@especialty / especialty.tumblr.com
Reading all those books you've always wanted to read. Watching a movie that changes the way you view life. Finding something new about yourself. Starting a new hobby. There are so many amazing things you have yet to experience, so much worth living for.
everyone be nice to her oh my god her teaser
some of you just don't know how to say 'OK I didn't know that, sorry and thank you' to save your souls like I can somewhat understand the defensiveness but u gotta internalized the fact that u also sound painfully callous and dismissive and if that's the hill u want to die on be my guest and die on it quickly but if u care about ur impact on others you should learn to be considerate and self aware. being right is not as important as being decent... I'm not saying anything groundbreaking like how is that not the bare minimum. I know it's 2am and nobody cares but I am Annoyed™️
give yourself a rest. all the things you’ve been so absorbed in will still be here, waiting for you, when you’ve got back the energy to pay them attention.
heyy!! do you have any advice for ppl with depression and severe anxiety thank you for making this blog <33
hi! here’s some advice for depression/anxiety that helped me:
- learn how to have neutral or carefree/optimistic inner voice that challenges the more negative, hopeless one. your inner monologue underpins your whole life, so it’s really important for it to be kind and encouraging, instead of having one hopeless, self-defeating voice all the time. imagine what you would say to your friend, and try to say it for yourself. it’s ok if you don’t believe it at first, but it’s good to just practice.
- feel and validate all your feelings, without attaching beliefs to them. you can allow yourself feel a certain way, like you’re very unlovable and unworthy, but still know they’re a passing feeling, rather than a true fact. and on the worst days, know that it’s okay to feel this way, and let yourself feel everything and cry, but remember that the beliefs attached to those feelings (eg. I’m so horrible, I’m so unlovable, I’m not worth it, people are better off without me) aren’t true.
- pay close attention to your feelings, through noticing your body tense up, or feeling your throat is tight, and then consciously give yourself time to ground yourself, think of your go-to good things/memories, breathe deeply and release your tension through activities that you know would help you feel better.
- create your own self care routine for whenever you spiral, feel depressed, unmotivated, or feel anxious, and look at it often.
- keep a list of positive reminders that help you, good things to stay alive for, or things that make you smile every day, and your favourite songs and memories. just reminders to look at that make you feel calm and less bad.
- i think often, your actions have to start before your thoughts can follow. so do things that you would do if you cared deeply about yourself. for example, work on eating and sleeping like you cared more about your body. do things that oppose what depression and anxiety want you to do, and the thoughts will follow.
- focus on the present. each day, write a few small goals to complete. it’s important to feel a sense of achievement, as it gives you confidence in yourself.
- remember that inside you there is an inner child that needs you to listen to them, ask them what they need, and comfort them with calming reassurance and activities. and you need to keep in touch with your inner child very often (whenever you feel bad), close your eyes, see them in your mind’s eye and ask them what’s wrong and allow yourself to feel everything without judgement, while also giving the child forgiveness, comfort and reminders. stay with them until they feel better, and imagine giving them a hug, telling them it’s ok. it sounds strange but this is one of the most important things that helped me.
- do less things that drain you, like social media or staying up too late. do more things that increase your physical capacity to feel good, like doing exercise, being outside, dancing, singing, going on a walk, surround yourself with calming scents, drinking tea, hug something, doing a guided meditation, listening to music, having a better posture, sleeping enough and at the same time each day, eating enough, being in nature, playing with a pet.
- do hobbies that make you forget about your phone. promise yourself that you’ll try to do it daily for a short achievable time, like 15 or 20 minutes and try to commit to it for a long time. start something from the beginning, and as you improve, so will your confidence that you can learn anything. I recommend learning something musical, because it really helped me. it’s also important to have zero expectations. be proud of improvement, but you shouldn’t expect improvement. your main goal should be to have fun.
- make peace with your past. find your own closure. forgive yourself. look through old photos of yourself and learn to love your younger self and be thankful for them.
- do forms of play. like stuff that makes you excited as if you’re a child again. maybe it’s swimming, riding a bike, skateboarding, dancing, or something creative.
- do loving-kindness meditation. imagine everyone that’s on your mind lately, including yourself, and wish them safety, happiness and warmth every morning and night, and imagine the love radiating from your heart to them (it sounds strange but it helps me!)
- don’t be afraid to ask for help. you don’t have to go through this alone! and you’re worth the ‘burden’ of getting help!
