*sigh*

My current project is healing via handling materials that used to scare me. So I'm reading nonfiction atheist, evolutionary, etc books.

I am also trying to learn tarot and rune reading. As you can probably tell from the first thing I mentioned I don't really believe in this second challenge as a actual way to tell the future but more as a party trick.

My first tarot reading was "what do I need to do to get a romantic partner" mostly as a self joke. And well,

Wholeness of body or past / forgiveness of mind or present / blockage of spirit or future

I get why people buy into this :/

Asked the same question again after shuffling and cutting the deck three times.

Got judgment again lol

maybe he hurts every woman that comes into his life because he should be stoned to death and killed and stabbed and beaten and shot and drowned and

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

this thing took me all evening to build! it’s from the tallest jar cutter I have. it’s 11” tall, including the knob on the lid

I kind of pinched the edges of this one for a scalloped sort of look, not sure if I love it but we’ll see. and the lid’s edge being folded over is kind of an experiment too

design-wise, I’m thinking one of my ‘rot with me’ or ‘the horrors persist but so do we’ kind of romantic vibe to match the heart shaped knob. or maybe I’ll come up with a new one lol. I have so much space to work with here

my sketches!

the jar is half carved but my neck is killing me so it’s break time

drew some abras for community day :3

Work in progress from today.

fatima aamer bilal, from i mother it the absence of her, iii. i am not a person that can be loved for a very long time excerpt from moony moonless sky.

Kait Rokowsky || Mary Shelley, Frankenstein || @hopepunk-humanity || Jenny Slate, Little Weirds || Intricate Explorer || Melissa Broder, Problem Area || Kerri Maniscalco, Kingdom of the Wicked || Louise Eldritch, The King of the Owls || Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know || Damir Omerović || David Leviathan, How They Met and Other Stories || Ariana Reines, The Cow || Anaís C., Am I Good? || Okechukwu Nzelu, Here Again Now || Max Muselmann || Fernando Pessoa, I See Boats Moving || Mary Maclane, I Await the Devil's Coming || Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts || Mary Oliver, Spring || Jordan Steranka Tathlyn Auvrynval: On Endurance, Defending, and Being Made A Weapon

i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam

This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…

Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.

“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”

Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”

The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.

On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.

OH! I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS!

There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice. 

Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.

Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.

Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.

The WIRED article explains why:

Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.

Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient. 

[link to the whole article]

basically, there’s a big damn difference between choosing to confide in someone you trust and being pressured to make a public spectacle of your trauma

THIS JUST IN: Forced Public Recalling of Trauma Not As Helpful As Voluntarily Processing Trauma In A Safe Space

I normally don't comment on posts but I'm a legit teacher so I think maybe I can help answer the question of why teachers specifically ask students to do this.

First, it's important to understand that teachers are people and people 1) fuck up and 2) have their own perceptions. So it could just be a matter of a mistake or being an asshole, but there are legit reasons to do this. Being asked to write/speak about a difficult experience is a common college or work application question. So it's good to practice our answers in a (presumably) safe environment like a classroom. Discussing difficult experiences in psychology class could also be an attempt to help students practice listening to patients in a "safe" environment.

Now, as people above have noted this doesn't make the classroom feel safe for some. And that it often does require editing of stories or choosing your second most difficult experience for this particular assignment. As a teacher, I think these teachers that we've all encountered should have made it clear that the story you share doesn't need to be complete for this task, or even true. If your teacher was insisting that you share deeply personal information regardless of your comfort then... sorry/congrats you've got yourself an asshole.

Classroom environments are supposed to be intellectually challenging but emotionally safe. Now, having an asshole as a teacher makes that difficult and/or impossible, but that's the general idea. Theoretically, in the pursuit of a safe learning environment a teacher may ask students to share on difficult topics as a kind of check in? I've never used them for that particular purpose but I could see a nosey person doing so.

This is tangential, but I do want to mention that getting called to the counselor is... not supposed to be a punishment? If a teacher is using it that way then sorry/ congrats again you have an asshole. But! Teachers are supposed to look after the emotional wellbeing of our students. Teachers are not required to be mental health experts but we are supposed to let others know if we're worried for a student's mental health. It's legit a legal requirement in some places/ circumstances

VOTE FOR FISHHHHHH

BIRDS FOR THE WIN

BIRD SWEEP

(big up the fish lovers out there though 👊)

Why do they have to fight

Done!

HOLY SHIT

Guillotines often backfired, leaving the victim's head even more strongly attached than it was before the attempt.

!! BIRTHDAY / MILESTONE RAFFLE !! ♥ ♥ ♥ Been inkling to do something my birthday month the day was actually yesterday & way back XYZ followers milestone what's gone due for confetti I WANNA ART ♡ I WANNA FULL ILLUST ♡ ART FOR YOU ♡ ♥ RULES TO ENTER ♥ ♡ (be) Following me (new welcome!) ♡ Reblog this post MARCH 1ST will randomly select & message one winner from the reblogs (match up w the blog you following from or leave a lil note about it in the replies if mismatched: o) & from there winner gets one full illustration from me !!