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afoolforatook · 5 years ago

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A RWBY V7 Ep12 rant.....When I say this is long..... Legit was fucking 37 pages double spaced at one point. Sorry....

Before this gets started I want to warn you, this is long (even longer than I thought it’d be going in). It’s probably too long ... actually it is definitely too long but if I agonize over editing it down again and again I won’t get it up before the finale. It’s probably repetitive at times, and most certainly not anything I’ll be showing off as an example of my top essay writing. And I want to be able to say that the length pays off because I have some grand hopeful insight at the end. I want to say I know things will be okay. But the fact that I can’t is exactly why I’m writing this, and why it’s so long. So if you need this to have a hopeful ending, I’m sorry, I don’t have one for you currently. I want to, so badly. But to me false hope would be even worse. So if you can’t handle another long post that doesn’t end with a way to fix things, it’s okay, take care of yourself. But maybe the most hopeful thing I can tell you, and tell you up front, is that you aren’t alone in your pain.

I want to preface this all with one more thing: I don’t hate CRWBY. I respect them, support them. I’ve wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt as much as I could. That doesn’t mean I can’t criticize them or expect more from them or just be plain angry with them. I can be vocal about all of that without harassing them, without hating them. I don’t think they’re just plain evil or homophobic. I still want to believe that they can do things that will allow me to trust them again. Maybe it’s naive, but I want to, at the very least, still have hope that this wasn’t malicious, just very poorly conceived and executed.

And I know that other people who are hurting like me are lashing out towards CRWBY. And while I don’t at all condone that kind of reaction, I can understand it to an extent. Because I’m very, very hurt and angry and it would be so easy to let loose and say all the awful stuff I want to in my anger. To yell and call people out and not care how I come across. It would definitely be a lot easier than spending all week writing this long thing and agonizing over making it perfect. There is nothing wrong with venting and being raw and open and angry, but just as we want CRWBY to be aware that their actions can truly hurt people, we need to be conscious of the fact that so can ours. Many people are very hurt right now. And whether or not you think it was queerbaiting/BYG or not, or even whether or not you just think it was bad writing, no one has the right to invalidate the people who are hurting right now, many of whom are queer people dealing with personal traumas and mental illness.

The few people who are attacking CRWBY and other fans (and there is a difference between being angry and vocal about that anger and just attacking them) do not invalidate the hurt people are feeling. If you are hurt or angry you have every right to be. You have every right to stop watching the show or leave the fandom, or communicate your hurt to CRWBY. But communicate means just that; communicate. Talk. You can be as angry as you are, you don’t have to temper your pain to be more tolerable to the people who caused that pain. But there is a difference between being harsh and honest about how hurt you are, and harassing real people. And I won’t say “harassing real people over a fictional character/show” because I know it’s more complicated than that. My hurt this past week isn’t over a fictional character or a ship. It’s about me and what I’ve been through and the fact that the very thing that gave me strength in hard times was turned into something that confirmed my biggest fears and hurt me immensely.

The world always gets so sentimental when we see things about fictional stories giving people some comfort, and we celebrate that. But as soon as people say they can be hurt just as much by media, we lash out, say they’re overreacting, that they’re just getting upset over fictional characters. But you can’t have it both ways. We can’t want fiction to be important and inspiring to people and then belittle people who are negatively impacted by the same material, especially when often that vulnerability comes from a history of trauma and/or being neurodivergent. I am extremely hurt. I feel betrayed and abandoned and angry. And it will take time for me to process all of that and move past it. But I can be all of those things without attacking CRWBY or the people who might disagree with me.

To me, this isn’t about disagreeing. We can argue forever about whether or not this was queerbaiting or bury your gays or poor writing (and I honestly at this moment don’t even know what I think about all of that because I’m not in that headspace currently) but the fact is that there are many, many people who feel it was, and who are hurting because of that, and whether you believe it was or not does not give you the right to invalidate the real pain that they are feeling. Who is right is less important than the fact that people, people who were already vulnerable, have been hurt. So, please. Respect each other. Respect those who are hurting. Respect those who aren’t and don’t understand, and respect CRWBY. You can still be angry and speak out without attacking others.

With that said, to fully understand why this has affected me so much, and why it’s going to take a long time for me to get back to where I was, regardless of how the volume ends, there are things you need to know about my history. It’s a lot of background and this is already going to be a longer post than I’d really like, but it’s important to understanding why RWBY is so important to me, and thus able to have such a negative effect on me. So please, bear with me. Also, fair warning, though at this point it’s probably obvious, but my story isn’t happy. I still haven’t found my own positive ending to it. If it’s too much for you to read right now, please, like I said before, take care of yourself.

I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Farley. I’m 24, nonbinary (they/them), biromantic, demisexual. I have MDD, GAD, ADHD, Panic Disorder, OCD, Comorbid PTSD, and am trying to get an official autism diagnosis. I’m a full on alphabet soup. I struggle with imposter syndrome, intrusive thoughts, self-isolation, dermatillomania, and multiple trauma related phobias. My queer and neurodivergent identities are huge parts of my life and I try to be as open as possible about them, in the hopes of helping end the stigma around them. One of the main ways I cope with my mental health issues on a day to day basis is through hyperfixations. While it might not technically be the healthiest method, it’s what I’ve found to work for me when I’m in a really bad place and unable to practice more active coping skills. Through stories and characters that I relate to, I can separate my problems from myself a little and both escape from them for a while when needed, and view them a little more clearly from a new perspective.

That’s some important info about me, but what really matters here is the past five years of my life and the trauma within them.

In October of 2015, a few months into my sophomore year of college, I went into a deep depression, mostly brought on by multiple family deaths and stresses over the past summer that I had not properly had time to process and recover from. I quit my job as an RA and withdrew from school and moved back home with my parents. While this was the right decision at the time, it wasn’t easy. I left a very close group of friends at school, and didn’t really have a strong support system at home aside from my parents. My friends from high school had all gone off to college themselves, and the few that still lived in town were often busy with work or school. And because I have an intense fear of driving and needed time to get myself in a better place before starting a job, I ended up spending most of my time home alone. I became more and more isolated, to the point of verging on agoraphobic, and my parents and I started thinking about ways I could basically get my life started again.

