mist-advice-things
41 posts
Latest Posts by mist-advice-things
Science side of Tumblr PLEASE share your tips/advice/hacks for academic conferences!
Im attending my first academic conference in a couple weeks and I’d appreciate anything you’d like to share with a lil baby bio undergrad like me
Give-away shops
I’d like to tell you all the story of Jan’s give-away shop.
The story:
Jan was a guy who lived in my hometown. Financially speaking, he was well-off: he owned the house in which he lived alone, and had gathered a lot of stuff throughout the years.
One day, Jan realised all of this stuff wasn’t making him happy. He decided to move to a small apartment and to get rid of most of his possessions.
Jan also realised the privileged life he led: he owned much more than he needed, and was able to move on the fly just because he felt like it.
All of this made Jan decide to open up a give-away shop. He moved everything he didn’t need to his living room, simply opened up his front door, and told everyone they could come and pick up whatever they wanted for free.
His friends declared him an idiot: humans are selfish, they said, and would just take his valuables and sell everything they’d gotten from him. They were wrong. Sure, some people did this, but they were only a small part of those who came.
Those who had less than Jan (including yours truly) came by and found things they needed but had been postponing to buy because they couldn’t afford to. Others came to pick up things they could use for their charities, or for the classrooms they had to teach on a too low budget.
The biggest surprise was how Jan never ran out of things to give away: rather than taking things, a lot of people started donating items they didn’t need anymore!
Objects weren’t the only thing people donated: Jan quickly amassed a team of dedicated volunteers to run the shop for him whenever he was absent.
And that’s the story of how my town got its first give-away shop. Unfortunately, the shop doesn’t exist anymore: they closed down after about five years because Jan eventually had to sell his house.
His shop has left an important impact on my town: inspired by his shop, we now have a thriving freecycle community, town hall frequently hosts give-away markets (flee markets where everything’s free), and individuals have been putting up give-away cabinets, fridges, and libraries all over where people can leave their unused goods, leftover food, and unread books for others to enjoy.
The take-away:
Not all of us are as privileged as Jan: if we were, we wouldn’t have much need for projects like these. However, we can still learn from his story!
If you’ve got an unused cabinet lying around, why not turn it into your own give-away corner? If you work in event planning, maybe consider hosting a give-away market some time. Do you work at a library or a community centre? Those are the perfect spots to put a give-away library or a leftovers fridge: just make sure to keep an eye on anything food-related and to clean out expired goods when necessary.
Another popular variation on this idea are plant cuttings corners and seed banks. These are a great way to share native plants with fellow gardeners to improve the biodiversity in your neighbourhood.
If this post has inspired you, try petitioning your town for projects like these: they’re often welcomed because they don’t cost much to set up and can have a big positive impact on both your community and the environment.
(Image source) [ID: a small outdoors wooden construction with a see-through plastic roof containing a cupboard with toys, cookwares, and shoes, a hanging rail with clothes, a shelf with books, a bulletin board, and a box and a bag. The text “Give Box: sharing is caring” is painted at the top of the shed, and purple flowers and red hearts are painted on its sides.]
>Join a union
>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on
>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members
>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that's going on
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
A Better World - create an alternate history timeline
Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game
Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet
Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games
Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones
Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy
ZenGM - simulate sports
Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi
IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)
Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface
The Cafe & Diner - mystery game
The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game
Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions
Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game
Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game
Miniconomy - player driven economy game
Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes
BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators
Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil
Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
I think a lot of autistic taking-things-literally goes under the radar because what the diagnostic tests and shit ask about is not what that generally looks like in an adult and often not in kids either and much more importantly it’s not what generally actually causes problems in real life instead of being irritating for caretakers or funny to bullies or easy to diagnose
I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.
BUT
My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????
I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was this and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form when surely they can’t know all the answers either? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago?
I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”
And all of that? That’s how “taking things literally” ACTUALLY affects your life as an adult. It’s not “haha you think ‘getting under your skin’ means parasites”. It’s “you have real difficulty functioning in the world because everyone else is conveying things through implication and assuming that you know that rules are flexible and questions are approximate and you’re supposed to lie on job applications, and you don’t”.
Light Cues
From the "find what works" department of my life...
