#Its an unhealthy mechanism and i am and have been trying to unlearn it and become better since becoming an adult but its hah

[mrfoox]

Me: something needs to change. I need to change

Also me: (does not know what steps to take or what more concretely needs to be changed and where to start. And even if I did, I have - 10 motivation to do it)

Me: well shit

[roadtohappy]

Why I detransitioned

I mentioned it briefly in response to someone else’s post, but I believe this subject deserves a post of its own. It included the statement: “I detransitioned because my identity changed, and I don’t regret my transition”, to which I expressed how much it resonated with me - and here’s why.

I was, I am, and I always will be transgender. As a young girl, I developed gender dysphoria. To anyone who’s unfamiliar with what that means, gender dysphoria is a term used to describe the emotional pain and distress a person experiences when their biological sex and their self-perceived gender do not match - a body/brain incongruence, if you will.

When I came out of the closet and told my family and peers that I identified as male, I had already spent a considerable amount of time contemplating my situation. I questioned myself constantly, and doubted every answer. I did this prior to, and after coming out, and even during my social and medical transition. Not because I was unsure of myself, but because I needed to know if there was any chance that my gender dysphoria could’ve been caused by something other than simply being transgender. It was important for me to unveil and deal with any underlying issues that could’ve been linked to my gender-identity, because it’s better to find out early on and stop before you find yourself overwhelmed with regret later in life if it turns out that you were actually mistaken. I asked myself the same questions constantly; “Am I being influenced by my peers? Media? Online communities?” “Is my brain using this as a defense mechanism to mask childhood trauma?” “Am I using my trans identity to escape from my past/present problems?” “Do I have any undiagnosed psychiatric or medical conditions that could alter how I perceive myself?” “Can I learn to cope with my gender dysphoria without transitioning?” “Am I trying to mend the absence of my father and lack of male role models by becoming male myself?” “Do I have any unhealthy ideas of what it means to be a woman?” “Do I have enough strong female role models in my life?” “Am I simply not ready to become a woman yet? if so, why?”

-These are all questions you should never ever be afraid to ask yourself, no matter where you are in your transition - whether you’re in the closet or out. Early, mid or late-transition; it is never a bad time to discover yourself and make the best choices for yourself, wherever they may lead you. This is not at all meant to discourage anyone from transitioning, but rather inspire people to ask them self the right questions.

As I mentioned in my introduction-post; I started living as a boy at 15, meaning I wore boy’s clothes, and went by a male name and male pronouns. I started taking male hormones when I was 18. If you’re unfamiliar with what hormone therapy does for trans people, it essentially means that you’re taking hormones regularly to induce a second puberty in order to bring on characteristics of your identified gender. I’m now 21 years old and I had chest-masculinization surgery 8 months ago. I never wanted to go any further than hormones and top-surgery, as my dysphoria mainly revolved around my feminine voice and other minor characteristics, and my breasts. The further I progressed into my transition, my gender dysphoria decreased, as you’d expect. After having my top-surgery, I also no longer feel dysphoric about my chest. To my surprise, I now feel completely comfortable with my natural body, including my femininity.

Early 2020 when the lockdown started, I began to spend more time alone by myself, going on long nature walks and exploring my thoughts through art and creative activities as a way to “unlearn” some of the unhealthy masking-behaviors I’ve taught myself over the years, in order to fit in better among other people. (Very common coping mechanism in autistic people, apparently.) As I began this process of “un-masking” I made it my top-priority to stop caring so much about what other people think of me or how other people expect me to look, talk and act. My new mindset became something along the lines of “Okay, the way my brain is built means that I experience the world and process information differently from other people, which also means that my actions and feelings are based on a different set of experiences than other people. I will no longer measure my worth by my ability to blend in and be ‘normal’, and I will no longer apologize for being different.” And so began a whole new level of self-exploration. I played around with some of my old make-up, I started taking up fun activities that most people would deem feminine - and it didn’t make me feel dysphoric at all. In fact, I liked it. I was unapologetically leaning into my feminine side and it felt good, it felt right, it felt safe - an experience I was never able to have before I transitioned.

