discussion with my psych yesterday about anxiety

he acknowledged that my anxiety has become sensitised much like fibro and chronic fatigue was and we talked about how weird the body was because it literally was indeed giving me highly sensitised anxiety symptoms for eating chilli—and I’ve been able to bring that down with exposure

but I needed a tool to help with when things are really bad like last week when there was an actual tiger (homelessness and having to move a house full of stuff in two months with cfs) looming over me and I was completely non functional and not abke to sleep

so he said the first thing to try is instead of pushing the panicked ‘tiger!!!!’ thoughts away (because I needed to sleep so that I could deal with them tomorrow) to hold onto them

just try to like pull them in and choke them out and keep them close. he said that your brain isn’t inclined to do that but as the thought slips through your brain that’s less inclined to linger. so we’ll see. he daid it takes practice and you’re training your brain so it won’t be like instantanouslybrsducing anxiety but it should teach your brain not to think anxiety is poisonous and make your body literally respond to that with physical symptoms

the other thing was that I kept saying ‘I’ll attack the problem tomorrow’ and trying to push away my thoughts every time my brain wanted to solve the issue and instead I should turn on the light and grab a pen and paper and write down the problem and everything I can think of that I can do in the moment, and then when I’ve run out I’ll have a higher chance to get to sleep. that one I should have realised myself because a lot of those sleepless nights are because my brain is a problem solver’s brain with existential issues and I often can’t get to sleep till I finish a story or solve the problem that it’s decided to latch onto and keep turning over

anyway hopefully I’ll be able to find this post again lmao

anyway what do you do when there is a tiger in the room with you? you hug the tiger aparently

I actually had a fandom-related semi nightmare last night that was so mundane but awkward that it made me mad when I woke up. dream-me had apparently, in a fit of hubris, recommended my own anonymous alt ao3 account to one of my irl friends years ago, but the friend in question had never actually checked it out, leading present day dream-me to feel very relieved because the fic there is very unpolished and venty and quite easy to identify as mine if you know me well enough. which leads to the premise of the dream itself, where my friend dms me like "yknow I think I'll finally look into those recs you sent me a few years ago, I have some free time and want to show that I'm interested in your tastes and hobbies," at which point it became a race against time to either a) convince them to stop reading before they got to the most damning authors note in as non-suspicious a way as possible or b) simply nuke the account. why was this my stress dream. the stuff on there isn't even that embarrassing.

it truly gets to me in a way that it probably shouldn't when people address my psych abolition stances not on the points themselves but on the idea that i'm some sort of clueless conspiracy theorist who doesn't even know the basic arguments or definitions of psychiatry. it's so deeply demoralizing to be suffer under a system for years, dedicate a huge chunk of my academic + vocational work to studying + even working within that system (as i still do!), then spend years reading + writing about critiques of that system, just to have someone be like "oh! you're wrong because you don't know what it is :)". like... why are you so averse to the fact that someone might genuinely understand the inner workings of this system + still have a problem with it? i'm not going to debate with someone whose knee jerk reaction to my carefully planned, always painfully polite btw, explanations of my views is to assume "you don't even have a passing knowledge of this subject"

i understand that it's not usually the intention + the person arguing usually has some sort of defensive attachment to their view of psychiatry which prevents them from even addressing my actual points but it really feels like gaslighting/"you only think poorly of the system which told you you're stupid + crazy bcuz you're stupid + crazy"

Is there like.... anywhere or anyone I can talk to about wanting to die without feeling bad or triggering people

I need them to commission you next time as their little elf to write down deep lore about them. I’m pretty sure you would be fantastic!

ty anon you’re so sweet and also highly correct. dnp pay me to use my remarkably detailed memory of their lives to ruin them emotionally

"i mess up things and then i don't have the energy to fix them up" yes brain true sentence but no brain the appropriate response is NOT "therefore i should kill myself (and here's how)"

I just read someone’s hot take on ‘the mermaid scene’ being ‘peak cringe’ and I just-

Sweet, sweet human. That’s Ed’s psyche you’re taking about. My dude is having his life flash before his eyes in the most beautiful little heartbreaking s1 montage, and if that’s how he wants to picture Stede coming to redeem his lonely fucking soul - as a glittery goddamn tits-out merman, then that’s HIS GODDAMN BUSINESS.

adele's "my little love" is currently on and i remember telling a friend a few months ago how i sobbed so hard the first time i heard this song and i didn't understand why because lol i'm not anywhere near being a parent and she was like, "well your mom raised you on her own and you're now at the age where you're experiencing a fraction of the loneliness she must've felt then which is making you finally realize she was a woman just like you before she was your mom" and all i could say was, OH.

Do it* scared

*emailing the freezer repository you're going to work in to make sure they have coveralls that actually fit you because if you ignore the issue you might show up and find that your ass doesn't fit any of the men's PPE they have

EDIT: email sent!!!!!

shawn spencer would escape a saw trap with time to spare

text-post

I know this has been ragged on a million times but I gotta

so this is how episode 25 is going down, right?

i. hate that i cant ignore any longer how fucked up i am

so much of a 21st century woman that i legitimately had to have a guy in my YA lit class explain to me how men's emotions work because i've only ever heard about it from idiotic women speaking for men or super macho guys who think any form of emotion is utter weakness for my entire life

Wait I’m 70% sure ocpd is a thing unless you meant it’s not real in the antipsych way not the literal way

i had no idea that was a thing i just used those words to avoid using the term obsessive compulsive disorder bc that’s not something i’ve been diagnosed with or feel like i can claim to have lol