ale gdzie mało pewników! masz serce dokładnie takie samo jak przodkowie nasi z zamierzchłych czasów jak jeszcze bogi po ziemi chodziły, taką samą duszę i pasję, magię, pragnienie poznania tajemnic, bycia bliżej, głębiej, bardziej, tuż tuż gdzieś obok nieodkrytego, nieznanego – a jednak bratniego nam samym, prawdziwego, oczywistego. trzeba szukać, czasem zbłądzić, zagubić się, i tam nagle właśnie oni, stare duchy i stare bogi, stare ścieżki czekające tylko, aż ktoś znów przedrze się przez pokrzywy i pajęczyny.
najlepsza wiadomość jest taka, że źródeł polskich jest najwięcej – zacznij sobie od rzeczy ładnych i wciągających jak Bestiariusz Słowiański – albo którąkolwiek z nowych ładnych matrasowo-empikowych Mitologii Słowiańskich – pisarze i historycy polscy muszą być ostrożni i dokładni w researchu bo grozi im gniew Gieysztora, więc nawet takie opowieścio-obrazkowo-urocze pozycje są warte ogarnięcia.
potem warto followować tumblrowych rodzimowierców jeśli jeszcze to nie jest za Tobą, tak żeby poczuć się trochę bliżej tego wszystkiego i żeby poznać ludzi (bardzo dużo wymieniania żeby wymienić chociaż połowę blogów, ale mogę jak trzeba, hihi – i zapraszam do naszego serwera discordowego!)
i wyjść w noc, w poranek, w las, w jezioro, w serce swoje własne i znaleźć to wszystko właśnie tam. czas i inni ukradli nam bardzo dużo, ale możemy odbudować te pasje i ścieżki, może po swojemu, może na nowo, może inaczej – ale któż powiedział, że i bogi nigdy się nie zmieniają?
ważne, żeby bez strachu, bez stresu – i jeśli ktoś Ci powie, że nie, że źle, że nie możesz, że trzeba się trzymać starych zatęchłych tradycji, że trzeba być uprzedzonym, że trzeba nienawidzić, gnębić, pluć jadem na kogokolwiek kto nie jest taki jaki oni by chcieli, że Polska biała a Panslavia silna genami i toporem, to proszę się powołać na mnie i po słowiańsku, z przytupem, kazać spierdalać.
Hey there. My name is Felix, and I am currently living with my two boyfriends Raymond and Shawn. We have created this crowdfunding account in order to assist us with bettering our lives by moving us to a safe place where we can be with others in our community. As of right now, we are in a terrible and scary place. We live in the south, specifically the panhandle of Florida, and while it is nice to visit, it is a nightmare for a lot of LGBTQIA+ people. Every day we fear for our lives when leaving our apartment. Every time we are out in public, we are greeted with dirty/threatening stares, and these people are very clearly gun owners. (You think that they would hide them better, but nobody cares here.)
Ray and I are both trans men and while I’m able to transition while practically being a hermit, my boyfriend is not provided with the space and resources needed to do so himself. We have a friend that is essentially our family in California that is in need of new roommates. She has been waiting for us to get there for over a year, and we need a safe space to transition and just live our lives. I hate to ask this of anybody, but we desperately need help moving from Florida to San Francisco, where our three future roomates are located.
The town we live in is super conservative and people are assaulted for so much less than being LGBTQIA+. A lot of people wave the Confederate Flag proudly, willingly start fights just because you’re different, and if you lived your entire life in this area, trying to transition is impossible. Ray is having to go to work every day and be the person they all grew up with which is causing a heavy toll on him mentally and physically. I’m watching him slowly break down. The weight on his shoulders has been so great that we have had to get him chemical help to keep him from having a meltdown, and he has been prescribed wellbutrin. However, the wellbutrin does not help with his transition. This is something he NEEDS, and his only chance to be the man that he knows that he is,is in California.
We have no family left. My mother has passed away and I was kicked out of my stepfathers place a while ago, and the rest of my family members are either dead, consider me a stranger, or they have no desire to help. Ray’s parents are dead and his grandparents are living on their pensions and have already helped as much as they can, and Shawn is working TWO JOBS to help pay bills and save money to get us somewhere safe. I am unable to work in an official setting and I am only able to make money through commissions due to chronic pain and damage to my body from double binding for years, and we are struggling. Every day is difficult in this one bedroom apartment. It’s so cramped, and so small, and we have been saving our asses off for so long, but we are running out of time.
