shout out to everybody who’s unlearning the old habits that won’t serve them in their next chapter of life. letting go is difficult, counterintuitive, and disorienting. it’s also worth it.

#this

[image description: plain black text over a white background. The first paragraph reads "The best thing a therapist told me is, "You're not lazy, you only have a certain amount of energy and right now you're using it all to survive." "The best thing..." Until the end of the paragraph is in quotation marks. The second paragraph reads "I know someone else needs to hear that today". Below the second paragraph, a username is highlighted yellow and is in italics, and read "@realdepressionproject". End of image description]

May you never forget all the little ways you’ve grown. - Morgan Harper Nichols

So cuddly

Shop , Patreon , Books and Cards , Mailing List

[image description: a purple dragon in the middle of an enchanted forest, with text behind the dragon that reads "It's okay to just be my messy self today. It's enough." In a handwritten font. End of image description]

[image description: a Tweet from Matsin Kipp, username @matsinkipp, saying "Healing trauma isn't about erasing the past, but about rewriting the future. End of image description]

Maybe one day…

My Books - https://debbietung.com/books

When I say "my ADHD wouldn't be a disability if society was structured differently," I don't mean that my physical brain structure/chemistry would somehow change the moment capitalism went away. I mean we as a society could choose to accommodate it to the level we accommodated nearsightedness to the point where most people don't think of it as a disability anymore.

To use this metaphor, imagine if in order to access help for your nearsightedness, you had to endure years of people not believing you're nearsighted because they don't believe anybody is near sighted, and you are just faking it for attention and the privilege of always sitting up front. And if you do manage to get help, you have to go to the eye doctor every 30 days for new glasses because they're not allowed to give you a prescription for longer than that. And the government is creating an artificial scarcity of glasses because they think too many people are lying about needing glasses. And when you try to push through and you make a bunch of mistakes because you can't see, it's all your fault. And because you can sorta see when you squint your eyes really hard, you're expected to do that all the time while keeping up with everybody who can just see well.

Disability is not just about what's going on in your brain and body, it's about societal response to it. Do we believe it even exists as a problem? Do we moralize having the problem? Do we have the ability to accommodate it? Do we follow through on those accommodations without complaint? Or do we throw up further obstacles? This is so much of what separates divergence from disability.

As a late diagnosed autist I will say one of the most damaging but transformative experiences I've ever had was being misdiagnosed with BPD.

Everyday my heart goes out to people with BPD.

The amount of stigma and silencing they face is astonishing and sickening.

I took DBT for years. Therapists use to turn me away because of my diagnosis.

I would be having full blown autistic meltdowns, crying for help literally - but because I was labeled as BPD ANY time I cried I was treated as manipulative and unstable.

As if the only reason I could be crying was if I was out to trick someone.

95% of the books out there with Borderline in the title are named shit like 'How to get away from a person with Borderline', 'How to stop walking on eggshells (with a person who has BPD)'

I was never allowed to feel true pain or panic or need.

That was 'attention seeking behavior', not me asking for help when a disability was literally inhibiting my ability to process emotions.

There were dozens of times where I had a full meltdown and was either threatened with institutionalization or told I was doing it for attention.

My failing relationships weren't due to a communication issue, or the inability to read social cues. No, because I was labeled borderline, my unstable relationships were my fault. Me beggong nuerotypicals to just be honest and blunt with what they meant was me pestering them for validation.

Borderline patients can't win.

And the funny thing is - I asked my therapist about autism. I told her I thought I was on the spectrum.

BPD is WILDLY misdiagnosed with those with autism and I had many clear signs.

Instead - she told me 'If you were autistic we wouldn't be able to have this conversation'. She made me go through a list of autistic traits made clearly for children, citing how I didn't fit each one.

And then she told me that me identifying with the autism community was the BPD making me search for identity to be accepted - and that I wasn't autistic, just desperate to fit in somewhere.

I didn't get diagnosed for another ten years. For ten years I avoided the autism community - feeling as if I were just a broken person who wanted to steal from people who 'really needed it'.

Because of my providers - I began to doubt my identity MORE, not less.

Ten years of thinking I was borderline and being emotionally neglected and demonized by a system meant to help me.

To this day, I still don't trust neurotypicals. Not fully.

I know I'm not borderline now - but my heart aches for them. Not for the usual stuff. But for the stigma. And the asshole doctors. And the dismissiveness and threatening and the idea of institutionalization hanging over their head.

I love Borderline people. I always will. I'm not Borderline but if you are I love you and I'm sorry.

You're not a bad person. You're not a therapists worst nightmare, you are a human with valid feelings and fears.

Borderline people I'm sorry.

Our therapist shared something today: at a DID conference she attended last year (at the Bowlby centre) they were told that it can take at least 7 years in therapy for DID clients to get to a point where they can start to tolerate trauma processing. It made some of us feel better about the speed of our progress so I just thought I'd share that in case it reassures anyone else.

ASMR YouTube Channel

So we have started an ASMR based channel on Youtube. We've only recently started it out, so the content is a little bare, but hopefully you'll enjoy it.

We have uploaded a video explaining the situation with the death of my mother. We won't be making or uploading any videos for a while.

CW: Cancer (Leukaemia), treatment, Terminal, family. Please read at your own discretion.

I am sorry to say that as of this morning, my mother has died peacefully in a hospice bed. She was looked after by an amazing team of nurses. She was happy and peaceful in her last moments.

[image description: white text over a dark background, what looks like a photograph of a path late at night. The text is in the middle, and reads "Never forget how far you've come. Everything you have gotten through. All the times you have pushed on even when you felt you couldn't. All the mornings you got out of bed no matter how hard it was. All the times you wanted to give up but you got through another day. Never forget how much strength you have learned and developed along the way.". End of image description]