Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
Things I did not actually realize was an option
What’s amazing is what happens when you do this with children. I hit on it when working at the foster home, where nearly all our kids were on the autism spectrum, and they weren’t “defiant” around me because I said things like, “How long do you need to stand here before we can move?” and “Come into the kitchen when you’re ready” instead of saying, “Stop staring out the window, let’s go,” or “Come eat dinner,” and interpreting hesitation as refusal to obey.
Yup, that’s way better for toddlers and younger kids. It helps when they don’t have the self-awareness, attention span, or concept of the passage of time to estimate when they’ll be ready by themselves.
I have also definitely found that doing the “okay when I finish counting down from twenty is getting up time” has been useful.
WELL OKAY WHOOPS XD I should not have been overspecific, I was just thinking about teaching this stuff to the parents at my job and your reblog made me immediately think of you with Banana and the kidlets.
Another hack: when you want to get up but are stalled by your brain and frustrated – stop. Breathe. Think about what you want to do once you’re up, without thinking about getting up. Treat it like a fantasy, no pressure, just thinking about something you’d like to do in the future. Instead of thinking “I should get up” over and over, think about having a bagel for breakfast, or getting dressed in your soft green sweater. Imagine yourself doing the thing.
I find that exercise often side-steps the block and the next thing I know I’m out of bed and on my way to doing the other thing I thought about.
Works for other things too, if you’re stuck on one step and having a hard time doing it, think about the step after that. Need to do laundry and you can’t get yourself to gather up your dirty clothes in the hamper? Think instead about carrying the hamper full of dirty clothes to the laundry room. And when you get to that next step, if you get stuck again, think about the step after it – you have a hamper of dirty clothes that needs to be put in the wash, let your subconscious handle the “carry hamper to laundry room” step while you’re thinking about the “putting them in the wash” part.
YMMV of course, and this doesn’t even always work for me (particularly not when I need to do a collection of tasks in no particular order, like packing for a trip… “pack socks, pack underwear, pack toothbrush, pack pants, pack shirts” is the kind of non-linear task list where this trick doesn’t help at all), but it’s something I’ve found helpful often enough.
This is one of the most beautiful threads I’ve seen on Tumblr simply because it deals so compassionately with an issue so many of us have and can barely even articulate to ourselves, let alone to anyone else. ❤
I think I get overwhelmed from the thought of all of the consequent steps, so maybe I’ll do the reverse of the advice above and try to focus on the first one.
@the-rain-monster i was just about to say something similar. that can work too sometimes. instead of going “ugh i need to eat something” for four hours, i try to focus on each step in turn.
and i mean each TINY step. just getting out of my chair has this many steps:
- pause music
- remove headphones
- hang headphones on laptop screen
- pick up laptop
- leg-bend recliner footrest shut
- set laptop aside
- stand
and i reckon that’s why i get stuck on it; because i’m trying to treat it as one thing, while executive dysfunction is treating it as seven things, and choking on trying to skip to step seven.
concurrent with this is a method i call ‘junebugging’. which is where i go to the location of the thing i want to do, and just sort of bump around the region like a big stupid beetle until the thing somehow accidentally magically gets done. this is an attempt to leverage ADHD into an advantage; i may not have the executive function to make myself a sandwich on purpose, but if i fidget in the kitchen long enough, some kind of food is going to end up in my mouth eventually. and hell, even if i fail on that front, i will probably have achieved something, even if it’s only pouring all my loose leaf tea into decorative jars.*
@star-anise please may i give you an internet hug *hug!* because god how i wish anyone had known to do that for me when i was a kid. my childhood was one big overload, and like 99% of the huge dramatic meltdowns that made me the scapegoat/laughingstock/target of my entire elementary school were simply due to people not giving me time to process the next step, and interpreting a bluescreen as defiance/insult.
*this happened when i was trying to do dishes actually but the principle is sound
yeah i absolutely echo what j’s saying about the steps, it’s a lot like that for me too. i get overwhelmed at the prospect of something that should be simple, and have to slow down and sort out how many steps it’s actually going to take, and what a complicated endeavor it actually is, even if no one else thinks so.
also, i thought i should put in: try to honestly figure out what you’re averse to, that makes things so tough. making a whole bunch of decisions really fast? the potential of things to make a horrible noise? the shame of failure? having to put down what you’re doing now? having to clean up whatever it is you might go do when you’re done?
for instance, for me, the difficulty rating on anything goes waaaay up when a step of a task is ‘go somewhere people will look at you,’ which is for me about the unpleasantness equivalent of ‘jump into a very cold swimming pool right now’. you know you’ll be fine and even have fun once you’ve settled into it, but it still takes a lot of shuffling around and bracing yourself first to go for it. and some days you just don’t fucking want to go swimming.