I was telling my prescribing psychiatrist about this and he really loved it, and it occurred to me I'm not sure I've ever talked about it on here, but I've started using light cues instead of alarms for some things.
I don't use a lot of alarms regularly throughout the day (I don't need one to wake up unless I'm getting up at an unusual time, for example) but I use them for one-off stuff like "time to start getting ready to go out" or "today you have a doctor's appointment". I found after a while that with an alarm for a regular repeating task, there comes a point where I just silence it and forget to do the thing. Like, I have almost all notifications on my phone turned off and it's still muscle memory for me, as it is for many people, to have my phone beep for attention and just silence it unthinkingly. So I started using lighting cues.
It's evolved a lot, starting with the end of the workday. The lighting in my bedroom is all floor lamps; the one over my work desk is on a smart switch, which plugs into the wall and then the lamp plugs into the switch. I set the switch to turn the lamp on at 8am just before I start work, and off at 4:30pm to remind me to stop work, which I don't always remember to do. The light suddenly going out makes that corner unpleasantly dim, and it's more work to turn it back on (open phone, open app, fin the right switch) than it is to stop work for the day.
Then I thought, this is so irritating it must be useful for other things. So I set it to go off from noon to 12:03pm. It's more of a pain in the ass to turn it back on than it is to get up, go to the kitchen, and do what I'm supposed to do at noon anyway: take my second Adderall dose. And the light is back on by the time I get back.
But I was running into the problem of taking the dose on an empty stomach as you're supposed to, but not having eaten since breakfast at like 5am. And now I'm in the kitchen. Having forgotten to eat my Early Lunch at 10:30. But the Adderall needs like 20 minutes to kick in before I eat, and by the I'm back at work, and then I wonder why I eat my body weight in pasta at 5pm.
So I set a light cue for 10:30 to remind me to take a break and eat. But I don't want to use the same cue for everything. The lamp on the other end of the bedroom doesn't have a smart switch but it does have a smart bulb, which is even more flexible, so at 10:30am it dims to 50% (irritating) and turns deep blue (doubly irritating). I leave the room, go eat lunch, and usually come back to sit on the bed with the cats for a few minutes. I don't mind the dim blue light when I'm on the bed -- I just can't work with it that way. So at 11 the light goes back to full white brightness and I get my cue to go back to work.
I have various other cues -- the living room lamps go off and the LED string on the headboard in the bedroom goes on low and red to indicate it's bedtime, and the LEDs go off a little later to remind me NO, it is BEDTIME NOW.
Obviously a lot of this is only possible with either analog daily timers or smart bulbs/switches, and those can be cost-prohibitive for some while others don't like having their lighting on the internet. But it's all switches and bulbs that I can remove easily, and they've come down a great deal in price -- mine are all Kasa brand so they're controlled from a single app, and I've found them extremely helpful.
Plus sometimes at night I put all the lights to deep blue and pretend I'm underwater and that's fun.
as a fairly successful woman with ADHD i will tell you that the two strongest tools in your kit are "be so competent they don't notice you're unmanageable" and "strategically deploy weaponized incompetence to avoid having to do things you hate" and a third is "learn a little about a lot of subjects so you'll always be able to make small talk and network because when people like you as a person they'll overlook a lot of personal failings." it's honestly that straightforward
I want to live by myself when I move out of my parent's place but I'm really afraid of money problems? I'm afraid that the only place I can afford will be in the ghetto and it'll all be torn apart and I'll only be allowed to eat one granola bar a week. I'm really stressing out about this. I don't know anything about after school life. I don't know anything about paying bills or how to buy an apartment and it's really scaring me. is there anything you know that can help me?
HI darling,
I’ve actually got a super wonderful masterpost for you to check out:
Home
what the hell is a mortgage?