When the semester came to an end a few weeks ago, I found myself in a weird position. I now have two completely empty months ahead of me, I truly detest big changes like that. A solid everyday schedule sort of functions as a mental “anchor” for me. Because no matter what happens in my life, I know one thing for certain; I will go to sleep tonight, wake up in the morning, do my morning routine and get ready, get the bus at exactly 7:41AM and arrive at school 10-15 minutes later depending on the traffic. I then attend class and adhere to the school’s timetables for the next 6 hours. I get the bus home and change into my uniform, work for 5 hours, go home and do my homework, make dinner, do something fun or watch youtube, go to bed - and the cycle continues. These little “anchors” make me feel secure and grounded, they help me cope with a world that can feel chaotic and overwhelming at times. 

So last day of school arrives and I’m like “shit, what now?? One day I’m at school and suddenly there’s just *nothing* for two months?? Not only that, but I’ve just discovered that there’s a whole new side of me that I’m now free to explore since my gender dysphoria decided to evaporate into thin air.” Everything around me was changing, even myself - and that’s the moment when I decided that maybe it was time to give Testosterone a break. Whether temporary or permanently, doesn’t matter. It’s not like my body is going anywhere and I can always just resume hormone therapy again if I want to. But for now, it was time to just take a break, let go of everything and truly get to know myself. My transition is complete, and I am ready to continue this journey in a new direction. It’s been a month now, and I’m happy to say I’ve had a lot of fun just enjoying the time off and being my authentic self. I haven’t really told anyone I’m detransitioning. I’m just kinda doing my own thing, and if people want to run along with it and refer to be as female at some point then that’s their choice, I don’t really care to be honest. Name-wise, I might just jokingly suggest “Jane” when people ask, since it’s so similar to “Jake”.  I get weird looks from people when I’m out in public, because I’m starting to pass as female again, but my voice is unmistakably masculine - I like my voice though, so I don’t care what they think. If people ask why my voice is so deep, I just tell them the truth: “I am a woman, but my body was testosterone-dominant for 3 years, hence the voice.” Simple as, lol. Not only that, but I am a whole, grown ass adult, I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.

On the topic of irreversible changes, there is one important thing that I cannot stress enough; My decision to detransition does not come from a place of regret, I have loved and cherished every step of this process. I’ve heard a lot of people say this about detransitioners but I don’t have “reverse-dysphoria”, why would I?  Man or woman, I love myself and my body regardless. I absolutely needed to transition from female to male in order to be happy, I could not have attained this level of happiness otherwise. I would not have been able to accept or even come to terms with my femininity if I hadn’t transitioned. I’m still on the same journey as before, I simply took a new path.

Anyway, I best end this wall of text because it’s 3:00AM and I’m going on a 9km hike with a friend in the morning, I can’t waiiiitttt!

[aeondeug]

I think I am finally able to better articulate why the current thing with vampireapologist and antis has hit so hard. It’s the sheer lack of compassion. There’s a lot of concern for children, but there’s an uncompromising lack of nuance. A refusal to have it. A line has been drawn in the sand and they openly looked in the eyes of people like me and told us that we were just making excuses. That we’re also just abusers.

And you know? That really fucking hurts. Really bad. In a not fucking useful ass way.

Kencyrath involves canonical incest. It involves canonical incest that is not condemned by nature of it being incest. Indeed, the thing we could call the canon main ship of the series is incestuous and not condemned on account of that. What problems Jame and Tori have aren’t ‘Wow that’s my twin! I guess that means we’re inherently incapable of consenting to anything with one another.’

And that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. Lots of people can’t read these books and I get that. I feel that the bare baseline for recommendation etiquette with these novels is that you got to bring up the incest and you got to bring up that Jame/Tori is a repeated thing that shows up and is not shown to be unhealthy because they’re twins but because of personal abuse history shit and what reads like fantasy BPD. And that’s fine. It’s fine not to be comfortable with it.

I get that.