But isolation messes with your head, and makes you want to just isolate more and more. In mid February of 2016 I started to really work on being social again. Mostly because I started talking to my best friend from high school, Emma, regularly again. She knew I was struggling, and while I’ve always had a hard time keeping in touch with people, Emma has always been the person I never felt self conscious about going to. We talked everyday. After high school, Emma’s mom and younger brother had moved to Ohio (I live in NC) and Emma had gone to school in Oregon. Her father lives in Germany. So between visiting her family in Ohio and Germany she didn’t have a lot of time during breaks to come back to NC to visit friends. Since we graduated I’d only seen her once for about 12 hours during that awful summer. But now we were skyping and chatting everyday. And slowly I started to be less and less scared of being more social. I wanted to hang out with friends. I was excited about going back to school in the fall.

Something important to understand about me and Emma is how close we’ve always been. We’d been best friends since 8th grade. We told each other we were soulmates, soulfriends, when we were 15. Nearly everyone in our small high school thought we were dating at one time or another. I always knew I loved her. I was fine with our relationship being “only” platonic. Because platonic wasn’t “only”. It was absolutely perfect. It was having her as one of the most important people in my life, and me in hers, and that’s all I wanted. But I also knew that if she ever wanted to try a romantic relationship, I’d be open.

Around the time I left school Emma had been going through a lot herself. She was finally getting help for her own mental health issues and she was, for the first time, really thinking about her identity and sexuality. On May 4th 2016 she texted me like always, but this time she was nervous. She wanted to tell me something. She said she was still confused about her sexuality and didn’t know where she fell. But when she tried to think of being with someone, the only person she pictured was me. And I told her basically what I just told you. So we started talking about testing out us being a couple. She had already been planning to come to NC to visit after she went to Ohio later that month for her brother’s high school graduation. And my parents were going on a two week vacation around that time as well. So we decided that she would come and stay with me for two weeks. We would keep this to ourselves until then, so that we could see if this was really the best thing for us. And if so, then we’d tell people. We’d always talked about living together after school, but now we wanted to see exactly what we wanted our relationship to be. She bought a bus ticket for May 26th and would stay through June 10th or so, which would mean she’d be there for her 20th birthday on June 5th. We talked everyday about our plans for her visit. How excited we were, how we could cook dinner together and dance around the house in our underwear, and just get to be Us again. We talked to friends, planning to visit friends from high school and maybe even my friends from college.

On May 18th I texted Emma around 11 pm. I hadn’t heard from her all day which was unusual but she was in Ohio celebrating her mom’s birthday and getting ready for her brother’s graduation that weekend, so she was probably just busy. We’d told each other goodnight every night for months at that point. So I told her I loved her and was so excited to see her in just over a week.

The next morning it was a bit odd that she still hadn’t texted me back but again, I just assumed she was busy with family. And then the mail came, and the last part of a birthday present I was making for her arrived. So I got to work, giddy.

Around 2 pm my other best friend from high school, Juli, called me. For some reason I decided I’d just call her back later, I was too engrossed in making Emma’s present. About 20 minutes later I heard a knock on my door and turned to see my parents standing in the doorway to my room. I vividly remember spinning around happily and saying “Hey! Everything okay?” even as I noticed the tears on my dad’s face and how pale my mom was. My stomach knotted and I stood as my mom said “N-no. Honey…..” and walked towards me. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for her to say that a grandparent or aunt or uncle had died. But as she got closer and put a shaking hand on my shoulder, I got a little more confused, a different kind of scared. One of my cousins? One of my baby cousins?

Nothing could have prepared me for her telling me that there’d been an accident in Ohio. That Emma, and her mom, and her brother, and her aunt had been in a crash…. And that all four of them had been killed on impact. The only thing I remember about the rest of the night is the pain of continuously screaming, punching the wall until my dad stopped me, and calling my friends from college, trying to have someone to talk to, someone who I could call who wouldn’t also be mourning. I couldn’t handle my own grief, let alone anyone else’s at that moment.

There’s a lot more to that story. There’s the memorial service in Ohio and meeting her dad and stepmom for the first time. There’s the service we put together at our high school and seeing our friend group all together again, except not. There’s the panic attacks every time I saw a garbage truck, or my parents drove off to work.

But most importantly for what you need to know right now, is my sliding back into isolation. I barely ever saw my friends from home and every time I did for the next two years it had something to do with mourning Emma. I saw my college friends a few times; them coming to visit or me taking a bus to stay the weekend. But eventually they went back to school and I stayed at home. I drifted away from high school friends because I didn’t know how to handle being with them when everything we did together reminded me of what I’d lost. I didn’t know how to talk to them because I needed their support but knew I didn’t have it in me to be supportive of them, and that wasn’t fair. I drifted away from my college friends for the same reasons, and even more so as the group dynamic that I had left slowly changed and faded until I didn’t know who was talking to who anymore and I again felt bad for dumping my shit on them when I couldn’t do the same. I began to think that all I brought to any social interaction was my pain and hopelessness. I would just bring everyone else down. They shouldn’t have to deal with my pain. So a year after I left school I was even more alone. I’d lost or pushed away all the people in my life that I’d expected to be lifelong friends, family. And I didn’t know how to begin to fix that. I didn’t know if I wanted to. I didn’t know if I deserved to.

The only reason I was even still alive was because anytime I even got close to thinking about hurting myself, I could just sense Emma glaring at me, yelling at me, telling me that I couldn’t let this stop me from living out all those dreams we’d talked about. And I knew that my life wasn’t just mine anymore, that all those dreams, that bond, the parts of my favorite person that only I knew, would be lost if I died.

But I didn't have my friends to vent to, and as supportive as my parents were (I’d told them and a few close friends about me and Emma that first terrible week) I needed friends. But I didn’t know how to reconnect and I was too scared to go out and meet new people, especially knowing that at some point I’d have to drop the “dead girlfriend” bomb on them, and who’d want to stick around after that? So I tried to use media and hyperfixations to pull myself out of spirals, like I always had. But it was hard. Because most of the things that had been comforting before were all things I’d shared with Emma, and so now they were just more reminders of her absence. And even new things I found soon turned rotten because I couldn’t help but think about how I wish I could show it to Emma. Everything that made me happy for even a moment would pretty soon make me sad.

