buzz buzz

it's all fun and games until you take a little too long to swallow your medication and you start tasting it

Do you ever think about your mutuals (even the ones you don’t know) during the day like “the swedish taurus girl had an exam today, I hope it went well”

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ALWAYS REBLOG WHEN YOU SEE SOMETHING LIKE THIS PLEASE; ITS SO MUCH MORE THAN IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE. IT MEANS EVERYTHING TO SOMEBODY AND EVEN THOUGH YOU MIGHT NOT SEE THIS IN THE SAME LIGHT, SOMEONE MIGHT. INFACT YOU REBLOGGING THIS COULD STOP SOMEONE TAKING THEIR LIFE TONIGHT.

I noticed there isn’t one here for Ireland, so

Irish free suicide helpline: 01-116 123

So much of managing your mental health is just…learning to parent yourself like you’re a toddler

Like, “Honey, it’s 10 pm and you’ve been up since four in the morning, no wonder you’re emotional. Plus all you’ve had to eat today was three chocolate truffles and a half a protein drink. Make yourself some scrambled eggs and peas, you can even put them in separate bowls so they don’t touch. Then go to bed. You can do more fun things tomorrow, but first you need to sleep. Okay?”

.

In the old days we didn’t call this managing mental health, we called this managing being an adult.

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Interesting, that.

See, I’m five years into adulthood. I have a college degree (a few in fact), a car, insurance payments, a job, yada yada. I ostensibly joined the Grown Up Club a few years back.

But, having grown up with a number of undiagnosed disorders and mental illnesses, I never learned a healthy style of self-talk.

If I’m honest, between depression and anxiety, the way I grew up talking to myself was abusive. I’m not kidding; if the things I thought to and about myself were said aloud to someone else, it would be considered verbal and emotional abuse.

So this idea of treating myself like a small child? With the same loving firmness and compassion?

This is a radical idea for me.

This is me learning to stop those abusive thought patterns, and talk to myself in a kinder, healthier way.

And it doesn’t have much to do with adulthood. I know adults who have treated themselves unkindly this way for many years. A healthy relationship with yourself doesn’t just sprout once you’re an adult; you have to develop it.

Those are my thoughts anyway. I hope they make sense.

People who act like managing being an adult is just instant and easy to everyone and those who have to work for it are to be looked down on? Nah. (And they seem to be totally missing the point that it’s the approach, not the doing of things that OP is focusing on here.) Congrats to OP for figuring out this approach! I was more years into being part of the Grown Up Club before I realised that parenting myself lovingly was even a thing to try, much less that it was a magically useful tool.

Also, some neurodivergent solidarity! I’m Autistic (yay!) and have ADHD (ugh). And our brains just have some different wiring, plus all the well-meaning neurotypical people in our lives often don’t get it. They didn’t know how to help us sort things and we didn’t know what was in our heads was not the same as theirs and/or we didn’t know how to describe it, so we are figuring out a lot by trial and error or just–as OP did–sharing our winning strategies.

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.

This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.

So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.

after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

- if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.

*likes your anonymous ask but not in an "i sent it"-way*

*likes your anonymous ask in an “i sent it”-way”

*likes your anonymous ask in an “I sent it but anxiety says please dont put that together” way*

*likes your anonymous ask in a I didn't send it but agree with everything it says way*

I’m going to give you the best piece of Adult Life Is Hard advice I’ve ever learned:

Talk to people when things go to shit.

I don’t just mean get it off your chest, although that’s good. I mean: Something’s wrong with your paycheck/you lost your job/you had unexpected emergency car repairs and now you’re broke so your credit card payment is late. Like, not just 15 days late. We’re talking, shit got crazy and now you’re 90 days late with compounded interest and late fees and the Minimum Payment Due is, like, $390, and you’ve got about $3.90 in your bank account. Call the credit card company. 

I know it’s scary. I know you feel like you’re going to get in trouble, like you’re gong to get yelled at or scolded for not having your life together. But the credit card company isn’t your parents; they’re just interested in getting money from you. And you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or money from someone who doesn’t have any. So what you do is you call them. You explain you’re experiencing temporary financial hardships, and you’re currently unable to bring your account up to date, but you don’t want to just let it get worse. Can you maybe talk to someone about a payment plan so you can work something out? Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to negotiate something so that at least it’s not just taking a constant, giant shit on your credit score.

- Can’t pay your power bill? Call the power company.

- Can’t pay your full rent? Talk to your landlord.

