starry-genome

[starry-genome]

Gettin' Through the Holidays Mental Health Tricks

If y'all are anything like me, this time of year is triggering AF. Here are some small, very easy grounding exercises that I was taught by my therapist, basically in order of how much I like them for this rage-inducing season. You make like them in a different order, depending on your rage-to-despair ratio.

Push a wall: literally go up to a wall and try to push it over. Really try. I promise you won't push it over, but give it your best shot. Try to hold it as long as you can, and then take a breather and assess whether you need to repeat. Why it works: This is a quick, physical expulsion of the fight-or-flight feeling. It's a bit like punching a wall, but without the potential to hurt yourself/look scary/damage things. You can even do it in front of people and say you're stretching, they'll never know (unless the wall actually falls down, but this will not happen, I assure you).

Shake like a dog: Animals shake to release stress, and you are also an animal. Setting aside time to just shake it out, as vigorously as you can, arms and legs, face, stick your tongue out, pretend you're shaking like a wet dog. You can dance instead, if that feels better, and you can do this to music, but basically the more unhinged you can be, the better. If you are in a place you can scream, scream too! Why it works: like the above, this is a release of pent-up stress and anxiety. Especially if your rage-to-woe ratio is high, some kind of physical exertion is often the best way to burn through the cortisol and adrenaline you're building up.

Bilateral Tapping: Cross your arms over your chest so that your fingertips are at your shoulders, and slowly tap, one hand at a time, back and forth, for about a minute. Breathe slowly. Why it works: This is weird as hell, but because this engages both sides of your brain, it helps override the activity of the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that Makes The Fear. If you're being literally triggered in a situation, i.e. you're having a trauma response, or reliving some family trauma, this is a good one.

Box Breathing: From a comfortable position (can really be seated, laying down or standing), inhale slowly for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, then repeat. You can do it for shorter counts or longer counts, but if you vary the counts make sure the exhale is longer than the inhale. You can close your eyes or leave them open. Why it works: This exercise helps you move from a sympathetic (activated) nervous system response to a parasympathetic (balanced) response. I do this one every day, and it's a good gateway to meditation. Especially helpful in anxious or tense situations, but I find if I'm very triggered I need one of the other ones first, or it can make anxiety worse. Breathwork is amazing but not usually as a first exercise if you're very activated, or have been activated a long time.

Ice: Lots of ways to do this one – hands in cold water for 30 seconds, ice pack on the back of your neck, dip your entire face into a bowl of ice water (this one's the most effective). Why it works: I kinda think this is hilarious, but this activates your mammalian dive reflex. It immediately slows your heart-rate, so if you are feeling your blood pressure and heart rate rising, this one is very good. The only reason this one's at the bottom of my list is because I hate being cold.

I wish you all a very get-through-the-holidays-without-hurting-yourself. Take time alone if you need it.

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Years ago I remember reading an article with historians trying to figure out what the heck kind of disease would put Tiny Tim in a leg brace and eventually kill him but could magically be cured with a giant bag of money.

Rickets. The answer was rickets. This kid was dying of vitamin d deficiency he literally just needed some cod liver oil shoved down his gullet and a trip to the beach it makes me so mad

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me when we start eating billionaires and i have to kill gomez addams

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american christians are so bad at christianity lmao

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I forgot about this pre-election post in my drafts.

Tumblr isn't letting me fully insert the article, but I'll hyperlink the article here. I think this is a major aspect of the lasting damage of Trumpism that is still woefully underdiscussed. Trump has destroyed families. While his supporters chose to go down that path and must not be excused, it's notable how he served as the main radicalizing force for a significant number of Americans. For many families, things will never be as they were pre-2016. The below article is about a Trumper who regretted his decision on his deathbed, but now that Trump won again, I feel like most will go to their graves convinced they were right. They’ll choose to die as shamefully as they lived.

Here's the full text:

"Daddy died in August of 2017. It was a terrible and painful death and he was only 61 years old. His last words to me were absolutely unfathomable and embarrassing: He begged for forgiveness for his behavior and his Facebook posts since 2015. The MAGA mentality he had displayed since Donald Trump came down that escalator. The point of contention in our formerly close relationship—the reason we had barely spoken in two years. He was dying and he talked about Betsy DeVos. Years before his death, Daddy had sent me several messages through Facebook about 'ripping the teeth' out of education departments across the country and I was shocked. I am sick writing those words. I write them because I know I am not alone. I know many of us lost parents and siblings and grandparents and friends to Trumpism. It’s a sad state of affairs and we may as well talk about it, because even though Trump has been out of office for three years, he’s never gone away. We still suffer the loss of our relationships. Daddy. He was a Navy Seabee. A carpenter. A guitar player. A fast car collector. A good guy. A man who tried to raise two little girls on his own and did it to the best of his ability. A hippie in his pot-smoking, hard-rock youth and a MAGA in his death. It made no sense. He was never hateful, until he was. He was always caring, until he wasn’t. He was proud of me—the first to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, much less an master’s in education, until he decided the Education Department was a part of a conspiracy. He was always the man who I could count on when I called, but he died a man I didn’t recognize. What happened? Well, a lot, and it didn’t start with Trump, but it was cemented and drug to the forefront with his candidacy and election. Daddy was immediately a Trump fan. I thought it odd at first, but I soon grew more upset the more I learned of Trump. I have never watched a ton of TV and only knew of him as being a rich guy in New York with the occasional scandal and bankruptcy. My dad was the father of two girls. He flinched a little when the 'Grab ‘em by the p***y' recording was released, but made excuses. Daddy had a disabled brother who died of muscular dystrophy and he winced when the clip of Trump mocking a disabled reporter was spread widely, but he didn’t stop supporting Trump. I never knew my dad to be a hypocrite, so I was genuinely surprised to see him support a disgusting misogynist—an unapologetic and prejudiced ableist.