first apartment essentials checklist
how to care for cacti and succulents
the care and keeping of plants
Getting an apartment
Money
earn rewards by taking polls
how to coupon
what to do when you can’t pay your bills
see if you’re paying too much for your cell phone bill
how to save money
How to Balance a Check Book
How to do Your Own Taxes
Health
how to take care of yourself when you’re sick
things to bring to a doctor’s appointment
how to get free therapy
what to expect from your first gynecologist appointment
how to make a doctor’s appointment
how to pick a health insurance plan
how to avoid a hangover
a list of stress relievers
how to remove a splinter
Emergency
what to do if you get pulled over by a cop
a list of hotlines in a crisis
things to keep in your car in case of an emergency
how to do the heimlich maneuver
Job
time management
create a resume
find the right career
how to pick a major
how to avoid a hangover
how to interview for a job
how to stop procrastinating
How to write cover letters
Travel
ULTIMATE PACKING LIST
Traveling for Cheap
Travel Accessories
The Best Way to Pack a Suitcase
How To Read A Map
How to Apply For A Passport
How to Make A Travel Budget
Better You
read the news
leave your childhood traumas behind
how to quit smoking
how to knit
how to stop biting your nails
how to stop procrastinating
how to stop skipping breakfast
how to stop micromanaging
how to stop avoiding asking for help
how to stop swearing constantly
how to stop being a pushover
learn another language
how to improve your self-esteem
how to sew
learn how to embroider
how to love yourself
100 tips for life
Apartments/Houses/Moving
Moving Out and Getting an Apartment, Part 1: Are You Sure? (The Responsible One)
Moving Out and Getting an Apartment, Part 2: Finding the Damn Apartment (The Responsible One)
Moving Out and Getting an Apartment, Part 3: Questions to Ask about the Damn Apartment (The Responsible One)
Moving Out and Getting an Apartment, Part 4: Packing and Moving All of Your Shit (The Responsible One)
How to Protect Your Home Against Break-Ins (The Responsible One)
Education
How to Find a Fucking College (The Sudden Adult)
How to Find Some Fucking Money for College (The Sudden Adult)
What to Do When You Can’t Afford Your #1 Post-Secondary School (The Sudden Adult)
Stop Shitting on Community College Kids (Why Community College is Fucking Awesome) (The Responsible One)
How to Ask for a Recommendation Letter (The Responsible One)
How to Choose a College Major (The Sudden Adult)
Finances
How to Write a Goddamn Check (The Responsible One)
How to Convince Credit Companies You’re Not a Worthless Bag of Shit (The Responsible One)
Debit vs Credit (The Responsible One)
What to Do if Your Wallet is Stolen/Lost (The Sudden Adult)
Budgeting 101 (The Responsible One)
Important Tax Links to Know (The Responsible One)
How to Choose a Bank Without Screwing Yourself (The Responsible One)
Job Hunting
How to Write a Resume Like a Boss (The Responsible One)
How to Write a Cover Letter Someone Will Actually Read (The Responsible One)
How to Handle a Phone Interview without Fucking Up (The Responsible One)
10 Sites to Start Your Job Search (The Responsible One)
Life Skills
Staying in Touch with Friends/Family (The Sudden Adult)
Bar Etiquette (The Sudden Adult)
What to Do After a Car Accident (The Sudden Adult)
Grow Up and Buy Your Own Groceries (The Responsible One)
How to Survive Plane Trips (The Sudden Adult)
How to Make a List of Goals (The Responsible One)
How to Stop Whining and Make a Damn Appointment (The Responsible One)
Miscellaneous
What to Expect from the Hell that is Jury Duty (The Responsible One)
Relationships
Marriage: What the Fuck Does It Mean and How the Hell Do I Know When I’m Ready? (Guest post - The Northwest Adult)
How Fucked Are You for Moving In with Your Significant Other: An Interview with an Actual Real-Life Couple Living Together™ (mintypineapple and catastrofries)
Travel & Vehicles
How to Winterize Your Piece of Shit Vehicle (The Responsible One)
How to Make Public Transportation Your Bitch (The Responsible One)
Other Blog Features
Apps for Asshats
Harsh Truths & Bitter Reminders
Asks I’ll Probably Need to Refer People to Later
Apartments (or Life Skills) - How Not to Live in Filth (The Sudden Adult)
Finances - Tax Basics (The Responsible One)
Important Documents - How to Get a Copy of Your Birth Certificate (The Responsible One)
Important Documents - How to Get a Replacement ID (The Responsible One)
Health - How to Deal with a Chemical Burn (The Responsible One)
Job Hunting - List of Jobs Based on Social Interaction Levels (The Sudden Adult)
Job Hunting - How to Avoid Falling into a Pit of Despair While Job Hunting (The Responsible One)
Job Hunting - Questions to Ask in an Interview (The Responsible One)
Life Skills - First-Time Flying Tips (The Sudden Adult)
Life Skills - How to Ask a Good Question (The Responsible One)
Life Skills - Reasons to Take a Foreign Language (The Responsible One)
Life Skills - Opening a Bar Tab (The Sudden Adult)
Relationships - Long Distance Relationships: How to Stay in Contact (The Responsible One)
Adult Cheat Sheet:
what to do if your pet gets lost
removing stains from your carpet
how to know if you’re eligible for food stamps
throwing a dinner party
i’m pregnant, now what?