- notice and appreciate the little things in your life. take more photographs of pretty things you notice that aren’t that exciting to others. find beauty in the everyday things. romanticize the mundane things in your life.
- positive visualization!! imagine that inside you, you’re not barren. imagine you’re a field of flowers or a forest, always growing. imagine your dream home, your dream goals and places you’d love to visit one day. imagine what it would like to be recovered, and let this motivate you.
- don’t be hard on yourself. if you feel like your heart is aching, let yourself feel the pain, and place your warm hands on your chest. and tell yourself it will be okay. comfort yourself how you would comfort someone who is crying and blaming everything on themselves.
- don’t think you’re a failure because you haven’t recovered yet! recovering from depression and anxiety takes a long time, because you’re practically relearning everything you know. be patient with yourself, keep going, and accept bad days are natural and aren’t telling of your overall progress. and be proud of yourself for living with anxiety/depression every day and trying to recover from it.
- have a morning routine that makes you calmer. it helped my anxiety a lot to eat breakfast while reading a book. because jumping straight into being productive after waking up made me wired and stressed. and have a night routine too to unwind, like journalling, reading, listening to a playlist that calms you down, or other activities that makes you feel safe before you sleep.
this is a bit long but i hope this helps 🌷✨
medications don’t work the same for everyone.
therapy doesn’t work the same for everyone.
self care doesn’t look the same for everyone.
mental illness doesn’t look the same for everyone.
recovery is a personal process and shouldn’t be compared to anyone else’s. we are all healing from different things. just because someone else says, “my life has been bad too, and i got over it”, that in no way means you’ve tried less. you will grow at your own pace.
the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!
it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.
and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.
making things improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.
take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.
crazyheadcomics who you can find and follow on Instagram created this artwork. (They clearly state that they allow reposts to other sites as long as proper credit is included.)
https://nerdbot.com/2021/01/09/new-pill-bottles-for-shaky-hands-will-help-people-with-parkinsons/
This makes me cry, actually.
[ID: Facebook post from user David Richards posted on January 5th, 2021 at 06:21 which reads:
“For anyone who isn’t on Tiktok, I wanted to share a story.
1 week ago, a Tiktok user with Parkinsons posted a video expressing anger over how tiny the pills for treating Parkinsons are because it makes them really difficult to pick up when someone has something like, you know, Parkinson’s.
4 days ago a guy who directs country music videos for a living, and was previously most famous on Tiktok for knowing obscure facts about Snappple, taught himself how to use Fusion 360 (a design and modeling tool) so he could design a pill bottle that solves the problem.
Problem was though that he didn’t own a 3D printer so he posted a video of his design and offered to share schematics with anyone who wanted to test it and or improve upon it. All schematics are open source.
3 days ago, dozens of engineers and 3D printer enthusiasts had begun working on the project and started refining and tweaking to get tolerances where they needed to be and ensuring that it actually met the needs of those it was being designed for.
13 hours ago, there is a working prototype, it has ‘less plastic than your average McDonald’s toy, and should be priced as such.’ The original designer has gotten a patent attorney to ensure it remains open source and the patent itself will be donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
In the mean time, for anytime who needs one now and doesn’t want to wait until the manufacturing in scale begins, they can get one at cost from the engineers printing them at home.
(Edit: I have put a link to the tree link for Brian Alldridge, the guy who first designed the bottle, in the comments. The first 2 entries are links to info on the bottle.)
END ID]
When you’re feeling overwhelmed with your sadness and loss, it’s hard to believe that your life will ever change, or you’ll ever be able to smile or laugh again. But the truth is you will – it won’t always be this bad – and there are things you can do help move on with your life:
1. Decide to face your pain. An unresolved past never really goes away. You may think you have buried your anger and pain but the hurt is still there and it will surface later on. If you don’t face what happened, and the feelings it unleashed, you will end up being ruled by your subconscious mind. So try and find the courage to revisit all the pain.
2. Accept there’s nothing you can do to change the past. What’s happened has happened, and what’s done is done. There’s nothing you can do to turn back the hands of time, or to rewrite the story so the ending’s happier. But you can change how you think, and you can start over again, and build a different future that’s not poisoned by the past.
3. Be grateful for the good times. There’s usually something good that you can be thankful for. You don’t have to pretend that everything was bad – or write off any good times and happy memories.