Eventually I found things that comforted me and helped me be creative again and that led me to starting school again, nearly three years after I’d left, at SCAD. I loved the classes. I wanted to be there. I’ve always been a fiction writer but now there was so much in my head that I needed to get out, to process, and to share with people, especially people like me dealing with an unimaginable grief. Those past few years had been made even more difficult by the lack of representation I found in grief material. Everything was either about grieving the elderly, not someone who’d barely even gotten to live. Or if it was about someone young it was due to suicide or disease or violence; in other words things that at the very least, left the grieving with some cause to care about, or something to be angry at, some real world outlet. I didn’t have that. I didn’t relate to that. And even harder was finding anything I could relate to that included the complexities that my queer identity put on my grief; there were people I could and couldn’t tell about our relationship. Did I say I lost my best friend or my girlfriend? What if her family didn’t approve and wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t let me have any of her things, wouldn’t want me around? And one of the biggest things I kept thinking those first few months; why had my life become a ‘bury your gays’ soap opera plot line. Was Emma supposed to just be my tragic backstory now? Was I just supposed to use this as angsty fodder for the rest of my life? What about her? What about her dreams, her potential? What about her progress? She’d just gotten to a place where she was accepting herself. Where she was overcoming her mental health issues, where she was proud of who she was. Why was I allowed to keep going and she wasn’t? I couldn’t find any support for these feelings. Not books or groups or forums. So I decided to make them myself. I started writing and drawing, putting together what I called my Grief Scrapbook. I was working towards the thing that mattered to me more than anything; telling our story. I was getting the chance to create the content I’d so desperately needed.

But I was still alone, even at school. I was 23 living with mostly 18/19 year olds. And while there wasn’t anything wrong with them, I was struggling with a strong sense of dissociation. Everywhere I looked I saw Emma, forever 19. And there I was, continuing to age and getting further and further away from her.

My first year at SCAD I made two friends, and while I love them, they didn’t fulfill the hole left by the large close knit groups of friends I’d lost. I tried to get back in touch with my best friend from college, only to find that she was no longer talking to me. And I don’t blame her really. Yes I’d been going through things, but so had she, and I hadn’t been able to be a good friend for her. So if she needed to move on for her own good, no matter how sad that made me, she had every right to do what was best for her, just as I had been trying to do.

I’m now in my second year at SCAD and recently started hanging out with a new group. And they’re great and I’m slowly feeling more confident and secure around them, but I still struggle. I still miss the relationships I held so dear, the relationships I let dissolve. I still worry I’ll never have that kind of connection with people again, and that if I do somehow manage to find it, I’ll mess it up again. Some days are particularly rough, when I sit with my thoughts too long, or see something that reminds me of any one of the many people I miss, and I ache for the happiness I had. And it’s those moments when I turn to hyperfixations (I do promise this is getting to RWBY).

This past February the final How To Train Your Dragon movie came out. The HTTYD franchise holds a very dear place in my heart, as it was my main hyperfixation during high school, and something I shared with Emma and other friends. The second film came out the day of my graduation. It was the last movie Emma and I saw together before she moved to Ohio and then went to school in Oregon. It was the last movie we saw together at all. I knew it was going to be very emotional for me to see the final movie, alone now. But I had to see it opening night. And (spoilers for The Hidden World I guess) the movie ended up being about the reality of having to let go of the important people from your childhood as you grow up. About dealing with the fact that sometimes the people you expected to always be a part of your life, aren’t. I loved the movie, but it destroyed me. A few months later I had to get through May, the 3rd anniversary, away from home for the first time. And it was extremely difficult. I’d had to take a break from HTTYD and process things.

So my main hyperfixations weren’t helping me get through a really difficult time. But around the time HTTYD 3 came out I happened to get back into RWBY. I’d watched the first season or so when it first came out, but then had just kind of forgotten about it. And so, in the absence of HTTYD, I got caught up. And I can’t say there weren’t things that hurt, that made me have to take a moment and collect myself. Watching the end of volume three, watching Pyrrha and Jaune finally kiss, and then watch their relationship die with her before they even had a chance to be together, hit way too close to home. Logically I should have projected on Jaune more than I did but I think I couldn’t, because it wasn’t just similar, it felt like I was literally watching the worst moment of my life play out. He was too much like me to handle. But there was Qrow. And at first I just kind of latched onto him because I liked him. I like his characterization, his design, and I was a fan of V*c ( I hate to even mention him here for fear of causing a totally different discourse, but Emma and I were big fans of his and high school and met him and when everything happened with him it was just another thing that felt like a good memory of Emma had been tainted.)

And so I was watching while the last half of volume six was airing. And I was watching Qrow slip further and further into his depression. I watched as he felt betrayed by Oz after grieving him and then getting him back. I thought more about how he’d basically lost his sister, about how he’d grieved for Summer (regardless of whether it was platonic or romantic), how he lost hope in having strong relationships ever again. How he felt cursed and how he pushed people away to protect them and himself from more pain. I saw how the Apathy affected him and how close he was to giving in before Ruby and Weiss snapped him out of it. I saw him struggle to get himself back together for Ruby and the rest of the kids, but not know how. I saw every single fear I’d struggled with those past few years in him. I related to Qrow more than I’d ever expected to. And so my hyperfixation on RWBY grew. His addiction was my isolation. His insecurities of hurting others and thus pushing them away was my fear that for the rest of my life, I would be alone because I was always going to be too broken to be worthy of friends and love.

And then everything happened with V*c and for a bit everything hurt again and I had to get away from RWBY and the toxicity within parts of the fandom. And when I was able to come back I was excited but worried. I hoped that Qrow would continue to develop, continue to progress alongside me, that I would like his new actor enough to finish healing the sting I’d felt over V*c. I just wanted Qrow back, I wanted this character to be there to help me again.

Because Qrow Branwen gave me hope. He gave me hope that I could get better. He gave me hope that even with my insecurities and trauma, something I’ll never be fully free from, I can deserve people who care about me, and that there are actually people who will care about me. He gave me hope that good things can still happen to broken people. And not just people who were once broken and have healed, but people who are still figuring out how to heal, who know they will never fully heal, but also know they still are worthy of support and care. And then volume 7 started and I got more than I’d ever dreamed.

There was the hug with Ironwood. And even though I shipped Ironqrow, the idea of there being a romantic aspect to that hug wasn’t what made it important. It was the fact that we got Qrow connecting with an old ally (and an adult), finding that he even still had an old ally. That despite everything that had happened with Oz and Lionheart, despite all the trust he’d had broken, maybe he wasn’t actually alone yet. And then we got Clover. I’ll admit I was wary of him at first. I was worried about the traitor theories, the death theories, and then the theories that he’d negatively affect Qrow, making him feel worse about his semblance. But then he grew on me so quickly. Because he smiled at Qrow. He got him to talk about himself, called him out when he was putting himself down, told him how well he was doing. And while it’s wasn’t because of Clover, he was sober, and Clover had to at the very least help him stay that way. Qrow was hunching less when he walked, opening up, being more vulnerable and social. He was smiling, laughing, making jokes. He had a steady partner that he trusted and worked well with, likely for the first time since team STRQ. And yes, I shipped them, but honestly while I would have still been disappointed if it was never canon, given how blatant it really seemed like it could be, it would ultimately have been okay. Because again, it was less about Qrow finding love and more about him finding support. And then I saw Qrow and Clover and Robyn team up, and whether it was canon or just fandom I felt represented. Not just in the way I had with Qrow about my mental health, but as a queer person struggling with complicated grief; the exact thing I had never been able to find and had taken upon myself to create for others. I saw Qrow being loved (again, whether platonic or romantic isn’t as important) and healing. Even if Fairgame never actually happened, I could still see them as queer characters helping each other process trauma. And maybe I set myself up in a bubble part of the fandom that fully convinced me that Fairgame was possible, but at the very least I truly, undoubtedly thought that Clover would side with Qrow.