i discounted this factor for years because i wouldn’t admit that i was so daunted by something so silly as as people looking at me. but, now i know what i’m so aversive about, i can factor it in to plans, and work around it, and be kind to myself. for instance, i was never able to get fit since highschool PE, because i couldn’t make myself go to a gym, or even out jogging. once i figured out the big problem wasn’t avoidance pain or difficulty, it was avoidance of doing a New Thing that i was Bad At in front of Unknown Quantities Of Strangers, which is like a triple threat of stressors, i started working out quietly and safely in my room at night, and i’ve been doing really good on it!
Absolutely loving the tag #you don’t make a broken car work by yelling ALL THE OTHER CARS WORK FINE
I’ve found when my brain won’t “list” that I’ve managed a similiar effect by narrating myself as a character. Out loud if necessary.
Tag: to remember
And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.
Let people grow.
When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.
There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.
But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.
You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.
It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”
Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.
a lot of gay fic written by gay men i’ve read also have bad unhealthy sex practices (no lube at all ever is very common) so wow i guess this shit might have more to do with bad education/lack of research in general rather than evil women authors not caring. like honestly most of the “bad woman author” shit could be fixed thru education instead of kicking em out. in fact disseminating safe sex info more so ppl don’t apparently gotta learn from FUCKFICTION would be uh a good idea
but all people have weird ideas about sex and how it’s done, it’s not a limited population category thing. women are copping the brunt of this dumb discourse because the discoursees are applying some really shallow readings to content on two sites, where the content is generated by women by a huge margin over any other gender, and making some hogwild logical leaps to end up endlessly circling the mlm discourse echochamber.
occasionally you’ll luck out by bedding some fuck shaman who opens your third eye through the power of labe grinding your armpit or whatever, but Regular Guy and Population Median Woman probably know diddly shit beyond PIV and anal on birthdays. sex ed sucks beyond ‘don’t do it/this is a condom on a banana/from the front the uterus-womb-ovary complex looks like a buffalo kinda’, live action porn is stuck in a one-upmanship overton window shift (except, y’know, for sex), and sex positive material online is like a infinite house of mirrors except every reflection shows you erica moen advising you to stick a lamp up your ass
and that’s just the cisgender hets bumbling their way around.
finding out info about what the hell to do and how to do it if you’re gay is hard, and damn near impossible if you’re not cis and probably juggling an extra course load of terminology, body perception, and having to do a 101 How Not To Talk About My Junk to every Brock and Chriss on Scruff.
when all the material out there is basically boiling down getting that dick into a hole as the ultimate goal, it’s a wonder that anyone is even writing anything other than ‘he shoved it in, he came’. 1-2-3-dick is formulaic but man, that it’s even around enough to become formulaic is new.
‘straight girls write anal wrong! they don’t know anything about anal!’ well i mean without getting into the whole thing of yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with spit, yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with nil or extremely fast minor fingering, no your o-ring will not blow out and prolapse if you take a pounding without 40 minutes of getting tenderly fingered with free trade lube handmade by monks in the peruvian alps, etc etc etc (i.e. every thing some sanctimonious chucklefuck will grandly declare as absolutes) but lmao women absolutely know about anal. a quick glimpse at cosmo magazine will tell you that. a quick glimpse at fuckin’ pornhub will tell you that. straight women do anal, lesbians do anal. every population microselection you can name has been getting pleasure from the asshole for as long as human beings have had assholes!!!
‘straight girls only write about penetration! real gay people frot and grind!’ again: PIV/PIA is everywhere. EVERYWHERE! gay porn is penetration focused! straight porn is penetration focused! romance stories with a regulation fade to black cut imply penetration! the popular concept of what constitutes sex itself is based on penetration! you can’t get furious at someone for doing a thing when everything around them is doing the same thing!
everyone is stupid about sex. sometimes people get less stupid. sometimes people get brave enough to actually ask for what they want. i really can’t fault anyone for not having every intricacy of boning nailed down straight out of the gate but if the alternate is going ‘women are harming me by not faithfully depicting ultimate best practice safe sex in their fiction written for the purpose of hopefully getting the reader off, and for that sin they’re all b*tches who will never understand what it’s like to be sexualised or objectified 😦 :(*’ then god, just end it.
anyway i got totally off track from your ask, but yes, 100% i am supportive of more sexual education that isn’t based solely around cis bodied reproduction and how to avoid it/recognise it, but amatuer erotica is not the venue to get educated and it’s unreasonable to demand that it should be en masse. that doesn’t mean people can’t strive for good practice and authenticity or whatever. if it works for you then shit yeah, make gloving up a feature, go nuts, the only way to normalise something is by including it, but the smarmy attitude of ‘if you don’t include items a through f, practices 1 through 4 and do my towers of hanoi puzzle to decode the Problematic Content Of The Day then you’re a homophobe who is actively hurting and fetishising smol mlm beans and you deserve to be hounded’ is just… nah. nah, nah. nah.
you know, this entire slashcourse could be cut off at the knees if every time someone said ‘but no REAL gay man writes x, y, z’ their browser was force directed to nifty.org with a posting ban until they do a book report on a randomly selected story.
