have to use a wheelchair.
• If I do need to use a wheelchair, make it fly or able to "walk me" upstairs

What I actually want:

• Prosthetic covers that can change colour because I'm too indecisive to pick one colour/pattern for the next 5+ years.
• A leg that I can turn off (seriously, my above knee prosthetic has no off switch... just... why?)
• A leg that won't have to get refitted every time I gain or loose weight.
• A wheelchair that I can teleport to me and legs I can teleport away when I'm too tierd to keep walking. And vice versa.
• In that same vein, legs I can teleport on instead of having to fiddle around with the sockets for half an hour.
• Prosthetic feet that don't require me to wear shoes. F*ck shoes.
• Actually accessible architecture, which means when I do want to use my wheelchair, it's not an issue.
• Prosthetic legs with dragon-claw feet instead of boring human feet or just digigrade prosthetics that are just as functional as normal human-shaped ones.
• A manual wheelchair with the option to lift my seat up like those scissor-lift things so I'm not eye-level with everyone's butt on public transport/so I can reach the top shelf by myself.
• A prosthetic foot that lights up when it hits the ground like those children's shoes.

Some apps that helped me with ADHD functioning/adulting.

TL;DR at the end!

EDIT: I still heavily struggle with keeping up with everything and it can be overwhelming, but I'm trying to figure it out and hoped that this could be some help for you guys.

I made it look overwhelming with all the colors, but I promise that they're a lot more accessible and easier to use than it seems.
Edited for accessibility on August 6th.

📋 1. There's an app called TickTick

It has...

🍅 a built in POMODORO (with customisable timers, a strick mode with an app and site blocker, and a whitelist),

⏱️ a TIMER that you can set on specific tasks or subtasks,

📅 it has a CALENDAR,

📚 LISTS, TAGS, an Eisenhower-matrix, Kanban Board,

🤩 you can endlessly CUSTOMISE it with colors and emojis,

🚩 you can set PRIORITIES and set the lists to show the items SORTED BY date or priority or name or custom, etc.,

🏡 you can create SECTIONS within the lists too,

📮 you can set NOTIFICATIONS that POP UP ON YOUR SCREEN giving you the option to start a timer, postpone it for later, check it off, or skip it.

📈 You can create both SUBTASKS and checklists for your tasks, and it shows a tiny PIE CHART with the prescentage completed. It also shows how many days are left.

- With school tasks, I've listed everything I had to get done for the exam and added all the information and details, e.g. for all my readings, I included the link/where to find it in the library, the pages I had to read and the number of pages for quick access.

- To make it more fun/gamify the process, I added a little emoji (e.g. a waterdrop 💧 or a colored book 📙) before the name of the thing I have just completed and e.g. a bucket 🪣 or river 🌊 or plant 🌱 for the raindrops, or a bookshelf 🗃📚 emoji for the books, and as I complete an item, I collect the books/drops, etc. in there.

For example:

✉️💌📧📦🗞 >> 📬📮

🌧💧 >> ☔️ or 🌊 or 🪣 or 🌱 or 🪴

📕📙📔📗📘📖📚📒📑📜 >> 🗃🗄📚

🌟🌙🌠🪐🚀🌕☁️ >> 🌌

Etc.

🪣 2. Then there's Tody!

🧹 An app for HOUSEWORK,

🙌 it REJOICES when you complete a task,

💦 it puts little SPLASHES on the area where there are tasks to be done

🙆 you can set "EFFORT LEVEL",

✉️ it also sends you a NOTIFICATION

and meassures how dirty one thing might be based on the last time you cleaned it.

You can RESET it.

🍽 3. Then there's WonderFridge!

It's an app to keep track of the CONTENT of your fridge and pantry, it has plenty of beautiful ILLUSTRATIONS for every sort of drink or food. It keeps track of the EXPIRATION DATES of foods and sends you NOTIFICATIONS so you can eat/use them up before they go wrong.

🕑 4. Then there's Boosted!

Boosted is a very SIMPLE app, originally created to MEASURE the time spent on different projects and their subtasks. I personally use it to break down tasks in the moment and do a speed run doing them as fast as I can. (Especially when I'm about to hit a deadline.)

🐦 5. Then there's Finch!

Finch is an adorable SELF-CARE app in which

you hatch a LITTLE BIRB and as you do your tasks, you give them ENERGY to go, explore and every day come home with a new thing explored, CHAT with you about it and GROW a little.

💡It has TASK SUGGESTIONS,

📓 a built in JOURNAL with or without prompts,

❤️‍🩹 breathing and grounding exercises, an S.O.S. mental first aid box,

⏲️ timers, reminders, lovely messages,

🤗 acts of kindness, and many more.

You can also group your tasks into JOURNEYS.

🙂 6. Then there's Daylio!

Daylio is a very SIMPLE JOURNAL/DIARY to KEEP TRACK OF THE DAYS ('cause I rarely remember what happended yesterday or which day did something happen.) You can set up little BUTTONS for activites, moods, symptoms, the weather, or anything you fancy and just tap over the ones that fit the day. You can also freely ad text, photos, or create a sound entry.

It's fully customisable (even the colors and moods) and makes you plentiful of different STATISTICS so you can check long term tendencies. It's super useful for monitoring mental health.

⏳️ 7. There's also Tiimo

Tiimo was developed by and keeping in mind the needs of neurodivergent people. In it you can set up routines and tasks with their duration and an emoji (they have a beautifully colored emoji set!). You can schedule your tasks at a specific time or set them "to do anytime" and set them to repetition. Once the scheduled time comes you get notified and the app starts a visual timer (even if you don't start the task...) and once done, you can check it off.

TL;DR

TickTick is a cool to-do app where you can make colorful lists, tag tasks and it helps you sort them by priority. Tody is a chores app that measures the dirtiness and is happy for you when you complete a task. Wonderfridge is an app where you can keep track of your food and their expiration dates and has nice icons. Finch is an adorable self-care app where a little bird grows with you and that suggests you self-care activities. It is a 100% mental illness/disability/neurodivergency friendly. Boosted helps you break down tasks and measures time. Daylio is a low-effort diary to keep track of the days, especially useful if you have memory issues. It makes statistics too so you can see how a thing might affect your mood. And Tiimo, a visual timer for tasks and routines.

-------

I hope I could help some!

If I made any typos, let me know!

*friendly salutes* Until next time! 🫡

Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"

Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."

I've been scream laughing at this for several days

the first time i ever saw this video it made me spit out my drink all over my desk which is somewhat ironic considering the content of this video