And as I watched episode 12, I could feel my stomach sinking. Okay Clover didn’t side with Qrow at first, but maybe he’ll come around. Okay maybe he won’t come around, but maybe he’ll take Qrow in and they’ll have time to talk, maybe even with Ironwood. But then Clover abandons the ship, abandons Qrow and I was scrambling even more for hope that things would be okay. Maybe he’s trying to get away to diffuse things. But then “Never pegged you for the manipulative type” the first sign of Qrow doubting their entire relationship, of feeling betrayed again. And then Clover calls Qrow cynical? Maybe I’m forgetting something, cause I haven’t gone back and analyzed every scene with them, but I can’t remember Qrow ever being cynical around Clover this volume that we’ve seen. Self-deprecating yes, but this is legitimately the happiest and most secure we’ve ever seen Qrow. But okay maybe they’ll reason and Clover will come around. But then “We don’t have to fight, friend.” and it’s friend not Qrow. And then “You don’t know my friends. That’s how it always goes.” and I broke. I almost stopped there, a part of me wishes I had. Because it was already so broken, this thing that had even in the past few weeks, been a main pillar of hope for me. But maybe they’ll come together to fight Tyrian. And then Qrow goes after Tyrian and Clover keeps attacking Qrow. Well maybe he’s really trying to protect him, or has some plan. But then they continue to fight each other. And they don’t have even a moment of “who’s the bigger threat here? Us or the serial killer?” And then Qrow works with Tyrian?! Tyrian the serial killer? Tyrian the unstable maniac? Tyrian who tried to take Ruby? Tyrian who nearly killed Qrow? Tyrian who fucking worships Salem, who Qrow has spent most of his life fighting, has lost Summer to, and countless other traumas? (and I get the possible reasons, realizing that Clover won’t lay off of him so Tyrian is his best bet and then he can take care of Tyrian, but I still don’t like it. But this isn’t even about whether or not I think it’s good writing or characterization and it’s too long already to get into that.) And then Tyrian and Qrow fight so well together and I honestly felt sick. We haven’t seen Qrow work that well with anyone. Not RWBY, not Ironwood, not Clover. And now we see it with fucking Tyrian? And maybe it’s a stretch but it honestly felt like another nail in the “Qrow attracts bad” coffin that is his insecurities. Qrow and Tyrian fight nearly perfectly together and it felt so damn wrong. Clover’s wrong here, Qrow’s wrong here, and it all feels so very very wrong based on the entire progression of their relationship throughout the volume. And then Qrow takes down Clover’s aura and I’m just empty. There’s no hint of him trying to just beat Clover and not kill him. He has no reason to think that Tyrian won’t actually go for the kill during this fight. But they continue to have these snippets of “We don’t have to fight” or “I want to trust you” while showing no signs of holding back and still caring about the other’s well being. And then Qrow’s voice breaking during “Why couldn’t you just do the right thing…”. We’ve literally never seen Qrow this emotionally compromised, let alone during a fight. He’s crumbling because he finally had someone who made him think he could get better, that he could have close relationships, that he could be good for the people around him. And now he’s losing it.

I was broken here, I was already spiraling. I knew Clover would get hit. I knew I would be struggling to deal with this episode because I had so fully expected a different course. But I thought there could still be hope. There had to still be hope. CRWBY wouldn’t give us all that development, wouldn’t show Qrow finally happy without leaving some hope for things turning around in the finale. He’d get hit by Tyrian’s stinger and Qrow would have to work to save him and they’d work things out. But then “I trust James with my life… and I wanted to trust you.” And I’m sobbing. Because I get it, Clover’s loyal, but when Qrow’s face hardens I know what he’s thinking. What he’s trying not to think but it’s so hard to fight: “Maybe it is me. Maybe I can’t be trusted. Maybe I’ve ruined things again”. Even though he knows what James is doing is wrong. But he trusted James, he trusted Clover. And he thought they trusted, cared for him. And now they’ve both turned against him and no matter how much he knows he’s doing the right thing, he can’t help but worry that he’s still the thing broken here, that he still messed up somewhere and ruined the relationships he needed so much. I was breaking more and more as I watched this source of my own hope lose all hope.

And then Harbinger. The weapon Qrow built himself. That he modeled after his hero. The literal extension of his soul. And only moments before, Qrow destroyed the one thing that might have protected Clover. Clover’s emblem falls. Tyrian with “Like you killed Clover”. And yeah yeah Qrow being framed is heartbreaking. But it’s more that he’ll believe it. He did. He fucked everything up again. He tried so hard to do the right thing and still managed to hurt the person he cared about. And if Clover, the foil to his bad luck, could be destroyed by his semblance, how does anyone else stand a chance? And then blaming James. Swearing to make him pay (I honestly don’t remember if he says make him pay or kill him but I physically can’t rewatch that scene to see which it was). And yes he blames James. He hates James. It was the last straw breaking on someone he wanted to trust so much, wanted to have as a friend. But he still blames himself. He still knows he’s cursed and all the progress he’d made with Clover’s help is ripped away.

And then “Good luck”. I’ve seen people saying it’s sweet, that it’s a moment of reconciliation, of Clover showing he still cares. And I don’t necessarily disagree. But I hate it. Because Qrow won’t take it that way. It’s just another reminder that good luck is out of his reach. And then the goddamn sky and the bi flag colors. And then we see Qrow cry for the first time. And then…. The scream…. I literally nearly vomited and that was the thing that sent me over the edge into full blown panic attack. Because I know that fucking scream. I know how it feels. I hear it ringing in my ears, I feel my throat getting raw. I could hear and see and feel myself in the same position. The nightmare I’d fought off for years; kneeling over Emma’s body and there being nothing I can do but scream and scream as the last of the hope I was clutching to faded with her… with Clover’s eyes.

