everythingwasshiny

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So for a long time I had a lot of imposter syndrome feelings about my ADHD, mostly spurred partly by the fact that when I was diagnosed at 15 I hadn’t gone to the psychiatrist because of symptoms of ADHD, I went because my pediatrician felt I needed a little extra help managing my depression.

I was unmedicated from about 17 to recently at 33, and at some point in my early twenties I told my mom that I didn’t really feel like I had ADHD (at this point I had dropped out of college because I wasn’t keeping up well), and my mom agreed with me, feeling like I had “acted differently” at my appointment when I was 15, as if I was seeking a diagnosis that wasn’t even the reason I went to the psych in the first place.

When I was 26 or 27, my roommate at the time and I were talking and I mentioned that I had been diagnosed ADHD but felt it wasn’t accurate, she asked me why and then talked to me about some things that she noticed that could be symptoms of ADHD.

After that, I started doing the research that I didn’t as a teen/young adult and took a hard look at my behaviors and cross checked them against symptom lists. I finally *felt* like I had ADHD and my teenage psychiatrist wasn’t wrong. The problem, then, was not being able to afford treatment and also being hesitant to be on meds again because I was on adderall and concerta at the same time as a teen and hated how I felt.

It took hitting a very low point emotionally to get treated for depression again, and then another hard look at my behaviors — specifically in the realm of rejection sensitivity, emotional dysregulation and impulsivity — to talk to my new psych about my ADHD and about trying a non-stimulant treatment first.

I’m now on Wellbutrin off-label and will probably have to add straterra to boost the efficacy of the first, but I’m finally seeing improvement in some symptoms that I have been struggling through as long as I can remember. I finally don’t feel like an imposter.

All this to say if you get diagnosed with something and don’t really know why, ask questions. Try to understand why, and do some research to better grasp the concepts and what symptoms you might have. If your family members don’t understand, they don’t have to, you’re the one who needs to understand your disability — and by extension your self — better.

If I had just asked questions when I was younger, I would have found out that my inability to organize, my emotional issues, and my impulsivity were all tied to my diagnosis and I probably would have saved myself a LOT of suffering.

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The Silent Treatment

Silence is identity erosion. It’s covert punishment, intended to manipulate a change in behaviour without actually appearing to be overtly manipulative. When given the silent treatment, people often self-destruct and think of everything they might have done wrong. As a result, they start to whittle down their entire personalities in order to avoid repeating any of those potential wrongdoings. If you find yourself trying to “outlast” someone’s silence so you don’t appear needy or delusional, this is not someone worth your time or energy. Good people cultivate open communication and discussion. They don’t make you feel that you should deconstruct your whole identity in order to meet their unspoken demands.

[everythingwasshiny]

I hate knowing how I’ll instantly forgive you when I see you

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Run ❤️

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Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

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Make it make sense.

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nothing like being stood up 🙃

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Raise your hand if you were a gifted student who was labeled as lazy or underachieving because you had poor organization skills as a result of undiagnosed ADHD, but still were in gifted or advanced placement your entire K-12 career almost entirely because you were good at test taking.

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“Psh, I don’t hyperfixate” I say to myself after spending two weeks working on writing one character and spending whole days on twitter at the beginning of this stay at home order.

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My Norwegian grandfather didn’t fly a bomber in WWII for you Nazi fucks to co-opt Norse ideologies. 😡

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Stop holding on to people who have no problem letting go of you.

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Isn’t it funny how someone will bring up a transgression of yours that they’ve never discussed in a fight?

Isn’t it grand?

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you told me I was “operationally” like your girlfriend but you failed to mention that I’d never officially win that title.