Moving to California where our family is waiting for us will alleviate a lot of financial stress for us so we can live comfortably as middle-class people. So that we don’t have to drown in the stress of poverty. We also need to get there by end of June because Shawn was offered a much better job that could really help us out, but if he’s not there in time, then we lose this amazing opportunity. I’m scared. Ray is scared. Shawn is scared. We are sick. We are tired. We need help, and this is our last ditch effort.
We’ve already saved up $2,200 and just need this last $3563 to get us there. The budget is comprised of:
$2,673 = U-Haul/Gas/food/hotels for the move
$400 =Wiggle Room to make up for the cost of the car towing weight (Chrystler Concorde 1998 and a Kia Soul 2013) and the U-haul furniture/boxes weight
$2640 = Deposit/first month’s rent ($660 for Deposit x2 $660 First months Rent x2)
Nothing donated will go to waste or wasteful things. Everything will be accounted for so you know what your dollar went toward. Please. Every dollar counts.
If you cannot donate, a reblog would help very much! Thank you!
We’ve slowed down at $1,660, loves! Doing great so far, but please keep boosting/reblogging!
this is fantastic now children in Puerto Rico wont be able to receive the education they deserve thanks to their messed up government
Its even worse than that. I’m living through it. Not only are schools closing, hospitals are collapsing. Only around 9% of the island has electricity and it comes and goes at times.
People are dying in hospitals because of lack of diesel for the generators, a lot of the water is now infected, there are disease outbreaks and scareceness of food. I am safe, but many are not.
Some have water, others don’t. We need help. Sending money would be helpful but what would help even more would be sending water filters, filtering water bottles, food, medicine, if somehow possible diesel.
All of you reblogging this news helps, but what we need is physical help. If you can’t, then spread the word, but God if you can send supplies… Please… PLEASE do. We are dying. Help us, help us save ourselves. Help us save our people. Help us save out ISLAND.
If you’re not in a position to ship or transport useful items to the island (which is sure as heck the case for me in New Zealand) then the best thing you can do is give money to a reputable relief organisation operating in the area.
I started writing this as a comment on another post, but it got too long so fuck it, this is going to be its own post, and it’s going to be a collection of basically everything I can get my hands on about asexual oppression, history, and the shit aphobes say. Yeah, this is going to be long, heavy with links to a lot more reading, but I’ve had it up to here with the “discourse”.
Everyone who wants to is free to reblog this post and use it as a reference when arguing with aphobes. (fyi, I created the blog @asexuality-and-aphobia in the middle of this project to be a reliable source for my links.)
Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can ‘opt out’ if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but don’t know that it’s “a thing”. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told they’re sick, then been “treated” for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality “correctly”.
Posts of people describing the hardship they’ve faced for their asexuality: x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to ‘fix’ them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.
There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like “aces don’t get kicked out” or “aces don’t _____” any more than I as a white person get to say that things I don’t experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you haven’t experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You haven’t walked in an ace’s shoes, you don’t know what they deal with. Period.
Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesn’t mean the lack of oppression is the default “truth”.
Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it “as bad” or worse than gay or trans people, but we don’t HAVE to “have it worse” to be included and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone else’s. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone else’s.
Told asexuals to die: x, x, x, x, x (tbh this is only a tiny sample and I don’t have the heart to go digging for more)
Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.
“Het aces/aroaces are straight”
Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces don’t identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and it’s not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.
“We accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans aces”
Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand, a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of “same” and “opposite” gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only “same-gender attracted” if they’re attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument “well they’re included as trans” is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. I’m one of them.
The standard of “SGA and trans” as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed “gay enough”.
The modern American movement was first known as the “gay community” when cis gay men refused to even accept lesbians, then the “gay and lesbian community”. (Good reading on the subject.)
“After the elation of change following group action in the Stonewall riots in New York, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, some gays and lesbians became less accepting of bisexual or transgender people.
Critics said that transgender people were acting out stereotypes and bisexuals were simply gay men or lesbian women who were afraid to come out and be honest about their identity.
Each community has struggled to develop its own identity including whether, and how, to align with other gender and sexuality-based communities, at times excluding other subgroups; these conflicts continue to this day.” (source)
“From about 1988, activists began to use the initialism LGBT in the United States.