It wasn’t that Clover died. It wasn’t that my ship won’t happen. It was how traumatizing it was. It was that Harbinger was now defiled. It was that Qrow set it up to happen. It was the sky. It was seeing the light go out of Clover’s eyes. It was Qrow’s scream. We’ve never seen a death like this on RWBY before. Yes we watched Pyrrha’s death. But there was no blood. We didn’t see her bleed out. We didn’t see the exact moment the light left her eyes. We saw Adam stabbed and some bleeding and then hitting the rocks, but we weren’t right there, seeing the exact moment of his death close up. If Clover had been stung by Tyrian and died I’d be upset still, and many of the issues I have would still be relevant. But using Harbinger like that, playing directly into Qrow’s own insecurities like that, after having him do things that felt extremely out of character in order to set things up for Tyrian to kill Clover like that and blame Qrow? It felt vile.

It didn’t just feel like bad writing or different narrative choices. Hell, it didn’t even just feel OOC. It felt malicious. It felt like twisting established plot and characterisation completely in order to make it fit some tragic climax that was only chosen because it would have the biggest emotional impact, not because it was the best way to continue the plot. And they can’t say that they didn’t expect people to be so attached to Clover. Because if they didn’t expect that to be so emotional for viewers, then why do it like that in the first place? Why put in the climatic cinematic shot that mirrors when Yang lost her arm? Why have Qrow screaming over Clover’s body be the final shot? If Clover was never meant to have significance to both Qrow and fans, why make his death so painful? They can’t say that they didn’t know fans would get so invested at the same time that they say that it was necessary to make it that traumatic. It’s not that you can’t kill off beloved characters, no matter how long they’ve been in the show. But if you do, it’s got to feel important, it’s got to feel necessary, and it’s got to make sense for those characters, or else it just feels like you’re playing with peoples’ emotions for no reason other than shock factor.

I’ve seen a bunch of theories and discourse. Arguments over whether or not it’s queerbaiting or bury your gays. Over whether or not it’s bad writing or out of character. And I’m sure I’ll eventually have a stronger, more thought out opinion on that, but right now I can’t even get there.

I’ve seen theories as to why CRWBY did this, why it’s important to the plot. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ll be just as surprised in a good way next week as I was in a traumatic way this week. But it will take a lot, and I will still need time to recover and dig myself back out of my own intrusive thoughts that saw this episode and rejoiced because “See!? See, good things can’t happen! You’ll always lose whatever good you find. You’ll always ruin whatever good you find.” And none of the theories I’ve seen make that better. Maybe they’ll bring Clover back with the Staff of Creation or some other method: doesn’t matter, the damage is still done. Qrow still is betrayed and traumatized. And even if Clover came back and Ironwood realized he was wrong and stopped, even if everything went back to exactly what it was, Qrow still would have lost all the progress he made this season. Because even if everything was fixed, Qrow would still have to fight down the newly boosted fear that everything will fall apart again. And similarly even if I come back to RWBY and things are good, I will still have a hard time trusting the show, and will still have to climb my way out of a hole I had just gotten out of, except this time I won’t have the comfort of RWBY to help me.

Or maybe Clover won’t come back and Qrow will relapse and try to kill Ironwood and lose his mind like the scarecrow he is. And what will that do but reinforce the fear and idea that “broken” people can’t escape their vices? That they’ll always come back to pain. Yes, it’s important to show that people can relapse and still get better, that relapse doesn’t mean all hope is lost. But there’s a difference between a relapse and new trauma that directly undercuts all the progress you’ve made. That’s not inspirational, it’s exhausting. Yes, you can come back again, but what about the next time and the next and the next? When will you just get to be secure in your happiness without worrying that at any moment you’ll thrown back to square one?

If it turns out there’s some great plot point this creates, some big revelation that fixes things, I still think it wasn’t done properly. Fine, have that, have that pain. But don’t end on that and leave people for a week. It’s not about it being a cliffhanger. It’s about people who are traumatized being abandoned. (Again, I’m not even getting into how, if this did happen, how episode 12 would still feel off from a characterization standpoint and whether or not it was poor writing. It’s an analysis I can’t currently do.)

And maybe my least favorite theory and the one that I might see as most likely; that Qrow won’t relapse. That he won’t completely lose it and instead Clover’s death and influence will be what keeps him going. Because yeah, that sounds great, that sounds heroic and strong and like the progress that came from knowing Clover did make a difference. But it feels wrong in this instance. Qrow’s had that. He’s had loss that hurt him but he kept going to finish something or honor them. He kept going after Summer died. He kept going for Ruby and Yang and Tai. If he didn’t have that, why would he have kept going when things were so bad? But Qrow doesn’t need that again. He doesn’t need another pain to spur him on. He needs support. He needs proof that his hard work, his struggle, has been worth it and that he still has allies. And not just the kids. Because as much as he respects them, as much as he believes in them and their abilities as hunters, he’s still protective of them, they still aren’t on an equal level. He still feels responsible for them. And that’s good for him, but he needs adults too. He needs people who aren’t his responsibility. He needs adults who can call him out on his shit. He needs adults he can lean on, who can take care of him. And now who does he have? Summer is gone. Raven is gone. Tai is back at home. Oz is gone. Lionheart betrayed him. James has now betrayed him. Winter has sided with James and might not be alive much longer? Robyn is there, but also hurt, and we haven’t seen anything to suggest that they are particularly close. And now Clover is dead. Clover, the only person we have ever seen Qrow let his guard down around like we did this season.

And it’s not that the “Staying alive for the person you’ve lost” is a bad plot line, and if I’d trust any show to do it I would’ve thought it’d be RWBY. But I can tell you from fucking experience, forcing yourself to keep going in honor of someone? Yeah, it might keep you alive. It might give you meaning and even lead you to do great things. But when it’s just you and your head? When you’re alone because you’ve lost everyone who kept you going and now you have to keep going without them, for them? It fucking sucks. It’s not poetic. It’s not this heroic strength that lifts you up. It’s a crushing weight of fear that you will fail again, that you’re the only one who can carry this burden, but this time you’ll let down the person most important to you. And then not only will you have fucked up your life but you’d have made their suffering and loss meaningless.

And I can see why CRWBY might take this route, what their message might be, and maybe for them and for some people it’s good, but personally it’s crushing. Because it can be a good thing to have the desire to honor someone spur you on, that’s literally why we still have RWBY. But if that’s the only thing you have? It’s toxic. You have to have other support and motivations of your own to keep you going without becoming hollow inside. And right now, Qrow doesn’t have that. Right now, if Qrow uses this to push him forward, it’s not recovery, it’s not avoiding a relapse; it’s falling into a new, much harder to spot, addiction.