But these books are also honestly probably some of the most important books I have ever read. They are some of the only books that have ever looked at someone with my sort of abuse history and who have ever looked at the ways I’ve ended up acting because of that and gone ‘Yeah, no, you still get to be a magical good boy hero with a cool sword! It’s just going to be a bitch to unlearn your unhealthy coping mechanisms and that’s ok so long as you’re getting there.’ Exceedingly few things do that. I never get to be the hero of fantasy novels. At best I get to see characters that have my problems but have the roughness filed off. Or which don’t treat us like human beings. Or which feel kind of like us but always feel like the author writing the story doesn’t actually understand what living through this is like, so that the roughness of the character feels flat and fake. Like it’s an approximation someone made of one of us out of clay based off descriptions they read on wikipedia.

These are helping me.

They’re not the sole thing in my recovery process, of course. They can’t be. But they do help a lot. Because I get to see someone like me. I get to see someone like me treated with compassion and told that they can be a cool hero dude too. I get to see things like the one character realizing that her abusive father wasn’t actually an unstoppable monster but just some...person. Like he was still a dick, but fundamentally he was just a person with an understandable reason as to why he was the way he was. And the father doesn’t get redeemed by any stretch. But she is kind of able to let go of the seemingly all encompassing fear of she had what seemed more like a monster than a man.

Or, you know, something that comes up in my fucking therapy sessions and which is part of the fucking process of healing from abuse. Something that I’m still having to work on and which I was so fucking not about initially that I actually yelled at my therapist one day and declared that I would never, ever do it. Even though we’ve started to do just that and it’s actually fucking helping.

And now I have some fuck on tumblr just coming in and refusing to have any degree of compassion for people like me. They see our hard edges and say that none of that matters. That everything is just forever bad without exception and that there can be no nuance. Your books and your fanfictions involve The Naughty Bad Incest Times so they’re just bad and probably abusing children right now.

And you know what that feels like? It feels like I am being pointed at and told that it’s something I deserved. Like I fucking deserved what’s happened to me. That the sexual abuse from family members is my fucking fault and that I’m just as fucking bad as they are because I happen to like this fucking book series where a pair of twins kiss and I write lots of fanfictions about it and other equally weird or fucked up shit.

I get that that’s probably not the intent but that’s how it ends up coming across to the trauma brain. I get that. Especially with how so much of the concern is regarding fandoms with like wider pulls. But I dunno I’ve fucking seen the Rose/Dave homestuck fandom (I am part of it, though a quiet part, after all) and honestly they seem to stay in their own fucking lane and tag their fucking shit and don’t really seem about going ‘YOU MUST READ MY THING OR YOU ARE A BAD PERSON’. And I’m not really sure I can see what the fucking issue is so long as everything is properly tagged and kept in its proper location. 

And like that’s bad but still the thing that bothers me most is how little feeling vampireapologist appears to have for people like me. And how little the people reblogging that followup post about how even people like me have no excuse or whatever the fuck have.

There was not a single lick of compassion in that entire fucking spiel and I read the whole damned thing. The only thing there was malice and puritanical panic. And you know what? We’re fucking people too. We exist, we matter. “I’m a person and my name’s Anakin.”

This isn’t even about my stupid fucking fanfiction shit, I just don’t want some fucking asshole to just take my shit and throw it on the ground and then fucking blame me for what’s happened to me before telling me that I’m just as bad as they are.

You know when I’ve been making some progress on the whole not being a raging dickhead thing. And now some of that seems to be backsliding because ‘What if I actually am a monster?’ and ‘What’s the point in bothering if I am one...I might as well just be one...’

That’s why people don’t fucking trust antis. There’s a lot of reasons why but that’s one of them. It’s because they don’t actually care. They don’t actually try to sympathize. They don’t actually view us as human beings. We’re just pawns to knock over in some stupid fucking morality game. And that’s fucking bullshit. We’re people. Why don’t you fucking care?