first aid tools to keep in your house
how to keep a clean kitchen
learning how to become independent from your parents
job interview tips
opening your first bank account
what to do if you lose your wallet
tips for cheap furniture
easy ways to cut your spending
selecting the right tires for your car
taking out your first loan
picking out the right credit card
how to get out of parking tickets
how to fix a leaky faucet
get all of your news in one place
getting rid of mice & rats in your house
when to go to the e.r.
buying your first home
how to buy your first stocks
guide to brewing coffee
first apartment essentials checklist
coping with a job you hate
30 books to read before you’re 30
what’s the deal with retirement?
difference between insurances
Once you’ve looked over all those cool links, I have some general advice for you on how you can have some sort of support system going for you:
Reasons to move out of home
You may decide to leave home for many different reasons, including:
wishing to live independently
location difficulties – for example, the need to move closer to university
conflict with your parents
being asked to leave by your parents.
Issues to consider when moving out of home
It’s common to be a little unsure when you make a decision like leaving home. You may choose to move, but find that you face problems you didn’t anticipate, such as:
Unreadiness – you may find you are not quite ready to handle all the responsibilities.
Money worries – bills including rent, utilities like gas and electricity and the cost of groceries may catch you by surprise, especially if you are used to your parents providing for everything. Debt may become an issue.
Flatmate problems – issues such as paying bills on time, sharing housework equally, friends who never pay board, but stay anyway, and lifestyle incompatibilities (such as a non-drug-user flatting with a drug user) may result in hostilities and arguments.
Your parents may be worried
Think about how your parents may be feeling and talk with them if they are worried about you. Most parents want their children to be happy and independent, but they might be concerned about a lot of different things. For example:
They may worry that you are not ready.
They may be sad because they will miss you.
They may think you shouldn’t leave home until you are married or have bought a house.
They may be concerned about the people you have chosen to live with.
Reassure your parents that you will keep in touch and visit regularly. Try to leave on a positive note. Hopefully, they are happy about your plans and support your decision.
Tips for a successful move
Tips include:
Don’t make a rash decision – consider the situation carefully. Are you ready to live independently? Do you make enough money to support yourself? Are you moving out for the right reasons?
Draw up a realistic budget – don’t forget to include ‘hidden’ expenses such as the property’s security deposit or bond (usually four weeks’ rent), connection fees for utilities, and home and contents insurance.
Communicate – avoid misunderstandings, hostilities and arguments by talking openly and respectfully about your concerns with flatmates and parents. Make sure you’re open to their point of view too – getting along is a two-way street.
Keep in touch – talk to your parents about regular home visits: for example, having Sunday night dinner together every week.
Work out acceptable behaviour – if your parents don’t like your flatmate(s), find out why. It is usually the behaviour rather than the person that causes offence (for example, swearing or smoking). Out of respect for your parents, ask your flatmate(s) to be on their best behaviour when your parents visit and do the same for them.
Ask for help – if things are becoming difficult, don’t be too proud to ask your parents for help. They have a lot of life experience.
If your family home does not provide support
Not everyone who leaves home can return home or ask their parents for help in times of trouble. If you have been thrown out of home or left home to escape abuse or conflict, you may be too young or unprepared to cope.
If you are a fostered child, you will have to leave the state-care system when you turn 18, but you may not be ready to make the sudden transition to independence.
If you need support, help is available from a range of community and government organisations. Assistance includes emergency accommodation and food vouchers. If you can’t call your parents or foster parents, call one of the associations below for information, advice and assistance.
