@storiesandnarratives and @sinesalvatorem wrote lovelyletters to their 10-year-old selves. I liked this idea, but my 10-year-old self was pretty content. My 14-year-old self, though, I could muster a few choice words for.
Hi 14-year-old me,
I’m going to try to build credibility by starting off with something you won’t want to hear: sadness still haunts you. I know that one of your small secret hopes is that this too shall pass, that this worthless sad feeling is just a phase induced by teenage angst. Sorry.
It does get better, though, which I think won’t be a cliché phrase for another year. My future is uncertain, but it feels full of waiting possibilities rather than waiting failures. There comes a time when the years of life stretching in front of you no longer seem an inconceivable burden that cowardice will force you to bear. You stop collecting all the jagged hurts of the world and turning them inward to stab at your self-worth.
Right now, you feel like life has given you everything you could have asked for and all you do is take and take and break and break, squandering the gifts you’ve been given. Your mental alchemy transmutes gratitude to guilt and then the guilt feeds itself on the knowledge that it ought to be gratitude. Here’s what I think you need to hear:
You can’t deserve your life.
You can never earn your birth.
Life is just something you have. There is no end point at which someone will judge you worthy. There exists no way for you to be accomplished enough or helpful enough or exceptional enough or just enough that someone will finally nod and say, “Yes, you’ve done it, you’re now officially a good person. Carry on being alive.” You know this, of course, but you don’t believeit.
Remember in the play where you were Arietty, you messed up your cue and someone tried to comfort you backstage, saying, “Everyone makes mistakes,” and you shouted, “I don’t!” and felt shaken and childish? Even at age eleven, you refused to give yourself permission to be a person in progress.
Think of that tender feeling you have when one of your little cousins tries to do something new. When they try to rescue all the monarch larvae in the field by bringing them to milkweed or attempt their first backwards somersault on the trampoline? When they fail, you don’t get angry at them. You feel proud that they’re growing. Can you try to feel some of that tenderness towards yourself? You’re growing, too. So am I. We’re going to be in progress as long as we’re alive.
In your diary (thanks for writing it, by the way, you were right that it would be fun to look back on) you spend paragraphs listing what you hate about yourself. You let yourself believe that you are a bad person who never does anything, while simultaneously telling yourself that anything less than perfection is failure. It’s overwhelming.
Letting go of your painful need to be perfect will happen gradually. You will let go. You will let go because the people you love, like your Nana and brother, are ordinary, not perfect. They will convince you that they will love you even if you never do anything exceptional. They celebrate your mundane accomplishments, sure, learning a new language or publishing a poem or winning a science contest, but their desire for you to live is never conditional on how impressive you are. Life is just something you have.
You’re homeschooling yourself right now, at your Academy of Vegan Learning. This was a good decision. It makes you anxious when your friends recite the fullness of their days in school, but don’t worry: you’re not falling behind. I’m so glad you took some time to read and e-mail your friends and do hardly anything. You don’t have to be productive to be progressing.
I don’t think this reassurance will be enough for you. You are dangerously good at convincing yourself that you never do anything. One thing I suspect may be a fundamental personality bug is that you always feel like you’re wasting time when you work alone. I suggest finding a project to work on with other people. Maybe go to Hacklab with your dad or spend more time making community theatre puppets.
You feel lonely sometimes, even sprawled out on that couch on the island with your eight closest friends. You feel isolated from their conversations about school and dating, because you really do just want to talk about genetics. You know what, though? Emotions and people are systems just as fascinatingly complex as protein signalling networks. It’s not necessarily less intellectual to analyze them instead. In fact, you feel really good when you have a new insight that helps explain people. Start chasing those insights now and maybe you’ll feel better about the conversations you so often dismiss as gossipy.
Finally, you really do need to talk to some people about your sadness. Turning inward isn’t strength. It isn’t unforgivable weakness, either. It’s just not optimal. You are so afraid that your parents will feel like failures if you tell them about your self-injury, or that they will panic and force you into therapy or snatch away your plans. In fact, your mother thinks all smart teenage girls get incredibly sad for a few years. I promise she won’t freak out. After you talk to your parents, you may want to consider therapy. I suggest you look for something mindfulness-based: that flavour of therapy asks you to practice being and thinking a certain way, which is more interesting than overanalyzing your regrets.
Anyway, I like pointing at pictures of you and saying how cool you are. I usually follow that up immediately with, “Too bad I was so sad back then”. Your life may not be something you deserve, but I’m glad you hold onto it. There’s a hell of a good future next door; let’s go.
I have depression. It’s simple right? Everyone knows depression, it’s that thing that makes you sad. Isn’t it?
I wish it was just sadness, because sadness I can explain. Sadness makes sense to people. Something bad happens and then you’re sad, simple.
But sadness makes up a very small part of depression and everyone’s depression manifests in different ways.