- Had to go to the hospital without insurance and have giant medical bills looming in your place? Call the hospital and ask if they have someone who helps people with financial hardships. Many do.

- Got super sick and missed half a semester of class because flu/pneumonia/auto-immune problems/depressive episode? Talk to your professor. If that doesn’t help, talk to your advisor.

You may not be able to fix everything, but you’ll likely be able to make improvements. At the very least, it’s possible that they have a list of people you can contact to help you with things. (Also, don’t be afraid to google things like, “I can’t pay my power bill [state you live in]” because you’d be surprised at what turns up on Google!) But the thing is, people in these positions gain nothing if you fail. There’s no emotional satisfaction for them if your attempts at having your life together completely bite the dust. In fact, they stand to benefit if things work out for you! And chances are, they’ll be completely happy to take $20 a month from you over getting $0 a month from you, your account will be considered current because you’ve talked to them and made an agreement, you won’t get reported to a collections agency, and your credit score won’t completely tank.

Here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind:

1. Be polite. Don’t demand things; request them. Let me tell you about how customer service people hold your life in their hands and how many extra miles they’ll go for someone who is nice to them.

2. Stick to the facts, and keep them minimal unless asked for them. Chances are they’re not really interested in the details. “We had several family emergencies in a row, and now I’m having trouble making the payments” is better than “Well, two months ago my husband wrecked his bike, and then he had a reaction to the muscle relaxer they gave him, and then our dog swallowed a shoestring and we had to take him to the emergency clinic, and just last week MY car broke down, and now my account’s in the negatives and I don’t know how I’m gonna get it back out.” The person you’re talking to is aware shit happens to everyone; they don’t need the details to prove you’re somehow “worthy” of being helped. They may ask you for details at a certain point if they have to fill out any kind of request form, but let them do that.

3. Ask questions. “Is there anything we can do about X?” “Would it be possible to move my payment date to Y day instead so it’s not coming out of the same paycheck as my rent?” The answer may be “no.” That’s not a failure on your part. But a good customer service person may have an alternate solution. 

Anyway! I hope that helps! Don’t just assume the answer is “no” before you’ve even begun. There is more help out there than you ever imagined.

Hey guys, this is an old post, but it’s still relevant, and I thought I’d re-up it for living in COVID times when a lot of people are losing income. Don’t be afraid to toss that in when you call to ask for help! “I’ve experienced a loss of income due to COVID-19″ is gonna be all you need to say for most places, because wow let me tell you how much this is the case. A lot of places are setting up COVID-19 specific relief policies, so this may be even easier than normal. 

Good luck, stay safe, stay inside if you can, and wash your hands. <3 

kids also just want to feel understood. whenever a kid’s scared of something, I think it’s our instinct as adults to tell them it’s not scary, there’s no reason to be scared, etc. but to a scared child, that reassurance means nothing. they’re scared, so telling them that’s the incorrect feeling doesn’t really accomplish anything.

instead, I often find success telling them “this scares me too, and this is how I handle feeling scared,” and then I give them some mental tools.

It works ALMOST every time. Example: when a kid’s afraid of bugs, I say “ew me too! They’re sort of creepy! What scares you the most?” Then when they tell me (the legs, the eyes, etc.), I tell them a cool fact, or I try to make the feature seem funny.

It doesn’t have to be true. I’m not actually afraid of bugs. The point is validating the emotion while teaching the child that it’s possible to exist and get on with things even while feeling the unpleasant emotion.

I’ve found some kids even have a natural want to comfort others, which can work too. During a thunderstorm, I can say “you’re afraid of thunder? Me too! Will you hold my hand? I think that will make me feel better. What will make you feel better? What about watching a movie?” Then I tell them how much better I feel being together watching our movie, and I thank them for being brave!

I think kids get a lot out of just feeling like we’re in this together. When the assumption is that adults know and can control everything but for some reason refuse to acknowledge and destroy things that scare them, the world must be so confusing. I’m not a psychologist or anything. I’ve just spent a lot of time working with children, and I get a lot of mileage out of basically just letting a kid know that grown ups feel and experience the same things they do, and that we can navigate it together.

JUST some thoughts.

This might be a controversial post but... I want it to be Christmas. I'm like homesick but for Christmas time

(source: qvotext on instagram)

By Jan and Odee

Yeah, you got it spot on!

Laziness Does Not Exist Devon Price

I have NEVER seen a tiktok with this much vine energy I swear