*’women don’t understand sexual objectification’ is a phrase i read with my own gay eyes on a yaoicourse blog and i had to stare out of the window for a while to absorb the goddamn
audacity of it.
I feel like god personally came down from heaven and kissed me on the mouth with tongue when reading this, this is poetry, this is modern art, if no other document makes it past the burning of our libraries and the fall of society, I hope this is preserved somewhere for someone or something to find in the inevitable ruins
So the thing I find fascinating about this, is that I feel like I’ve been around fandom long enough to have seen this whole thing come full circle. Back when I first started reading slash the sex was often fairly unrealistic. And then there was a BIG BIG BIG push by people within fandom to mock any unrealistic sex tropes, ESPECIALLY in slash fics. I remember post after post about “Things I Never Want to Read in Slash Again” about how much preparation anal sex requires and the wonders of lube and how unrealistic simultaneous orgasms are, how sex can’t really last that long etc, etc.
And this really seemed to take hold. I would occasionally see people mention things like “well this fic has them come at the same time but otherwise, it’s pretty good.” It was very much a Thing.
And personally I became very self-conscious about writing sex to make sure I wasn’t breaking any of those rules. Even the ones I didn’t completely agree with I made sure to follow because I didn’t want anyone dismissing my fic on that basis.
But things started to feel very formulaic to the other extreme. Every slash fic had to be very careful not to make anal the be-all end-all, and make sure there’s endless preparation with gallons of lube and blah, blah, and yanno, it gets kinda boring.
And real, actual sex varies. A LOT. By person, by couple, by day, by taste. I mean, I’ve actually gone and researched some stuff for fics of like biological function of male orgasms and stuff and it’s way more weird and complicated than the “acceptable slash fic” rules would have you believe. And I know my own experiences don’t conform to a lot of that stuff either.
So, I think stereotypes are bad, whether it’s “real gay men do X” or “real gay men don’t do x” or whatever. I always think sex is best when it has a realistic grounding, but at the end of the day this isn’t a textbook. It’s supposed to be sexy and romantic and hot. (Except, I guess, for when it isn’t.)
And ultimately there are only so many ways for human beings to get off. I mean, yanno, props can add variety, but ultimately there aren’t that many sex acts. That’s almost never the point of the story. ‘Dude has an orgasm’ just isn’t very interesting unless we are made to care about that dude and how he FEELS about his orgasm. And that’s almost always the actual point.
i sometimes grump about things like “why is it always three fingers” but it’s not because it’s especially unrealistic or – god forbid – because i don’t want people who don’t hang out with penises to write smut. the more smut the better. it’s just that it kind of breaks my immersion when it’s the same every time in every fic. similarly, the phrase “come for me” has become an instant fourth wall breaker. and “to give him better access,” that one kicks me out of the story as well.
also i guess there’s some minor element of going, “most dicks just aren’t three grown-man fingers thick, y’all, the characters’ hands are bigger than yours,” but that’s not honestly a big deal, it’s just a bit funny.
For all the wonderful non-binary trans folks<3
sorta related but i dont like that tumblr has made “unhealthy relationship” mean “one person is an abuser and the other is a victim”
unhealthy relationship means just that. a relationship that is unhealthy. whether because a party is uninterested, both parties bring out the worst in eachother, theres just no more spark, etc
just stop using “unhealthy relationship” as if its perfectly synonymous with “abusive relationship”
abusive relationships are DEFINITELY unhealthy relationships but not all unhealthy relationships are abusive, ya dig?
Important post.
Not everyone you don’t get along with is an abuser.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things that people do.
William Zinsser
(via theliteraturenerd)
(via theliteraturenerd)
things are gonna fucking work out. do this for yourself. don’t you dare quit. put in a ton of effort, it won’t betray you.