Yes, shitty things happen regardless of whether or not you’ve recovered from previous shitty things. Yes, life isn’t fair and sometimes it feels like you just get hit down over and over. And yes, people die in war and it’s ruthless and unfair. But RWBY is still a show. It’s still a show about hope. It’s still fiction, an escape from the cruelty of reality. And to me there were multiple other options for the plot to create conflict and sacrifice without doing it in a way that seems so needlessly cruel.

This is complicated and layered and I think there have been mistakes made on multiple sides, and in the end, we still don’t know what CRWBY has planned and how things will go from here and why they chose this. Because everything has a meaning in RWBY. At least I want to believe that. But right now it’s very hard to think that all the meaning that was what made this my favorite volume, was anything more than a trap to make the end that much more painful. And that hurts. I want to believe that’s not the case. But it’s very, very hard. And like I said before, even if they pull it off amazingly and everything makes sense after next week, damage has still been done. No matter what happens, there were ways things could have been handled either throughout the volume or in this episode that, while still having emotional significance and sacrifice, could have been less traumatizing to a large portion of the fandom who supports CRWBY specifically because they trust them not to do something like that to them.

In the end I’m hurt because right now it feels like the entirety of this volume was just a build up for the shock value of tearing Qrow down again. And I’m just tired of it. I’m biased I know, and maybe for some people it’s an important narrative. But to me it just feels like angst just for the sake of being cruel to a character who can’t catch a break. Since Emma’s death I understandably haven’t been a big fan of really angsty fanfiction. At first seeing fics where a character lost their partner made me irrationally angry. Because why can’t good things happen in fictional worlds? Why do characters I care about have to suffer like I do just for the sake of being angsty? Why would someone do that to a character they love? Why inflict that absolute agony onto a character when you could just, let them be happy? Yes conflict and sacrifice are crucial to good storytelling, but you still have to leave a character some hope, or else what’s the point of just watching them linger in misery? This kind of pain isn’t just a plot point that gets addressed for one or two episodes and then is fully dealt with. It’s a part of who you are now and will be for the rest of your life.

I’ve been sad over shows before. I’ve thought plot lines were bad and like I’d lost a character that deserved better. But I’ve never had something take me from a (relatively) stable mindset to a truly frightening spiral like I’ve been in this week. If this had happened when I was younger (granted if it had happened before Emma’s death it wouldn’t have had the same meaning), if it had been during that first year? It really might have been a breaking point for me. The final straw. The only reason I’m able to know that as truly devastating as this has been for me this week, I’m not in actual danger of getting to a critically low space, is because I’ve learned how to deal with those low places these past four years. I’m still in a dangerous headspace but I know how to handle it. I know to reach out, to vent, to ask friends to keep an eye on me, to keep an eye out for critical signs that I’m getting worse and I need more professional help. But if I’d had this trauma as a teen and saw this, or if I’d seen it before I’d built up this method of keeping myself safe even when in the worst headspaces? I don’t know that I would have been able to deal with it.

There’s a loud part of my head that is berating me for letting this affect me so much. For letting a show and fictional characters be the catalyst for me having to actively ask my friends to keep sharp instruments away from me for the first time in years. I’ll have a moment of clarity of “It’s not that bad, you’ll get past it” before being swallowed back up by the hopelessness. I have moments of “How could you let a fictional character’s death put you in this place, but not Emma? How is he more important?”

But it’s not about RWBY or Clover or Qrow. It’s about my brain, and how I as a neurodivergent person deal with things. It’s about this how thing that I use to filter parts of my life through so that I can handle them in more reasonable chunks, is now a trigger itself. I currently don’t have any other hyperfixations, which means every time I have a moment of silence, or start to get feeling down again, my brain goes to RWBY, because usually that’s how I pull myself out. But that just reminds me of the loss RWBY currently represents. Not just the trauma this has brought up, but the fact that I’ve lost this source of comfort. And then I’m left scrambling for anything as I spiral further and further. I’m at the point where unless I am having constant outside stimulus to keep my brain occupied I go right back into a nosedive. And there’s nothing I can do on my own to stop it. So I just have to ride it out, fight back dozens of overwhelming intrusive thoughts, and try to think that I won’t always be this miserable, even though the current thing that was helping me believe that has just shown me the opposite is true.

And no, creators can’t be held responsible for the mental states of fans of their work. But when things are done that directly hurt so many people, that even if not intended to, feel so calculated and malicious, they have to acknowledge the part they played in that trauma.

The point of whether there was queer baiting/byg, and mlm representation and how its handled, is very important, but it is also something I just can’t even begin to look at right now from an analytical viewpoint. I can’t begin to come at this from an activist place right now. And I know there are plenty of other people who can speak on it better than I could currently. My queer identity is largely wrapped up in my grief and how it affects me, but that also means that when I’m spiraling, it is very hard to focus and make good points about things that are not issues I’ve directly experienced. The only reason I can write this at all is because these are really just emotions I’ve dealt with for years that were dragged back up.

RWBY has always been about finding hope when it feels impossible. But this feels like it’s becoming “keep finding new hope but know you’ll lose it too and have to start over”.

RWBY has been what gave me hope that even when bad thing after bad thing happened, there was a reason to keep going, that eventually something good would come your way and you don’t have to live in fear of losing it. That you can still be broken and be worthy of good things. But this episode ripped that all away and told me that sometimes a person is never meant to be happy no matter how hard they try.

A big reason I have clung to RWBY so much, and admired CRWBY so much, and in turn been so forgiving of plotlines or details that I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of, was because I see myself in them. They lost Monty so suddenly and tragically and I understand that as much as anyone who isn’t them can. I understand the drive of keeping the show going. When I’m working on my own writing and art about my story and my loss, they are a huge inspiration to me to keep going even when it feels impossible. I can barely listen to Indomitable because, much like Jaune losing Pyrrha, it is uncanny how close to home it hits. They have been through more than we as fans can or should ever expect to know. Because even as someone very open about their grief, who wants to get rid of the stigma of expressing grief, I know that everyone deserves to keep as much of their grief and pain private as they need. And I can't even begin to imagine how hard it is to work on a show that is literally a feat of love and honor to a person you’ve lost, and then have people attack it and you, and make huge accusations, even try to use your loved one’s memory against you. It’s my biggest fear in creating something so incredibly personal but so important.