Where to get help
Your doctor
Kids Helpline Tel. 1800 55 1800
Lifeline Tel. 13 11 44
Home Ground Services Tel. 1800 048 325
Relationships Australia Tel. 1300 364 277
Centrelink Crisis or Special Help Tel. 13 28 50
Tenants Union of Victoria Tel. (03) 9416 2577
Things to remember
Try to solve any problems before you leave home. Don’t leave because of a fight or other family difficulty if you can possibly avoid it.
Draw up a realistic budget that includes ‘hidden’ expenses, such as bond, connection fees for utilities, and home and contents insurance.
Remember that you can get help from a range of community and government organizations.
(source)
Keep me updated? xx
I fucking hate game apps. I wanted to play tetris the otherday so I figured there must be a simple tetris app out there its the most basic game. But every app is like heres your daily log in bonus of 10 gold! You get 5 free plays a day. Here's an ad. To replay a level costs 1 diamond. You can eart gold by earning points in levels. 1000 points = 1 gold. You can exchange 550 gold for one diamond but we have a sale right now that they only cost 500 gold. Heres an ad. You can buy a loot crate of diamonds for 5.99$! You leveled up! Heres 1 free diamond. Youve run out of free replays for today, would you like to buy some more diamonds? Heres your daily tasks, make sure to log in every day this month for a free reward chest. its free! Heres an ad. Would you like to sign up for this credit card to recieve 10 free diamonds? Invite a friend and you can earn points! Ding! Youve leveled up. Heres an ad. This is our special bonus play weekend, you get one free replay and a pack of diamonds only costs 4.99$. You can use your gold to purchase new skins for the tetris blocks. This ones shaped like cats! It costs 100 diamonds. You need to collect them all. Free to play, may be some in-app purchases.
don’t know what parent of an autistic child needs to hear this but as long as they’re not harming anyone your kid’s stimming is not a “problem behaviour”
Daily "avoiding hopelessness" checklist
Hey, friends. I know I've been really struggling to look towards the future with any kind of hope, so here are some little things I've been trying to do every day that might help you, too.
Accept that your productivity might look weird right now. Don't expect yourself to act as if nothing is wrong.
Make art. I try to write something every day, even if I don't really feel like it, and I've found that once I get into it, I'm grateful I did.
Do something to plan for the future. Doesn't have to be big. Even getting some ice cream you know future you will thank you for counts.
Eat. Even if you're not hungry. I keep skipping meals because I don't feel like eating, and then I force myself to make something and realize I was absolutely starving.
Clean up one thing in your space. If doing all the dishes and sweeping the floors and putting away laundry all feel too overwhelming, try just doing one of those things.
Lean on your online and offline communities. I live in a county that voted trump by a margin of eighty percent. My world feels scary and hostile right now, and it's my communities that are helping me feel hopeful.
Try to find one thing that feels normal. One thing that feels safe and normal and helps you feel a bit more grounded. My local grocery store just got their shipment of chocolate oranges in for the season. That's my thing.
Try to find one thing to look forward to, no matter how small. My thing is checking my ao3 inbox for comments on my fics.
Love you all <3
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
this is gonna sound like a shitpost but the best advice i have if youre consistently coming off wrong is to start talking like an elcor
you will feel like a dumdum at first, but once you get used to it youll realize that telling people what kind of thing you're about to say ahead of time flattens their anxiety a huge amount
ive been starting every question with "question:" for awhile now and i almost never get people reading too much into what i mean anymore
it seems super dumb, but "what are your plans tomorrow?" gets people asking me what i have planned despite me obviously being in the process of figuring that out, whereas "question: what are your plans tomorrow?" gets me a quick rundown of their schedule, followed by "why?"
it also makes it really easy to work tone indicators into your verbal speech. if you're always saying "question: [your question here]?" then no one blinks when you say "genuine question: [question that could read as sarcastic]?"
it also gets you out of your own way for any types of things you struggle to say. "can you make sure to do the dishes before you go to bed?" feels like an argument waiting to happen, but "request: can you make sure to do the dishes before you go to bed?" gets the words flowing on a neutral word while making it clear that you're not looking for a fight
so yeah. suggestion: talk like an elcor
Any tips for being a suicidal 15 year old?
