Look at you, a warrior. Fighting this battle. Fear not, you will win. You are strong .｡:+♡*

just-another-hhazbin:

The casual intimacy of just choosing toexist in the same space as another, working or relaxing or the like individually with the knowledge that the other is only a glance or reach away…

Just yesterday I was reflecting on how far I’ve come from the “silent and sitting in the backseat while my friends talk and laugh and I’m not joining in bc the anxiety won’t let me hold a happy emotional tone if I try to converse”

Now it’s silence when I’m happy being in their company, with the added desire to find another silent backseat friend who needs that acceptance and welcoming space where their presence is appreciated.

thelatestkate:

Shop,Patreon,Books and Cards,Mailing List

At some point in my life I discovered the nick case website, which contain some games about social behavior and mental health among other kind of works.

Sometimes I don’t feel good and I think about these games again. Well, especially one that I remember the most which is about anxiety and help to feel a bit better.

Adventures with anxiety

Adventure with anxiety is based on the native american belief that we have two wolfs fighting inside us: The wolf of compassion, love, understanding and generosity ; and the wolf of cruelty, hate, fear and selfishness. According to that belief, the one who’ll win is the one you’ll feed.

In that game Nick Case use a wolf to represent anxiety and how it can hurt us if we don’t learn how to communicate with it. Actually we even play as the wolf, whose goal is to protect our human!

It’s an interesting way to teach how to deal with anxiety while not saying we should reject it. The game is all about nuances : yes we should listen to it because the only purpose of our anxiety is to protect us, but no we shouldn’t always listen to it and when it’s wrong then the best way to deal with it is to try to reason with it.

Example:

My wolf: “Aaaah!!! They’ll hate our post on the nicky case project!!! We should stop you’ll be ha…”

Me: “Come on! I posted many things that people liked and…”

My wolf: “And sometimes people didn’t like it! What makes you think they won’t hate this one? Do you want people to hate you or laugh at y….”

Me: “OK OK I’ll show it to someone else before posting it and they’ll tell us if it’s worth it or not. Do you feel better?”

My wolf: “Ah! You are thinking about that guy? Well, I can work with that.”

Me: “Nice! It’s settled then.”

And this is how that game suggests to deal with the anxiety. A good one!

Well, to be honest in my head there was way more things about mental health, but in reality most of the interactive games are rather about social behaviors. In that category I can talk about some of them among the most interesting. Like…

The wisdom and/or Madness of crowds

That one is less than an adventure than a puzzle game. At each step you have a text explaining something about history or a fact about connection, and it makes you connect the heads with each other to see how an information or a behavior can spread.

More of an essay than a game as are most interactive games on the website, The wisdom and/or madness of crowds is a good way to understand how our connections can affect people and ourselves, how we can act good or badly depending of who we are around us. For example when among our friends we have half drinkers and half non-drinkers you easily starts to think half of the world drinks. Or when challenger was launched in 1986 despite engineers warnings and it killed 7 people because the big boss only listened to the other big bosses they usually agree with. Or when a fake news appears and you don’t see many people refuting it.

You have all of these in it, and it’s pretty interesting! Give it a try!

As another kind of game you can find there is one I found while looking at the list of Nicky Case’s projects :

Coming out simulator.

Here we have one of Nicky’s first games. A very personal one where they talk about their coming out, what was said, and what happened next. Well, half-what happened.

You know I’m pansexual and I made my coming out too but I had the chance to have tolerant parent (my mom said something upsetting though). So what was in that game… I wasn’t ready for it. Like I wondered how we even could say things like that or act like their parents did. But they said it was full of things that was said so I believe them. Yet I didn’t feel comfortable at all while playing.

But that game is worth playing! Because he was seriously well-made, and the start as well as the end was rather funny. Well, not entirely but you feel Nicky takes it lightly today and is more like “yeah it happened and now I’m good, everything is going well for me”.

I’ll just talked about another one. One I hesitated to shared but it actually is good so…

Nothing to hide

A big brother kind of game in which you live in a world where people agree to say they don’t need a private life, that we should watch everyone 24/7 and that if someone isn’t visible by the cameras so they are suspicious and must be arrested immediately. Thus in that game you must manage to be seen by them all along while trying to flee your father, the minister in that world.

The hardest of them all! Especially for my puzzle game skills that are pretty low. And worst: my skills at 3 am! Where I’m the most impatient!

But it’s honestly an well-built world I wanna know more of and it’s pretty fun to do. So it’s worth a try! Just know that it’s the demo of game since long dead, which I’m incredibly sad about.

With these examples you have an idea of what you can wait from that website. Well, most of what I didn’t talk about are more essays like The wisdom and/or madness of crowds but they’re all interesting in some ways. And it teaches a lot with the media of interactive stories.