@spiralingintocontrol reblogged the post I made about brain freeze at my last job with a link to a blog post they’d written about the same thing that struck eerily true. And if it’s anywhere near as widespread as it seems to them, I – this is worrying??? (bolded mine)
You’re isolated. You’re not talking to anyone about your work. You don’t really want to talk to anyone about your work, and as days pass, you want to less and less. Why? If you talk to someone about your work, they’ll realize you’ve been banging your head against the wall for weeks. They’ll know.
For now, though, it’s enough to make you miserable that you know: You’re not getting anything done. Your goals don’t make sense to you, you’re not sure what direction to go in, and you don’t really have the power to move the project in any particular direction. You get a few things done each day, but feel demoralized by their sparsity and their insignificance. And the longer this goes on, the less you want to ask for help or input of any kind.
Some people call this a symptom of impostor syndrome. I don’t think so. To call it “impostor syndrome” implies that it arises out of a mistaken belief, when, in truth, it’s not mistaken. You’re not wrong to think that you’re not getting things done, and that you’re not very good at your job. Of course you’re not—yet! You’re very new to it, and being good at your job involves plenty of soft skills you didn’t pick up before your first (or perhaps second, or even third) professional programming job.
For another thing, this isn’t all because of you, either: Your supervisor isn’t prompting you to ask questions, and isn’t bothering to get more detail from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. They’re not making sure you’re not blocked, or spinning your wheels.
The trouble arises when you get into a cycle: you feel bad about not knowing what to do next, so you don’t ask for help, so you try to do everything yourself; you don’t have a lot of success, so you still feel bad and don’t want to ask for help; next thing you know, it’s been a month and you haven’t spoken to another human being, except to tell your boss “Things are going okay,” with a glossed-over description of your progress so far.
This is not healthy.
anyway this is a good post and the subsequent advice is also good.
My boss talks a lot about “psychological safety” (he’s such a nerd… I love him) which is basically feeling like you can ask questions, even really “stupid” questions, and be vulnerable in front of the group in that sense without feeling judged, or preferably you should actually feel REWARDED for doing this. Because asking questions not only helps you, it also helps other people on the team to understand what you’re working on, which helps them as well. Or maybe they don’t even know the answer, but you can find out together and BOTH learn something. And this is the most important and key thing you can do for the productivity of the team, is to cultivate that environment. I agree with that blog post like, if people habitually shut you down and act put upon when you ask questions, or even if no one else seems to ask for help ever so you don’t feel like you can… you should get out of that situation asap. Not only is that bad for both your professional growth and your mental health, it also means your team is probably shitty and unproductive because everyone’s wasting time feeling individually miserable trying to figure everything out by themselves. It just doesn’t work.
You spend 20 years in school being conditioned to do everything on your own or you’re Cheating, and the people in authority actually refuse to tell you things that they know because you’re supposed to “figure it out”. This is all bullshit that needs to be unlearned as quickly as possible. Real grownup people who are actually trying to Get Shit Done WANT to tell you the things that they know so that together you can Get Shit Done twice as fast. Anyone who feels like you’re wasting their time by asking questions is honestly not very good at their job, cause… that means they think they don’t need your help, and it just ain’t so.
to my surprise, i was actually praised the other day at my studio for just this. “i love roach,” the instructor said, “because they say everything the rest of you guys are thinking. i always know when you’re lost because roach raises their hand and says so.”
my studio skews towards the young and the male: kids just out of highschool, and men who don’t want to look dumb, and the minority population of girls that really really REALLY don’t want to look dumb. but i’ve been out of college for six years and am comfortable being seen as a clueless amateur, so i ask the instructor to clarify points and repeat demonstrations all the time. and pretty much no one’s exasperated or contemptuous of me: everyone, even the instructor, appreciates it.
it’s really tough, initially, to risk looking dumb in front of other people, but it’s worth it. after awhile you learn that asking questions is pretty much a public service, not a personal humiliation.
a meditation on boundaries
i.
Back when I thought I was straight I would go on dates with boys. The boys would usually want to kiss me. I disliked kissing, but I thought that their preferences deserved to count as much as mine, and I reasoned that they probably liked kissing more than I disliked kissing. So kissing was a morally good thing to do. I also reasoned that if I told them I disliked the kissing then they’d feel guilty and enjoy it less. So I did not tell them.
I am certain I was making some kind of critical error but it has taken me a long time to figure out what it might be.
ii.
I like cuddling. I know some straight girls who like cuddling with their straight female friends but don’t want to cuddle with people who might be attracted to them because it makes them uncomfortable. But they don’t want to explicitly tell me this preference because they’re worried it’s homophobic. Ever since I learned that this dynamic was present in at least one friendship of mine I have not cuddled with any straight girls because there’s a plausible scenario in which I’d be making them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t tell me.
just moving along like everyone else 