When I was a suicidal 15 year old everyone told me “it gets better”, and it sounded like bullshit. And frankly, it still sounds like bullshit. Like oh, what, I’m living in hell and you’re not gonna help me or *do* anything or give me any useful advice and I’m supposed to just hang in there on the nebulous, pithy promise that things are just gonna work out on their own? And you can’t tell me how or why, I’m just supposed to take it on the faith that I don’t have that something might change in ways I haven’t considered?
But yeah. It does. And it’s frustrating as hell.
Yes, things are gonna get better, and they’re gonna get better in ways I can’t describe even after experiencing it myself. Things you don’t even know CAN be different WILL be different. One day you’re just going to step outside and realize things got better somewhere and you didn’t even notice it happening.
And there’s really nothing I can say that makes that sound even a little bit believable.
I guess all I can tell you is that you have to want to believe it.
hey Elvis is the glass half full or half empty to you?
Woah mama it depends on whether you're filling or emptying
You do not need to heal the way they believe you should. You do not need to be the person they expect you to be after trauma.
It’s okay to just be you. It’s okay to heal in a way that makes sense to you. And honestly, it should be about you. It’s more than okay to take care of yourself how you need to.
You do not need to heal the way they believe you should. You do not need to be the person they expect you to be after trauma.
It’s okay to just be you. It’s okay to heal in a way that makes sense to you. And honestly, it should be about you. It’s more than okay to take care of yourself how you need to.
see the THING IS I don't feel like I ever worked hard enough to have "earned" the burnout, which is. probably how we got here.
I think something a lot of other people can relate to is the way that you get so conditioned to discomfort that you stop registering it.
I remember sitting at the table with my family, eating dinner as a child. I’d try to eat, because of course I was hungry. But sometimes the flavor or texture was so repugnant that it moved into a category of Not Food.
“Two more bites before you can leave the table.”
“I can’t,” I’d say, trying to explain the impossibility.
But because I was a child they heard, “I won’t,” and made me sit at the table. I’d sit in dull agonized silence, bored and hungry for hours until bedtime when they’d give up. I’d hate myself for not eating and my parents for forcing me to sit there. The few forcefeeding moments ended in vomit.
They’d say, “If you don’t eat this you can’t eat a snack later,” and I moved past trying to communicate my discomfort into accepting that I’d just be hungry.
That state of affairs didn’t last, because my parents realized nothing could force me to eat so they catered to my palate, worrying they’d starve me. But the message stuck. If you can’t do anything about a situation, just accept the suffering.
A few years later my mother called me off the playground to ask, “Are you limping?”
I shrugged. My feet had hurt for a long time, but that was just the way things were now. My mom pulled my socks and shoes off and gasped. The soles of my feet were covered in huge painful planters warts.
“Why didn’t you say anything?!” She demanded but I could only shrug at her. I’d learned a long time ago that saying things about my discomfort didn’t matter, so now I had no words. Sometimes things hurt and sometimes they don’t. I simply accepted and did my best.
Now as an adult trying to learn to improve my own conditions can be hard. If I make food that I can’t eat I’ll force myself to sit at the counter still, full of guilt and self loathing, trying to will myself to eat it.
At first I needed my betrothed to gently take it away to present me with something I could eat. Now on my own I can usually admit that it’s not happening before too long and get something else, but I still feel guilty.
Laying in bed at night waiting for my betrothed to finish getting ready I let out a huge sigh of relief when they turned the lights off.
“Why didn’t you turn them off if they bothered you?” they asked the first time it happened.
“I didn’t even know it was bothering me until it was gone.”
Assessing my physical state now to see if I can improve it is something I’m still relearning but I’m relieved to finally have the space and support to do it.
things that you should be able to check out from public libraries:
power and hand tools. drills hammers wrenches what have you
exercise equipment. yoga mats weights running trackers
specialty cooking tools. blenders steamers heavy duty pots
specialty cleaning supplies. carpet cleaners window washers steam mops
oops! it seems i tripped and dropped several million free books, papers, and other resources
https://annas-archive.org
https://sci-hub.se
https://z-lib.is
https://libgen.is
https://libgen.rs
https://www.pdfdrive.com
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org
https://monoskop.org/Monoskop
https://libcom.org
https://libretexts.org
http://classics.mit.edu
https://librivox.org
https://standardebooks.org
https://www.gutenberg.org
https://core.ac.uk
