Tag: this is for me

nurseydcx:

where’s my grandparent who will peacefully die of old age and give me a note only to open when i need it, revealing that they have gifted me their old farm that i can use to escape to if i ever need a reprieve from capitalist corporate life, in an idyllic town with lovely villagers and also a wizard

gallusrostromegalus:

scribefindegil:

the old-timers I played with back in Iowa used to say “it’s good enough for folk music” when we got tired of tuning and now it’s entered my vocabulary as an all-purpose useful phrase for beating back perfectionism. 

sure, i could make this closer to perfect if i put in more time and effort and there might be circumstances under which that’s a good idea, but for now i’ll get more joy and use out of it if i just accept the kind of wonky version and keep going.

Some variants of this I’ve heard, if folk music isn’t your jam:

  • Good Enough For Shakespeare (used to justify odd word choices, cliche’d plot devices, and putting Dick Jokes in the middle of serious work)
  • Good Enough For Government Work (Used when you can’t finagle the math so you round up and get on with your life)
  • Good Enough For Saint Anthony (used by my Catholic Grandmother, usually when something went wrong in the kitchen)
  • Good Enough For The Lutherans (Used by catholic great-aunt, usually when we were running late for something)
  • Good Enough For Fish And Biscuits (Great-Uncle Francis said this all the tie and I have no idea what it means but the man was an overwhelming sucess at life so I guess it works)

kuanios:

“Some of us, Audre Lorde notes, were never meant to survive. To have some body, to be a member of some group, to be some, can be a death sentence. When you are not supposed to live, as you are, where you are, with whom you are with, then survival is a radical action; a refusal not to exist until the very end; a refusal not to exist until you do not exist. We have to work out how to survive in a system that decides life for some requires the death or removal of others. Sometimes: to survive in a system is to survive a system. We can be inventive, we have to be inventive, Audre Lorde suggests, to survive.”

— Sara Ahmed, Selfcare as Warfare.

a fools guide to not wanting to die anymore

antipodeanpixie:

maramahan:

808lien:

colacharm:

wildlyannoyingdoofus:

colacharm:

by me, a fool who doesnt wanna die anymore 

  1. never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.
  2. find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.
  3. talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore
  4. picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else
  5. if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.

… 8|

That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.

Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining

This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.

Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes

Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”

Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”

When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?

And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking

Every time my mum and I do/witness something ridiculous and flaily, we have one of two stock responses “You womble” and “It takes years of training to do that.”

Either it was silly/dumb/clumsy, but it’s endearingly so and it’s fine, or it was a pretty impressive fuckup and pretty damn funny really.

load-bearing

brightlotusmoon:

aspiring-bonobo-rationalist:

theunitofcaring:

Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.

(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting. 

Almost two weeks after reading this, and I’m still kind of blown away at what a ridiculously fruitful definition this is.  Like I had no idea that load bearing things were a thing that needed to have a word for them, but now I’m like holy shit I’m so glad that there’s now a word I can use to refer to this really important class of Thing.

This is astounding. Load-bearing. Forget spoons, this concept is wonderful. I’m going to update my Spear Theory with this.

packbat:

“If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed. People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder. Maybe you weren’t always able to look at human behavior this way. That’s okay. Now you are. Give it a try.”

—

— “Laziness Does Not Exist” by E Price on Medium

(And a footnote I didn’t see explicitly covered in the article: laziness still doesn’t exist when it is you yourself making no progress and not knowing why. You deserve that respect and consideration, too, even from yourself.)