And I know that everyone handles grief differently, and no matter how many people you have to support you it can be an extremely isolating thing. I know that no one has the right to tell someone else they are grieving wrong, and I would never dare do that to them. Because I know that the ways I grieve and the things that piss me off about grief and people’s reactions to it, will not line up with everyone else’s, and that’s okay. So the exact things that hurt me so much may be the things that CRWBY find cathartic.

But I still think it’s important to talk about something that hurts you. To help people understand a facet of grief that might not be what they’ve experienced. Because even people who want to help, who want to provide representation to those hurting, can never please everyone, and even can even hurt people. I want to trust CRWBY. I want to believe they care about the queer community (even if they don’t always succeed in providing good representation), I want to believe they wouldn’t purposefully try to hurt queer fans with queerbaiting or byg. I want to believe they don’t actually hate mlm.

Narrative is complicated and sometimes things are done that will unknowingly cause harm, or that were topics that the writers didn’t understand enough to properly execute. Things that may seem so obvious to the people who were hurt could truly be things that hadn’t occurred to the writers. And that’s not to excuse those writers from acknowledging their mistake, but to give them a chance to learn and improve. I think a great example is The Adventure Zone (slight spoilers ahead), and how Griffin McElroy handled the fans’ reaction after Sloane and Hurley died in Petals to the Metal. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone but he made a decision that was very upsetting for many people and that wasn’t okay. But he listened and apologized and from there on not only tried to provide better representation, but asked about how he could do so, consulted the people he was trying to represent in order to do everything he could to not cause that kind of pain again. Creators are human and deserve second chances, as long as they show they are actively trying to improve.

Things will be learning experiences, but the people who are hurt in those learning experiences, and who are often the ones hurt in such things over and over, are still allowed to be hurt and upset. Intent is not effect. And for creators who want to be inclusive and supportive, it is their responsibility to accept criticism and work to avoid making the same mistakes. Like I said at the start of this, criticism is not harassment and harassment helps no one. Be as angry as you are, be as open as you need, but cruelty to people who are honestly trying to do good but will still make human mistakes just creates more pain and conflict. You don’t have to like it or forgive it but you can’t invalidate the people who are hurt, who do.

I love RWBY. I want to love CRWBY. I want to keep watching. I want to keep supporting and trusting them. And maybe I’m letting a show have too much influence over me. Maybe it’s unhealthy to project so much on a character. Maybe things will prove to be necessary to tell the story they want to tell. But speaking as a neurodivergent, traumatized, grieving, queer person, I still feel betrayed and hurt by something that I trusted enough to be vulnerable about and I don’t want to sugarcoat or hide that.

I can’t say I hate CRWBY or I’ve lost all hope in or respect for them, because I’ve related to them so much and know how complicated things like this can be. And because I don’t think I personally can write someone off while still in such an emotionally raw space. I’ll have to take some time to see if I’m able to watch the finale this weekend, but I will most likely watch it, if not just a bit later than I usually would. And RWBY has thrown big surprises at us before, and I can’t know what will happen in the finale and how it will feed into or try to heal some of the pain we’re feeling. But regardless of what the narrative intent is in Clover’s death, it needs to be acknowledged that episode 12 alone, ending on such an intense scene that wouldn’t be resolved for at least a week, hurt people. And CRWBY needs to acknowledge and take responsibility for it. I can’t say that I’m the most up to date on social media and what each person involved with volume 7 has said in the past few months. But I know that numerous official twitter accounts posted things that led people to put more credibility in Fairgame, myself included. And that even after seeing how big the ship had gotten, and knowing what the outcome was, some of CRWBY continued to seemingly feed into the excitement, even teasing about how hard episode 12 would hit us.

That’s honestly one of the reasons I think this feels not just like bad writing or something, but betrayal. Of course RT can’t control everything everyone involved with RWBY posts, but for a company that has tried to seem so supportive of lgbt and mentally ill fans, they should have, at the very least, not have fed the flame and given people hope and supposed credibility that they knew would crumble after this episode. It feels like, even if they hadn’t intended this entire plot point to come across the way it has, they saw us going down this path and egged us on for added shock factor.

And even if somehow the finale fixes everything, it doesn’t undo that hurt. It makes me think of the trailers for Insatiable when it first came out. How toxic and fat shaming they seemed and how people reacted poorly to it, but then all the people involved responded with how positive the show was, and that people shouldn’t judge it before they saw it. Or those “joke” videos or posts of kids coming out and the parents getting angry but then it’s about some stupid other thing. It’s meant to trigger a very sensitive issue, that people who have gone through traumas related to those issues are all too familiar with seeing over and over. So why would they have faith that this wasn’t just another one of those times when everything they see points to the opposite? Why trigger people who have already been hurt, for the sake of shock factor? It’s poor and callous writing.

And that’s what this feels like. It feels like we were exploited in order to make this hurt more. And maybe that was a very unfortunate accident. But CRWBY still needs to acknowledge that they made mistakes, and do what they can to prove to the fans that they still deserve our trust. And that’s not going to be an easy one and done thing. For some it may never be enough, and that is completely valid.

Of course everyone has different histories and issues that can lead them to be drawn to a certain show or character. And creators can’t ever know for sure that they won’t bring up painful things for any of their fans, and often trying to do so can make the content and message suffer. But even though everyone might not have a story that is as “obviously” traumatic as mine, might not have things they so directly relate to in Qrow and in Clover’s death, they’re all still valid in the pain they’re feeling. One of my least favorite things about living with grief is people thinking that their traumas and struggles aren’t as big or important as my own.

This week I’ve told people how hard a time I’m having, and why. And the people who know my backstory understood. The people who didn’t know though, brushed it off as crazy fangirl, tumblr discourse drivel. Even to my face after I told them how much I was hurting, they would groan about people getting so obsessed with fictional characters. You shouldn’t have to know why something negatively affects someone the way it does in order to respect the fact that it does. And I’m not more valid in my pain than people with “smaller” reasons. The fact is that a lot of people are hurting. A lot of queer and mentally ill people are reliving trauma. And like me, many of these people trusted CRWBY to be supportive, to be a comfort in a world where it’s hard to find sometimes. And that makes it hurt all the more.