[willowdays]

hahahhahahahhahhahahahah it’s so hard to get better and improve yourself when the entire internet places depression and mental health at the top of the fucking meme pyramid

i don’t blame people for misdiagnosing themselves with mental disorders today. it’s good that mental illness is no longer taboo but not everything is about being depressed and/or anxious. people aren’t learning proper coping mechanisms for normal human emotions such as sadness, grief, or circumstantial depression and anxiety and instead are freely diagnosing themselves with disorders because that’s whats normalized. and personally i think its more of a problem for people who don’t have easy access to healthcare or professional help and don’t feel they have a way to get diagnosed and/or learn coping mechanisms so they just decide they’re depressed.

mental illness, aside from alcoholism, does not run in my family. i have never faced severe trauma. any depression i have had in life has been circumstantial, not chronic. but tell that to a 14 year old who grew up with friends that were actually diagnosed with mental illness from early ages. it became acceptable for me to treat normal human emotions as signs of a mental illness because i was never taught proper coping skills for emotions such as sadness or loss. i considered myself to be “high-functioning” when in reality i am not mentally ill. it is too normalized to just freely diagnose yourself. i see memes related to depression/mental illness every single day. i can’t even imagine not seeing at least one.

people have depression. people have mental illness. but not everyone does. not every millennial or gen z person has a mental illness. sadness is normal, even circumstantial depression is normal. but it’s different from chronic mental illness. since i started therapy last year, i’ve had to detach myself from my identity as a high-functioning mentally ill teenager like everyone else i know, and admit that i’m not. it just became normal for me to consider myself mentally ill along with the rest of my friends. i didn’t know any better. i’ve done research on my behavior throughout the years, trying to justify them as a sign of a mental illness but nothing ever truly fit. i wanted to be validated as a mentally ill person because that was normal for me. it didn’t feel right to be “normal” when all of my friends had actual chronic mental illnesses. 

yeah, all of that is messy. but since i’ve actually learned healthy behaviors and self-awareness through therapy i’m finally able to detach myself from that thinking. i still have unhealthy coping mechanisms and some days are harder than others, but i raised myself on a habitual way of thinking and that takes time to unlearn. i’m just tired of everything relating to mental illness. i grew up thinking that wanting to kill myself was normal and that’s not okay. mental illness exists and we should talk about it, but it’s not a trend. teach children to cope with unpleasant emotions properly. please.

[songketalliance]

Bruneian Me: I Am Bisexual

“I've seen my fellow gay classmates who were out get treated badly in school – from having rumours spread about them, getting bullied by schoolmates and teachers, being ostracized to getting beaten up. It quickly taught me a lesson to repress, repress, repress.”

A Contribution by Phoenix

I am currently undergoing a journey of self-discovery and -exploration. This has been a process of uncovering my past and how it has affected my current state. It includes unlearning unhealthy coping mechanisms and realizing harmful internalizations regarding myself that I’ve taken in when I was growing up. This distorted perception has weaved its way into how I interact with others and my relationships with them.

Safe to say, I have been repressing a lot things that I’ve been ashamed about for a very long time. Coming to terms with my sexuality is only a portion of what I've unveiled.

It was only within the past year that I’ve felt my eyes have been peeled open, and a eureka moment flashed before me with a “Duh!” shining in bright fluorescent lights above my head.

Given this increasing clarity regarding myself, I’m slowly opening up and accepting certain aspects that I seemed to have overlooked. When I started becoming open, I began noticing my attraction towards people of the same sex as I am. This attraction started off mildly then quickly skyrocketed to finally being able to admit this: I am bisexual.

In hindsight, I’m able to see things more objectively now. Many of my first crushes were those who were the same sex as I am - only to disguise that as admiring them and aspiring to be like them. I had deep crushes on my friends that I had to suppress because I believed that it was wrong to feel those feelings; I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

The fear of being bullied for being 'out' and the stigma of identifying as such had led me to believe that I was the straightest person out there. I was raised to think that identifying as anything other than heterosexual was wrong and sinful. I had learned to deny any 'strange' feelings. I've even been shamed for trying to explore my own sensuality in private.

I've seen my fellow gay classmates who were out get treated badly in school – from having rumours spread about them, getting bullied by schoolmates and teachers, being ostracized to getting beaten up. It quickly taught me a lesson to repress, repress, repress. The negative treatments by others were not worth accepting that part of myself. I was scared that anyone would find out how I truly felt.