Not until the 1990s within the movement did gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people gain equal respect.” (ibid)
Insisting that LG people have always been accepting of bi and trans people is incredibly revisionist and does a great deal of injustice to those who have been excluded.
Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but it’s so rampant that I don’t feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, here’s a collection of biphobia, and the blog @terf-callout documents some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.
“The A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outed”
No one is saying that we don’t care about closeted people, but a) even if you’re a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the ‘B’ in BLT stands for ‘bread’. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we don’t have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every “ally” as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.
Furthermore, this puts forth the argument “I’m willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted people” while at the same time stating “I’m not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I don’t think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and support”. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.
“I have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible person”
Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I don’t think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesn’t justify you trying to invalidate all of us.
“’Allosexual’ is a bad word because ____”
I actually have an ‘allosexual’ tag just for posts about why ‘allosexual’ is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x
“The split-attraction model is homophobic”
What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as “disjunctive uranodioning”. (source) (credit to this post)
“The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbians”
No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.
“We’ll Show You You’re a Woman” describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, “Negative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).” It goes on to say, “Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality.”
The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, “A study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that “the percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the study”.”
It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and
gender non-conforming people
in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.
“Aces are valid, they’re just not queer/LGBTQ”
You cannot in one breath say “Asexuals are valid” and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you can’t call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.
“Aces take resources from other LGBTQ who need them”
I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals “steal” things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any “stealing” has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought “you’ll never get kicked out or fired for being ace”, “no one is suicidal because they’re asexual”, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we don’t need them or we don’t use them, you can’t have it both ways.
For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they can’t use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that you’re saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think they’re not “queer enough” so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and that’s the message aces receive when you tell them they are “stealing” suicide prevention.
Lastly, do you not realize we are also PROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you don’t WANT us here.
“Nobody wants to hear about your nonexistent sex life”
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
I was riding the subway home the other night, and suddenly this popped into my head.
The rise and fall, higher and lower, the rhythm between the opposites that makes your stomach flutter and your knuckles turn white. The sensation of weightlessness. Slipping the bonds of gravity and flipping the laws of nature off. Nietzsche once said something about women making the highs more high and the lows more frequent, but that may have been the bitter resentment of syphilis talking. That queasy feeling of a first taste-a first kiss-a first kill-all blurred together. Indistinguishable. Like a child smearing paint with her fingers, but in this case, it was someone’s blood. Details. Art waits for no one, and inspiration is a bitch of a muse.
I want you to pay close attention to the last sentence.
I can’t tell you how to find your passion, no more than I can tell you what you should write about. The one thing I can tell you is that if you wait for the inspiration to find you before you write again, you will be waiting a long time.
The truth is consistency beats passion all day, every day.
So my best advice to you is to set aside 10 minutes and write. Make peace with the fact it won’t be good. It’s not supposed to be. It’s pure myth that a writer sits down and has literary gold drip from their fingers each time. You will write a lot of garbage, but as you continue, and you build consistency, you will discover some gems that you can work.
What will happen is that you will slowly get better, and that moment when inspiration hits, you will be able to make the most of it.
-Graphei
P.S. Yes, that’s going in Sirens. I just don’t know where yet.
i’m now seeing posts that are basically accusing therapists of being the same as ““““neurotypicals”””” who tell you that doing yoga will cure your depression
and it’s fucking killing me because ??? the idea of being annoyed by people telling you that stuff is because those people honestly think that doing yoga and “looking on the bright side” will magically cure your depression, because they can’t imagine happiness not coming as easily to someone else as it does to them. the idea isn’t that getting exercise and practicing positive thinking are useless ways to treat depression. but that’s what i’m seeing a lot of now and i just want to say…. i got some fucking bad news, cause that is the treatment for depression.
therapists telling you to get good nutrition and exercise are not the same as your yoga-instructor aunt on facebook posting pictures of the sunrise and wondering how anyone can be depressed when the world is so wonderful!!! thats not just an anti-recovery attitude, it’s an anti-treatment attitude, and it’s unbelievably ignorant.
there’s sort of this interesting circular form to dealing with mental illness, where you start in a place of “i just need to think positively and push myself out of this ditch” and then you move to step 2, which is “depression is a real and very serious illness and it’s not my fault that i’m tired all the time, stop telling me to just “think positive” all the time.”