    (TW:Sexual Abuse) I’ve noticed as I’ve aged into my 20′s, my memory is quite literal shit. I usually have my boyfriend help me remember things that only happened months ago. This isn’t unusual for a trauma survivor who blocks out most of her past in a way to cope with the literal dump truck-fire of a childhood and teenhood that I had. I can, however, remember back to the old trailer I lived in as a child. It was small, but for a little squirt like me it was just enough for me to bolt around in and grow. I was… Introduced to some things early on and it stuck with me. I remember being in my parents room and sleeping next to my father while his chainsaw of a snore rung throughout my body. It was always hard sleeping with him in the room and that continued throughout my life.

    This wasn’t the only memory I had as a child living in a trailer park. I remember laying on the scratchy carpet and hearing some odd noises coming from my parents bedroom. Me, being the curious and invasive fucker I was, decided to peek under the crack of the door and investigate. This lead to me seeing a mesh of pink bodies moving to and fro and maybe that’s where this all began? I knew I saw something I probably shouldn’t have because as the 4/5 year old I was- I felt icky. Icky like the gum stuck in your hair that your mother would try to get out with all sorts of different food items but then turning to the good ol’ scissors and ultimately making you look like you crawled out of a car engine.

   Now I know what you’re thinking- mostly because I shared those paragraphs with my boyfriend and he replied, “It’s sad.” To this, I say, It wasn’t sad when I grew up. It was actually pretty normal. Shit piled up and continued to pile up as I grew older and it was just the norm. So here I am, at work, sitting on the toilet as most writers tend to do when it isn’t only shit that comes out of their ass that needs to be said- but their mind. I was a child. All of us older humans have gone through those developmental phases with little to no trauma and have flourished. I, speaking for myself here, have only started to grasp this as a 20 year old.

    I was born into a family with a history of PTSD and bad parenting engraved into their bones. Illinois was my home and in poverty we lived. I remember hearing stories about the sacrifices my parents frequently made to make sure I was taken care of to the best of their abilities. These stories would range from funny to kind of sad. I guess it runs in the family. My dad once had to sell his entire drum set for groceries. My mom would go months or years without proper clothing she needed. The fanciest clothing she would wear would be from Walmart or gifts given to her. I do not doubt their sacrifices in any way.

    The first place I can remember us living is in the trailer park in Manteno, Illinois. I had two friends who lived next door to myself. They were Taylor and Tori and their mom Bridgette was not especially fond of me. I remember accidentally leaving my pink ladybug bike in the driveway only to find it crushed beneath the bottom of her dust covered slushee-blue van. This angered my mom and I was able to see her motherly rage seep through her eyes in a beaming way. Taylor and Tori played with me like little girls usually do, and had even gifted me some of their toys when my family decided to move out of the armpit that is Ilinois.

    Pulling from the back of my memory box of age 5, in the corner where dust bunnies like to gather is solitude, there lies Michael. A firm bite from his dog had been placed on my ever-so-small rump, piercing my skin and causing what I think was a hospital visit.

    This wasn’t the only searing pain I was left with. I remember being told to go to a park where I was met with a boy who was not much older than myself. I place him as Michael. I remember my pants being pulled down and the rest is just a scene of him giving me a penny for the acts he had just performed on myself in the red tunnel slide. This wasn’t the only time this had happened. I remember being under neighbors porches and privately having my body explored. The rest is a blur. It’s so weird how easily the pure form that is a 5 year old, can be changed so dramatically. I remember going to school and taking the glittery red shoes a girl had brought to school and putting them in my backpack because I thought they were pretty. I remember knocking on the neighbors doors and asking for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I remember putting notes in two boys (I’m ambitious) backpacks and telling them I liked them.

    I was a kid and my start to this life was already pretty fucked up. In poverty, with a family hanging together by dental floss, already shown that the only thing they’ll want the most is your body, I struggled to learn what it means to be safe. I struggled to learn what it was to have a healthy family unit, to be protected, to be nurtured.

    Thank you guys for reading this first blog post. I hope it inspires you to tell your stories and to really just let it all out an connect with those who have gone through similar situations. Not only that, but to inform those that trauma and PTSD is not just something soldiers come home with, but an actual thing that can be passed on through DNA and through anything your mind could deem as traumatic.

    I’m going to show you over the next posts how I’ve been brought up and how it lead me here with all the therapy and positivity that made me who I am.

Don’t limit yourself when you have so much to offer. The world is vast, just as your mind is. Take a look within and unleash all you’ve yet discovered.

purplebuddhaquotes:

“Know who you are. Know what you want. Know what you deserve. And don’t settle for less.”

— Tony Gaskins

thepowerwithin:

Thank even the darkest darkness of the night, for without it, we would not know the true meaning of the light.

Nicole Addison @thepowerwithin

USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

As Mental Health Awareness Month kicks off, news and stories about mental health may seem to saturate media outlets. Yet a new report reveals that in top movies, mental health is rarely in the spotlight.

The study, entitled “Mental Health Conditions Across 200 Popular Films” is the second report on mental health in popular media from Professor Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion…

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OC by: bifedeunicornio

teen suicide - the same things happening to me all the time, even in my dreams

I don’t hate you, I just hate de fact that you had the heart to do me like that…

emetophobia