Learning I am bisexual has been an eye-opening recognition. Simply admitting it to myself feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Even more so after coming out to selected people who have accepted that part of me and for them to be okay with it. For the longest time, I’ve felt as though I couldn’t say it out loud because I wasn’t experienced. Over the years, based on what I've read or been told, I've concluded that if you haven't had any of these relationships (especially ones that include physical intimacy) with someone else of the same sex (or both), you're not actually bi - you're just heterosexual.

My understanding of this is similar to having a crush and viewing them on a pedestal. You see them with starry-eyes, as an idea that you've formulated in your head rather than as a person. But those feelings are still real. I felt the same in my feelings towards women: I have excused the tingly feelings I went through as a bandwagon for me to jump on and off from, rather than accepting them as valid emotions. After all, many have said that if you have no experience in certain things or have never personified something – and in this case, bisexuality – how would you know that you are actually bisexual?

For that reason, I had believed that my voice was small, and I didn’t have the right to identify as anything but hetero, otherwise I was a phony.

However, I would like to counteract that belief. Why does one need any experience to be aware of their attraction anyway? A straight teenager developing crushes is still deemed acceptable and completely normal. Some even act out on those emotions. There is no need to question the validity of their feelings because that is expected of them. They don't need to be in relationships to know who they're attracted to! This is the same with me; I don't need to be with someone else to know that I am attracted to them. I just am. I shouldn't have to prove anything with a checklist of people who I've kissed or slept with to identify as bi.

Although I’m cisgender and straight-passing, I admit that I have at least some degree of fear when it comes to being honest about my sexuality. I’m not questioned at first glance, especially given the current relationship I have with my male partner, and that is a privilege that I truly am thankful for. However, I do have to be wary of what I say and how I express myself for fear that someone else may catch on, especially close friends and family with homophobic tendencies who have made clear about their stance against the LGBTQIA community.

Within the past year, I’ve slowly come to terms and reached acceptance of this part of myself. I’m still discovering what I like and dislike. Heck, I may not even be bi—this is only the beginning. Just the act of acknowledging it and embracing it fully has been truly empowering for me. I’ve never been happier at finally feeling more like myself, and I’m looking forward to see what else I uncover down this path of exploration.

A Contribution by Phoenix Read more Bruneian Me, a column on being a minority in Brunei. 

A minority in Brunei? We want content by you! E-mail us at hi@songketalliance.com with your ideas and article. 

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[relativelyanonymousgirl]

Who am I?

If I ever do get a real blog (maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe in a month? we’ll see), then this would be my ‘about me’ page. Probably tumblr has one as well but I’m taking this exploring a blog thing one step at a time. And I already added an image to one of my previous posts so..

So who am I and what am I doing with this blog (and why should you be doing the same?)

Right, let’s skip on the who am i question and get to the interesting stuff. I’m 21, which means for me that I’m in the phase of my life where you have to unlearn all the ‘bad stuff’ your parents raised you with and you kind of have to raise yourself on all the stuff you wish they’d raised you with. I think for some people this happens automatically and probably at a younger age and for some people this doesnt happen at all. But I have wanted to do this (to change) for as long as I remember and it never really seemed to work. Now it is working and I guess I’m taking you all (that would be all the 0 (zero) people that follow this blog and the 0 people I’ve told about this blog) along for the journey. Both for me, because typing shit out makes them more real and makes the changes more real and because I’m learning a lot and I think other people might benefit from the lessons I’m learning.

So what’s the starting point? Like I said, I’m 21 and I just finished my bachelors in artificial intelligence. I spent my last semester in Spain and this is where I realised I couldnt continue living the way I was. I didn’t not only not want to keep living the way I was, but I genuinely couldnt. I think I have anxiety disorder and it’s been interfering with my life in many, many ways. But even if you do not have anxiety disorder, the same mechanisms that are making my life really hard are probably making your life a lot more difficult than it has to be. So in a way I should be grateful for my anxiety because it’s forcing me to explore these concepts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maybe my life at the end of this journey will be better than Iif I hadn’t been given these obstacles in life. Yeah. Maybe someday I’ll actually believe that.