But then there’s step three, which is where you size up your situation and say “look, i understand how serious my illness is, and i’m no longer blaming myself for it. And it sucks, and I don’t “deserve” this, and I didn’t bring it on myself. But regardless of how unfair it is, the truth is that I’m the only one who can actually do anything about it.” And so in a lot of ways, you end up with parallel ways of thinking as before, but this time you’re coming from a completely different source of understanding. People who don’t know anything about mental illness say “depression is a choice.” People who are fed up with being depressed and realize that wallowing in the comforting embrace of self-pity is useful to erase guilt, but ultimately won’t help them lead a better life say, “recovery is a choice.”
The first group means that if you’re depressed, you can just magically decide not to be depressed. The second group means that depression is a crushing weight on your back determined to make your life as miserable (and as short) as possible, and that you didn’t do anything to cause it, but that ultimately you have the choice of giving up and accepting being depressed for the rest of your life, or you have the option of making an effort to improve your quality of life. Similar statements, totally different meanings.
But I think a lot of people are sort of seduced by the comfort of giving up, and with the good intention of creating communities of understanding and non-judgement between mentally ill people, social media has unwittingly created communities of mentally ill people encouraging each other to give up. To just accept that this is the way their lives are, and there’s no possibility of getting better. And that’s how it’s gotten to the point of people dismissing actual mental health professionals as being no different than some ignorant person who doesn’t know the first thing about psychology and thinks an avocado smoothie will solve all your problems.
Avocado smoothie people are coming from the first perspective, that being depressed is a free choice that you can easily opt out of. Therapists are coming from the second perspective, where mental illness is a horrible reality, but given that you’re seeing them, a provider of mental health treatment, of fucking course they’re going to give you advice on how to treat your mental illness! Your therapist isn’t going to sit around and say “yeah man that sucks, haha look at this funny meme about how much you want to kill yourself.” Your therapist is going to give you recommendations of activities and habits that will help you recover. And they understand that these activities are not easy!!! They get that!!! The reason they’re there is to help you introduce these activities and ways of thinking into your life!!! Otherwise they’d just hand you a pamphlet and walk out!!!
But you can’t access that kind of help – the kind where you say “getting out of the house is a real problem for me, I never have the energy to get out of bed” and your therapist says “okay let’s figure out how to break this down into small steps, we’ll set a small goal for this week, and next time we meet you can tell me if it worked out, and if it did then we can figure out what the next goal will be, and if not then we can figure out why it didn’t work and try a different approach” – if you immediately dismiss any mention of recovery as “neurotypical bullshit.”
Anyways please please please take your healthcare seriously, get treatment, and realize that giving up and normalizing your depression/anxiety/etc as something that will never ever get better (yes, even if it’s a chronic condition that you’ll never fully cure, you still need to treat it) is not okay. Try to get good nutrition. Try to get sunshine and exercise. Try to be social. Making an effort to do things that will help you is not the same as thinking mental illness is a switch you can easily flip. Getting treatment is not the same thing as pretending your mental illness doesn’t exist or isn’t serious. On the contrary, getting treatment is taking your mental illness seriously. I’m not saying you should never make a joke or reblog a fucking meme or anything, I’m saying don’t use social media as your mental health care provider. Social media can be a way to vent, but venting is not the same thing as recovering.
Honestly it can take a very long time to get to that “step 3″ perspective but it’s a vital step.
THIS.
I’ve got my boyfriend calling me at 8am every weekday morning to get me out of bed so that I *get out of bed*. I then tell him when I’ve gotten to the gym.
We have worked this out between us, consensually, because I can’t fucking make myself do it. Because depression. But when I get up and go to the gym, suddenly my days get way, way more functional. I eat real food, I run errands, I cook- instead of laying on the couch feeling like my diaphragm got nailed to the floor. (They don’t all necessarily happen every day, but they become at least theoretically feasible.) This isn’t part 1, it’s part 3. Because dammit, I am fucking sick of this shit. I don’t deserve it and it’s a real issue- and for me, having someone to basically hotwire me because my starter is broken is how we’re gonna get a routine that takes minimal spoons to run.
Sometimes depression is cureable. Sometimes it’s just treatable. But dissing treatment because “gah neurotypicals” is shooting yourself in the foot.
Sometimes self-care is baths and Netflix and junk food and Tumblr. And sometimes self-care is an arranged phone call at 8am.
Found this reddit post. This kinda makes me feel better. And it’s something I think about sometimes because I always feel like regardless of how hard I work on something I don’t get anywhere.
starry-eyed 