RANTS ABOUT DEAD PEOPLE VOTING, ‘DEEP STATE’ My dad and I grew apart quickly—like, lightning speed. Every time I talked to him, he ranted about dead people voting or some 'deep state' scheme. My dad was sick with a chronic illness, but I could barely talk to him without getting off the phone feeling sick myself. He became a raging misogynist before my eyes saying awful things about Hillary Clinton, but they were never based in reality. I mean, there are reasons to dislike Clinton, or anyone else for that matter, but he was talking Pizzagate nonsense and trying to figure out code from her emails. I started avoiding him and skipped visits even though I knew his health wasn’t the best—that’s on me and I still regret it. I just couldn’t stand to see his brain rotting in front of me, and his new political opinions on everything from abortion to immigration enraged me. We used to talk about his dogs, his travel and his work. He was now ranting about locking folks up and welfare abuse and pedophiles. I couldn’t deal with it, so I didn’t. He grew sicker and sicker, but that just meant more time in front of the TV or online. He grew even more angry and more conspiratorial. The actual process of his death was a slow and perverse train that involved a misdiagnosis, drugs that poisoned him and a slew of terribly painful treatments that ultimately led him to a local research hospital that could do nothing more for him. I saw him several times during this period. He still wasn’t himself, but he was tired of talking about hate and resentments. In his final days, he asked me what I would do if I were in his position—unbearable pain and doctors who said there was nothing left to treat him with. I said, 'I don’t know, but I know you are in pain and there are a lot of reasons to stay, but I understand if you want to go.' He decided to let go. As he lay dying, he asked me to read to him. He wanted to listen to Moby Dick— a book he meant to read, but never did. I read it to him. He apologized between chapters for a lot of things that were out of his control when he was a young father and I was a child. I forgave him everything and apologized for not being there like a should have been. And then came the torrent of tears over what had happened to us during the Trump years. This is where I’ll say that I was just disgusted at his political apologies. I begged him to stop. The internet and Facebook are ridiculous things to talk about when you have only hours left. Stop, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. But, he knew it did matter.

YOUR LEGACY IS DEFINED BY LOVE OR HATE I was asleep in the hospital lounge when a nurse came to tell me she thought he was going. I watched as they helped him along with morphine—his physical pain was unbearable. He passed away within the hour and I was left shaken, confused, in mourning, incredibly sad and absolutely infuriated. I try to think of him now before the Trump days, but I can’t say that I remember him completely without those conspiratorial rants and bizarre rabbit hole conversations. And this is why I think it so important to warn others. Your memory is all you leave. That’s it. You are what you say and the way you make others feel. Nothing else matters. I don’t know why I wrote this other than as a warning: Your legacy will be impacted by the love or the hate you surround yourself with. I have to go way back before the Trump era to remember my dad properly. I know he knew this at the end, and feverishly tried to take it back before he left. I gave him grace then and I do now, but it doesn’t erase what he said and did and how it impacted our relationship. And that’s the thing: Daddy wasn’t a outlier. His story is common. I wish it weren’t, but such is the world we live in now. My hope is that the folks reading this can find grace for their loved one or just peace. Politics shouldn’t have destroyed my relationship with my dad before he died, but they did. My last memories of him leave a metallic taste in my mouth—bitter bile in my throat. I loved him deeply and it was reciprocated, but his skewed world view at the end of his life tragically confused his legacy and his loved ones, and that is the saddest thing I can say."

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Digital tinnitus

It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.

-Ed Zitron, Never Forgive Them

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Project 2025 Cliff Notes:

1. Complete ban on abortions, without exceptions (pg. 449-503)

2. End marriage equality (pg. 545-581)

3. Elimination of unions and worker protections (pg. 581)

4. Defund the FBI and Homeland Security (pg. 133)

5. Eliminate federal agencies like the FDA, EPA, NOAA, and more (pg. 363-417)

6. Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in "camps" (pg. 133)

7. End birthright citizenship (pg. 133)

8. Cut Social Security (pg. 691)

9. Cut Medicare (pg. 449)

10. Eliminate the Department of Education (pg. 319)

11. Teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools (pg. 319)

12. Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools (pg. 319)

13. End the Affordable Care Act (pg. 449)

14. Ban contraceptives (pg. 449)

15. Additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1% (pg. 691)

16. End civil rights & DEI protections in government (pg. 545-581)

17. Ban African American and gender studies in all levels of education (pg. 319)

18. End climate protections: (pg. 417)

19. Increase Arctic drilling (pg. 363)

20. Deregulate big business and the oil industry (pg. 363)

Not to increase anxiety, but I found this buried on Reddit. From six months ago. very good thing to have in your pocket so you are prepared

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in the club saying shit like "oh bother" and "i'm feeling rumbly in my tumbly"

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luigi mangione, the SUSPECTED (innocent until proven guilty) united healthcare shooter, has been charged with terrorism. that’s right. a man who supposedly shot ONE SINGLE PERSON is being charged with terrorism. because in america, billionaires lives matter enough that a SINGLE rich man’s death is considered a terrorist act against this country. think about that.

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Devastating to have more evidence that done IS better than perfect