So anxiety is the big problem and then there are the sideproblems and coping mechanisms that initially, if you’re walking a similar path to mine, you might think are the things ruining your life and are also the things that you want to change so badly, but can’t seem to. You think that doesnt make sense, why can’t I just stop picking my face? Why can’t I stop binging on chocolate? But it’s because I didn’t factor in the underlying reason: the anxiety. So my coping mechanisms aren’t that original probably. Number 1 would be ‘distraction’. Whenever the anxiety kicks in, which ranges from 50% of the time to 100% of the time, I’ll feel stress and fear and I’ll try to distract myself from feeling that and my brain from thinking related thoughts by either looking at memes, scrolling on pinterest or watching series. I would spent literally every minute of my time I’m not doing something and thus occupying my brain on my phone/laptop. Now I’m not saying memes are bad or series are bad, or unhealthy food is bad (woo shocker), it’s all about your relationship with them. Number 2 is food. I am not lying when I say that I would think of food every couple of minutes. And that’s hard. Because it feels like your dieting your life away, every time you have to tell yourself no. Then there is the fact that you have limited self-control. So for example, you have to finish a project for uni. This project in itself is giving you anxiety, of course so you’ll get the desire to eat unhealthy food. Now you can either put your self-control in denying yourself food, or you can put your self-control in working onthe project, both are a lot harder than they should be and both are a lot harder than they are for most other people. Obviously, I chose working on the project, which meant I was always eating a lot of crap when I’m studying. C’est la vie. Number 3 is a bit more strange. I pick my face. I look for any unevenness and god forbid clogged pores and I scratch, pimp and tug on my skin until the unevenness is even and bleeding or the clogging oil is out of the pores. And bleeding. This means my face often looks like a warzone (at least to me) and it’s been one of the harder habits to kick and it’s also the one that makes the least sense to me. I’ve never really cared about appearances much, I wear comfortable clothing (usually from my current boyfriend, and I don’t mean just a cute oversize blouse. I’ll wear his pants and his already oversized sweaters etc. I just care about comfort, which I think is also partly to do with my anxiety), I don’t wear make-up and sometimes I’ll brush my hair. But there have been nights where I laid awake hating my face, wanting it to burn, simply because my skin is not ‘perfect’. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s how it often is with anxiety. 

Then, what I think lies at the core of my anxiety is fear of failure. And this one is different, because fear of failure I’ve had my entire life. Beating anxiety takes a lot of determination. Just like changing yourself does (not if you follow my amazing advice, that is, I truly believe that change isn’t that hard if only you know how). And I’ve always been able to refer to the person I was ‘before’, so back when I had a healthy relationship with food, I simply didn’t think about my skin at all and seeing my roommates around the house didn’t fill me with a sense of fear and impending danger. If I had been that way before than I could go back to it. I’m stubborn enough to think that if life can change me this way, I’ll change my way back (that’s not how it works, you become someone else, but more about that later). But it’s harder when there is no ‘before’. Because if someone hasn’t showed you that you can change then who are you to believe you can? Well fuck that, I’m me and that’s all I need, I truly believe I can change EVERYTHING and I will keep believing this until proven otherwise, but guess what, since I’ll keep trying until I die, you won’t be able to prove me otherwise. 

Fun fact on this matter actually is that not having this belief can truly, seriously be one of your biggest enemies of change. So apperently it’s a big deal to run a mile in under four minutes and nobody thought it could be done. Until one guy did it. So this ‘barrier’ that stood for decades get broken and less than fifty days later someone else breaks it too. And then a year later, 3 people also break it, in one and the same race. By now, thousands of people have broken that ‘barrier’. It’s not a barrier. It’s your thinking. So stop that. 

So I had Fear of Failure (FoF) all my life and then there were some circomestances (it was high school, big shocker) and then I developed anxiety disorder. I’ve been talking mostly about a lot of symptoms of this mental foe, but there is also of course, the social aspect. And that one is so, so hard. It’s not the worst side-effect for me. I have friends, I know how to make friends, I go out to parties etc. But it’s the one that’s most debilitating. No one can prepare you for this one. For thinking you are not ‘normal’, for never fitting in, for that to even become an option, then a self-fullfilling prophecy and then just a part of who you are. 