4. Consciously let go and set your focus on the future - Don’t let the baggage, or the failures of the past, affect your identity or self esteem. You are not what you did, or how you acted previously. You’re not just a product of what happened to you. You are valuable, unique and you have so much to give. You’re the author of your future; you control your destiny.
5. Remove your past from your future. We all have a tendency to think that the past will morph into our future – and become our lot in life. But that doesn’t have to happen. The future’s a blank page. You can change your expectations and work towards those goals. Instead, look hard for the exceptions – the times when things went right – and notice what you did that resulted in success. You still have those same strengths, skills and great qualities.
6. Be realistic and take small steps at first. You can’t snap your fingers and find that life has changed. Accept it will take time, and you will still have some bad days. But if you keep on going then the past will lose its grip.
No, but seriously. If whenever you get up from wherever you start to feel faint, get palpitations, get numb, get nauseous, get light-headed and/or literally feel your blood drop to your feet, check the symptoms of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome.
Also add more salt to your diet lol. With or without the POTS unless you have hypertension in which case I’d be more cautious.
Actually, it’s not just that you can reblog this. I want people to reblog this.
My poor mom went by years without knowing why the fuck she was having all these debilitating symptoms.
All it took was me making her add some more salt to her diet and have an isotonic drink daily and she IMMEDIATELY (as in, less than an hour) stopped feeling faint whenever she got up from kneeling down and her hair is slowly falling off less and less.
She used to need at least 5 minutes to recover from kneeling down and now she kneels down and stands up like it’s nothing. Even her joint pain from EDS and brain fog have improved tremendously and she has much more energy.
I’m pointing all these things out as abnormal because chronically ill people tend to not realize that our symptoms are symptoms.
Our individual bodies are the only bodies we’ve experienced and since most of us don’t look any different from others and aren’t taken seriously when we complain of any ailment, we assume our symptoms happen to everyone. They do not.
People with no physical conditions (at least not impairing ones such as being a bit short-sighted) do not have their bodies make life difficult for them, unless they’re temporarily ill. But we are ill ALL the time.
If your body is making life difficult for you, there’s probably something going on with it, and if it persists and nothing makes it go away, it may be a chronic illness.
POTS can develop in previous healthy people after a Covid infection. If you have had Covid recently or know someone who has, please keep this in mind.
“Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?”
— Rumi
When you’re trying to make a difficult decision, bear the following points in mind:
1. Ask yourself if you will look back and feel proud of yourself in a month, a year, or 10 years from now. That should influence the choice you make.
2. Think about the strategies you used when making decisions in the past. What worked and what didn’t? Apply that information to your current decision.
3. Try and quieten the voices around you and listen to your heart.
4. Take your time. Rushed decisions are rarely good decisions. Don’t act in haste.
5. Think about the impact it will have on others, especially those who are closest to you.
6. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Few decisions are irrevocable – and living without risk is a life half lived. If nothing else, we can always learn from our mistakes.
7. Talk it over with people who know you well – and are willing to be honest and speak the truth (and who won’t only say what you want to hear.)
8. Ask yourself: What’s the worst thing that could happen? What are the chances it will happen? And can I survive if it all falls apart?
9. Get as much information as possible. Try to see the problem from every angle, and think about every possible outcome and effect.
10. Take time out and walk away from the decision. Opting for some space usually brings a new, and more objective, perspective.
11. Be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t sugar coat the truth, or try to kid yourself.
12. If you have to talk yourself into making a decision, then the chances are that it’s not a good decision.
Yes, your boundaries are still necessary even with people who do nice things for you or are really nice to you. I know sometimes when someone is really kind to you or you feel like you don't deserve the kindness you get from someone, it makes you want to violate your own boundaries out of gratitude for them or because you're afraid it will make them treat you differently. But in the long-term, this is only more harmful. Your boundaries are not an act of unkindness and are always relevant. And people treating you with respect and kindness is the bare minimum you deserve from others. Don't let someone's kindness or favours or respectful treatment make you abandon your self-worth and your needs to please them.
friendly reminder for the new year that you should not be making unattainable goals for yourself. listen to your body and mind and past experiences and set realistic, personal goals. you are not your friends, or family, or random people on the internet, and their process may not be right for you. your future achievements are not less worthy of celebrating because others think that they were easy or insignificant. be proud of yourself.