I find it hard at times to explain my depression because I don’t have words that fit with what I feel, or I don’t feel.
My episodes of depression can begin very slowly. I don’t even see it coming. It creeps in bit by bit.
I suppose I first noticed it when I become tearful a lot easier. There’s the sadness aspect to it. I would relive painful memories often.
Then there can be moments of anger or numbness, fear or being overwhelmed. Suddenly all these emotions take over and you don’t always know what you’re actually feeling. However you carry on with everyday life and try to ignore the black cloud moving over you. You say ‘I’m fine’ to anyone who asks. But slowly you begin to fade into the darkness, nothing matters anymore. You become so exhausted from trying to get through each day.
People might see you as being ‘moody’ or ‘distant’ but you don’t mean to be. You withdraw yourself to protect others because you like a burden being around them.
Everything you once knew and everything you could do becomes difficult. The smallest of tasks feel impossible. There are days that brushing your teeth, or making a drink just feel overwhelming. You feel silly saying to people that you’re struggling with these things as you think they should be simple.
Depression strips you of all sense of security, you question everything. I often don’t feel human, it’s like I’m walking in a bubble and nothing around me feels real. I dissociate often and feel really lost. I never feel like I’m good enough and no matter what I do I just won’t be okay. It’s draining feeling so negative all the time.
And often people say things like ‘think positively’, ‘you have so much to live for’, ‘just stay busy’, ‘you’ve felt like this before, it will pass’. For me no matter what you say my brain will just shut it down, I can’t think positively, I don’t want to live, I am too tired to stay busy and great I’ve felt like this before but doesn’t mean I want to go through it again and it doesn’t make this any easier.
I’m sure it feels impossible to be around me, I can even feel how miserable I am to be around. But I genuinely can’t help it.
Depression isn’t just one bad day, or when something doesn’t go your way. It’s crippling. For me it’s chronic, it’s something I have to face time and time again. My brain doesn’t produce the right amount of chemicals.
I work so hard to get through life, i try and make the right choices and I honestly don’t want to be depressed.
So, to any of you fighting depression, I see you. I know you’re trying to fight when you feel like flying.
Do you ever wonder if we’re born with a certain amount of happiness and once you’ve used it all then it’s gone.
And certain events take off so much happiness from you, like trauma or grief.
And what if I’ve used mine up and my tank is empty and I’m just fighting for the scrappy bits at the bottom. Like when your car runs out of fuel.
A car you can refill with fuel but what if I can’t refill with happiness and I’m just left with this empty tank. When you leave a car with no fuel it doesn’t move and it’s just stuck in one place and if you try to move, parts slowly break and soon the car becomes useless and only good for scrap.
No one wants a useless car. No one wants an empty human.
Its been almost 14 years and this is still one of the most unnerving videos I’ve seen. The idea that someone could honestly believe that Scrabble was an oracle of some kind can easily be comical (not that there aren’t any moments of levity in this short) and yet here she’s shown to be obsessed to the point of madness. I’ve seen some crazy stuff involving numerology but this takes the cake.
The ending was especially unnerving, with her implied to have gone and shot that man while he was in the hospital for ruining her percieved prophecy. I think what really makes this whole short unnerving is how it’s all presented against a solid black background with scant but well-placed music and sound effects. It reminds me of those creepy EAS videos.
I’m not going to be around on Tumblr as much as I used to, I’m afraid. I just had a major mental breakdown so I’m stepping back from social media for a while.
I love all my followers and I can’t wait until I’m well enough to come back. But right now, I need to take a break so I can recover properly.
@mariesackler asked me to write this at midnight. I finished it at 2am and spent thirty minutes trying to find a title before giving up and just going straight cheese. I’ve been awake for 21 hours. I didn’t edit this and on some level I am sure this is trash but I also don’t care.
You braid Sackler’s hair and eat Chinese food. That’s all I’ve got.
Adam Sackler x Reader || wc: 2421
CW: none really, it’s just fluff with a mentally ill reader who’s dealing with anxiety, being overwhelmed, and mild sensory overload; it gets slightly nsfw at the end with the implication that things will continue; I used fuck like every other word because that’s who I am as a person
You’ll be floored to hear this gif doesn’t really have anything to do with this I just like looking at him run his hand through his hair.
Anika and Liz had such strong feelings about episode 7 of season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, Monster, that they organised a quick out-of-schedule catch-up to rant.
Accordingly, this episode (and its show notes!) contains much fresher spoilers than usual.
We discuss:
Our concerns about the Yvette Picard plotline came true, with a fun domestic violence fake-out twist!
Multiple ableist tropes: the tortured artist whose creativity depends on their mental illness; the “having a mentally ill parent is SO traumatic” story
Imagine being a bipolar Trekkie right now
Brief mention of suicide from 8:14 to 8:26
This is not AS egregious, but they got Freud all over our Picard/Crusher