It’s also the hardest to change, because you can stop eating food and stop looking at your phone (this is completely the wrong way to go about change, but Im siumplifying) but you cant just ‘feel comfortable’ in social situations. You can’t just ‘increase your self-esteem’, you can’t just ‘set bounderies and feel good about it’. I mean I tried to do the things while ignoring the emotions thinking it would go away. AND THIS DOES NOT WORK. it made it all so much worse. So don’t beat yourself up for ‘isolating’ yourself. Sure, isolation without a solution is gonna make the problem worse and you should definetely still catch up with your close friends and do the things that are light-to-medium-exhausting. But just ‘getting out there’ isn’t gonna make your anxiety go away, it’s just gonna make it worse. That said. You need to actually address the problem if you are noticing that social situations have become harder for you. 

Okay, so this is me. This is where I am at right now. Finishing my bachelor thesis for uni was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even though the stuff I actually had to do wasnt that hard, but I had to fight for every single word I wrote. I couldn’t have continued to my masters. My parents came to visit and I cried at a restaurant, finally telling them my problem and then I decided to take a year off and focus on getting my life back on track. I’m now four months into this year and there has been many, many changes and definetely not enough. You can read about them here if you want to.

Sidenote. I’m living at my parents, which has its own challenges of course. But it’s been really helpful for me, since I didn’t feel like I had a comfort zone anymore, and this place is the closest thing to a comfort zone and I think it had slowly become one. Well at least my room has. One thing that seems obvious when you want to ‘find yourself’ is to travel, but I don’t think that would have been the best decision for me. I’ll write about that some other time. 

[thesinglesjukebox]

JULIA MICHAELS FT. SELENA GOMEZ - ANXIETY

[2.82]

This doesn't work for us...

Juana Giaimo: I'm glad artists are starting to be open about their mental health, but I wish "Anxiety" didn't sound just like a campfire song. The acoustic indie pop feeling of the late '00s -- it even features claps and rustic backing vocals at the end -- sweetens a song that I'm not sure needs to be sweet. [5]

Stephen Eisermann: I always appreciate songs like this that try to destigmatize mental health, but there's something pretentious about the melody and production on this track that I can't pinpoint. Although Gomez puts that weird affect on her voice, both she and Michaels do offer honest interpretations of the track, but something still feels off. Like trying to enjoy yourself during a bout of depression, I so badly want to love this track, but all I can manage to do is like it. [6]

Thomas Inskeep: As someone who lives with depression and anxiety, I appreciate that Michaels, a dull songwriter and worse pop singer, is attempting to write/sing about mental illness. But then she brings her pal Selena Gomez, who may actually be a worse singer, to join in. And she forgot to have anyone produce "Anxiety," which sounds like a bedroom demo. Oh, and lyrically, the song is garbage. (Musically, it barely exists.) So I'd give this about a "C" for effort, but that doesn't change the fact that I hate this thoroughly and completely. [0]

Will Rivitz: There aren't many hard-and-fast rules to good songwriting, but "Don't do anything Colbie Caillat or Jason Mraz did fifteen years ago" should be one of them. (This took me ten minutes to make in Audacity.) [3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The sparse arrangement and guitar playing is meant to recall "Uh Huh," surely. With the removal of the drop goes with it all its magnetic energy, but this contrast does allow "Anxiety" to highlight how the same person can inhabit these two disparate modes of thinking. While this is a fun kumbaya for a generation of people open about mental health, the affected vocalizing isn't particularly engaging as a musical element -- Selena's part, for example, finds her rehashing the "Bad Liar" talk-singing to diminishing returns. Oh well, it's still a good enough song you can tweet alongside the word "mood." [2]

Alfred Soto: The gritted teeth delivery is supposed to suggest suppressed anxiety, and the basic guitar strumming, jaunty almost, is supposed to create tension, but the melody and lyrics would make for an okay aspirin or a Farmers Insurance commercial. The cure is spending money on shit. [2]

Crystal Leww: I'm not so into how twee the production here sounds -- like Lily Allen in the late aughts -- but I am kind of interested in Julia Michaels attempting to carve out space for herself as a the every-girl pop-ish artist so openly grappling with mental health in her songs. Teaming up with Selena Gomez makes a lot of sense. Has there ever been a pop star that so blatantly wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear from the public eye quite like Selena G? [6]

