i like to think of myself who's relatively normal about holding grudges and the like but. i'm also still incredibly upset about something that happened in... february, i'd wager. especially given that it's relatively minor and i don't think anyone except for me is physically capable of taking seriously

How are you feeling? How is life treating you?

Hi there o/ tbh not great, I stepped away from tumblr for a bit because I was doing too much doomscrolling, and it was crushing me into anxious inaction/despair instead of reminding me to do what I can. possibly a skill issue

god gives his strongest soldiers his hardest battles etc etc

Anyways on the topic of renewing my learners permit they're closing the DMV liiike, testing area here indefinitely after next week and I *REALLY* do not want to have to go out of town to get my actual license, so I'm really tempted to practice everyday til next Thursday and then try and get it last minute before I can't get it here for who the hell knows how long. 👍

i love being an adult human being who exists

man I don't even wanna watch this ep anymore

it's getting unbearable babes <3

Cat indulging in drugs. In a sunbeam and everything

hihi vent post incoming (tldr im pretty sure everyone hates me and also im gonna fail all my exams)

All my friends: we like your stuff, we're glad to have you around, please throw giant textposts at us!

Me: Clearly I am being too noisy, I should disappear forever now.

coping healthily by translating sugae sweet nightmare

Aaaand I'm home it's time to dread over if my mom is going to try and interrogate me on why I can't just let my brother drive me or whatever. Because every time I try and share that I am unhappy about something it becomes a case of my mom trying to tell me I'm wrong for feeling that way.

so tired of not fitting in anywhere not like in a cool mysterious oh i don't fit in bc im so interesting and everyone is so dull kind of way like i never felt feeling of belonging and peace and being home kind of way like always the outsider watching from afar never connecting to anyone or anything or anywhere kind of way im always the observer and im stuck being the observer and no one else

my shithead brother doesn't believe in evolution and he thinks women shouldn't be heads of household because "statistically it doesn't work out" and that a genuinely competent woman should trade up to a better man...

still in suchhhh a funk

I feel bad responding to a very beautiful, poetically written ventpost with prosaic advice, but I'm going to say this:

Resilience is a skill. Being able to shrug things off is a skill. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can do something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that's a skill.

It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.

unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don't hurt anymore.

if you're highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't.

if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it's goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it's going to be a bitch to pick it up.

if you learnt "the world is scary and out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" (or "showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once", or "minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren't going perfectly then you're about to suffer", or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn't work like that any more is hard and it hurts. Unless you're really good at figuring out what you're thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.

You're not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that's as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it's cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.

....But adults learn Russian every day. Adults teach themselves Russian every day.

You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.

you are not doomed to get hit by everything that happens to you like it's a truck forever.