Jonathan Bradley: Twee bullshit can be wonderful, but this mannered bourrée of wandering guitar and logorrhea only proffers mental health trouble as shareable content. Tethering together rehearsed asides and faux-cutesy metaphors ("holding hands with my depression"), its candor is descriptive not evocative. Selena Gomez has the more irritating lyric, but she's the better actor of the two, and at least wrings a half-believable character out of her false starts and faltering tones. The song, however, is a public service announcement in search of a personality. Retweet if you agree. [2]

Iris Xie: If you take Twitter hot takes, Instagram self-love image shares, and Facebook self-disclosures, all about mental health, it could lead to a good empowering song. However, "Anxiety" rips that apart and builds a suffocating container. It is a slow, excruciating take on the deep immersion of self-loathing and self-isolation. Michaels's mumbling delivery, paired with her plodding guitar and boxed-in instrumentals, expresses the interiority of being trapped in isolated cognitive distortions. Unfortunately, Gomez is even worse, and has an awkward delivery that sounds more like a sketch comedy skit instead of a heartfelt testimony, that reveals a lack of ease with herself that would've been far more interesting to explore topically. However, lines such as "my friends don't know what it's like/they don't understand why" and "I wish I could take something to fix it/I wish it were that simple," are destructive, because there are no solutions here for its vulnerable fanbase. Nothing about going to therapy, unlearning unhealthy coping behaviors and survival mechanisms, or talking to friends for support. There are other songs that explore intense, isolated anxiety, or discuss anxiety in much more connected ways that can allow a listener to process and understand their experiences. But this is less of a song, and more of a cry for help. [3]

Will Adams: Maybe the chirpy backing and odious attempt at relatability in the final "I love this song!" exclamation (this song's analog to "WHO CAN RELATE") are intentional and meant to evoke the same alienation felt when scrolling through feeds on a Sunday morning, watching everyone else be connected and valued and adored while you lay, inert, on your bed, as you acknowledge that you have nothing to show since you stayed in this weekend, again, and it's just another weight to plunge you further into your ever-present fear that you've wasted everything that's been given to you until now, and you aren't worthy of any further investment or love or even life. Or maybe it's just a cynical garbage fire. [1]

Katherine St Asaph: A novelty of a credit -- think "Bonnie McKee ft. Katy Perry" -- and some endearing vocal delivery wasted on a campfire strum and the cuddliest-bunny depiction of anxiety and depression. I don't know either artist's inner life, only what's on record; and I do get why so many depictions of mental health are this anodyne: to show that it can affect even people with seemingly great lives. But it's hard not to suspect the commercial intent was to excise anything genuinely scary, alienating, or unrelatable by the "good" ones, resulting in a fantasy of anxiety without consequences. Anxiety means people disappear from your life, or you disappear them. Your friends don't ask you to the movies but silently block you on Facebook so you won't contaminate their happy hours or rooftop barbecue invites: one more lifelong, irreversible regret. Your exes don't say you're "hard to deal with" but use stronger, nastier language; or perhaps are confused and heartbroken about being silently withdrawn from by a partner who only presented a painstakingly curated, secretly dissociated 10 per cent; or perhaps are abusers, because those people feed upon anxiety.You don't overthink about FOMO but getting fired for ghosting work; or all the people you've alienated, running around out there like viruses spreading word of you; or perhaps how you can't even motivate yourself to play Fortnite, let alone do useful things; or perhaps thousands of dollars sunk into therapy, prescriptions, or for some even hospitalizations. These are ugly, unmarketable (or are they) consequences of anxiety, and few people will relate to all of them; but for those who do, their absence from songs like this is the opposite of comforting. Even Logic, who just turned "1-800-273-8255" into an "I banged your mom" joke, was more forthright than this. He may have sung "I don't want to be alive" like a jingle, a counterproductive earworm, but at least it acknowledged the fundamental fact that depression makes you want to die. It's telling that the last words here are a giggly "I love this song!" When depression and anxiety get really bad, you don't love songs. You don't love anything. [1]

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