I wasn’t in the fandom when Monty died, so I don’t know a lot about how CRWBY handled it, what they said publicly, what inevitable fandom discourse there was about how to navigate things. The only reason I bring him up at all, (because I’ve seen people mention him in discourse posts before and it’s usually hurtful and out of line and I truly hate it) is because he, and how CRWBY continues to honor him by keeping his creation going, is a huge part of why I feel so attached to it. My creative focus is on talking about Emma, about honoring her, telling her story, about sharing my grief with people. And while it’s extremely important to me, it’s also terrifying to think about people one day saying I let her down, or that because I made certain decisions I ruined the work or anything like that. And whether or not I am currently happy with every member of CRWBY doesn’t affect the fact that I will always keep in mind that RWBY is something directly tied to someone they’ve lost and it can be extremely difficult to have that kind of work criticized and not get defensive or angry (that’s not to say we can’t criticize things that are made in honor of someone, but that we need to remember there are still people dealing with grief on the other end of what we say). They’ll react poorly to certain things, they’ll say the wrong things, they’ll but heads with opinionated fans. And that’s not to excuse them for that, or to say we shouldn’t hold them accountable and communicate our problems with them and expect them to learn from past mistakes. But they aren’t faceless monsters in some big corporation who just make this for the money. They have real emotional investment in their work and I honestly believe they are well intentioned and want to support lgbt and mentally ill fans. But good intentions don’t ensure there won’t be negative impact, and if they truly want to keep, or regain fans’ trust and support they need to show they understand that.

It may be naive and there may be things I don’t know that might have changed my view but until now, even with some writing choices I didn’t love, I've really liked CRWBY and trusted them. I personally can’t say I hate them and write them off right now. I understand if you can, if this was the last straw or just proving your view, and that’s all valid. But I want to, as much as possible, believe that they’re well intentioned. RWBY is far from perfect. CRWBY is far from perfect. But that’s ok. As long as there’s effort to improve and acknowledge mistakes and try to make amends

It’s possible that things I’ve said here may anger some people, and unfortunately, as much as I tried to avoid it, may hurt CRWBY. Because as hurt and angry with them as I might be right now, I don’t want to hate them or hurt them. I’m human as well, and I’m very passionate about this and have a very personal attachment to it. So I acknowledge that it is totally possible that I have said something here that I could have handled better. If so, please, let me know. Constructively. If you need to, privately. Don’t attack me for it. I know when a conversation is toxic to me and I will not put myself in that position and will block people. But I want to be open to criticism, just as I want CRWBY to be. I want to know what I did wrong and how I can work to do better in the future. There are also certain things that I firmly believe that I know not everyone will like. And that’s okay. I have my own ways of dealing with grief and pain that will inevitably conflict with others. In those cases, while I won’t apologize for being honest about how I feel, I will understand and listen to how I may have hurt you. Different opinions and ways of coping will always be a part of grief conversations and it is less about making others agree with you and more about giving people a place to express their pain.

This is ridiculously, stupidly, long and honestly I’m not sure there’s a clear point and if you read through it all the way, you’re a saint. But I just needed to get this out, and I hope that maybe, somehow, through the ranting, it might help someone feel less alone in their pain, or feel validated. I started writing this on Sunday and wanted to post it before the finale. It’s now Friday and who knows if there’s really any point to posting it now, but still.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know how I will handle it. I’ve seen discourse that made me anxious all over again all week. I’ve seen jokes or edits or trolls that made me sick. But there are people out here for you. There are people to talk to who will just listen. You aren’t alone. And while I can’t promise you that everything will be okay, I can promise you that there will be people here to help you get through it. There are ways to get through it. They’re not always fun or ideal, but they’re there. And eventually you’ll be able to feel okay again. The pain might not be gone for good, but you’ll have good moments again. You’ll learn how to create good moments. I still want to believe that “broken” people can be happy again, even though the world may try to show me otherwise over and over. It’s not easy, and sometimes I honestly just don’t see how it can possibly be true. But I keep trying to get back to those good places and appreciate them, for as long as I can.

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setmeatopthepyre · 5 years ago

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Mental Health Tips

So, I was looking through my mood tracker recently and realized there’s been a gradual but undeniable increase of good days and a decrease of bad days, and it hit me that yeah, I have been doing better and better. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that getting my ADHD diagnosis in January was a life changer. There’s a (great) book on ADD called You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy? and that was exactly how I felt. Wait, all the things I’ve been struggling with, all the times I beat myself up over my lack of discipline or worried that I had a brain tumor because I’d forget things in seconds or thought I might be bipolar because I could go from the highest highs to extreme lows multiple times a day, that was all because of one thing? Amazing!

Anyway, realization is one thing. Then there was medication (also a life changer), and therapy, and look where we are now! Over the past year I’ve learned a few things that have had a huge positive impact on my mental health, and I thought they might be useful for others struggling with their mental health, whether it’s ADHD or something else.

You’re not the only one

Just to start off nice and cheesy, but it’s true. The reason it might feel like you’re the only one dealing with what you’re dealing with and struggling to do what seems so easy to others, is because mental health is still stigmatized and not something people generally talk about. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know it.

When I got my diagnosis, I talked about it a lot. Part of it was hyperfocus; it was something that was on my mind a lot so it became my one subject to fall back on. However, another part of it was knowing that if I’d known what ADHD really was earlier, my life would have been so much better so much sooner. At times I was sure I brought it up too much, but I’m glad I did. Being open about my mental health issues made people around me open up about theirs. Whether it’s people you know IRL or a tumblr page with mental health memes, that affirmation that other people have the same quirks and struggles as you do helps so much.

The bare minimum is better than nothing

Yes, it’s obvious. It’s still something I struggle with because there’s that little voice that goes ‘yes, but I should be able to do more’. Guess what? That there thought qualifies as not one, but two negative thinking patterns: should-statements and all-or-nothing thinking. Just because you think you should be able to do something doesn’t mean that’s the best choice for you, or realistic. Besides, who says you should? Society? Society knows nothing.

Thinking you should just be able to do all your dishes but getting overwhelmed at the prospect of doing so isn’t helpful. Washing a single dish, or even just rinsing one because that’s all you can manage? That’s still better than nothing.

That said, yes, strive for progress over perfection, but remember that progress is not the bare minimum. Sometimes, the bare minimum is maintaining the status quo, or even just making sure things get slightly less worse than they could have. And that is okay.

Remove steps & automate

Speaking of which: often it’s possible to make the absolute minimum easier. How? By removing obstacles, simplifying things so that they don’t take as many steps or spoons to complete. If your laundry basket is in the bathroom while you tend to undress in your bedroom, that’s where you move your laundry basket. Personally, even having a laundry basket with a lid on it is too many steps for me most of the time. If I can��t chuck my dirty clothes right in, they end up in a pile on the floor. Solution: my laundry basket is within throwing range and doesn’t have a lid.

It only has to work for you

Sure, society dictates that clean clothes go in a wardrobe or a dresser. That’s just the way it’s done. But guess what? When clean clothes start piling up all over my room because I can’t bring up the energy or focus or whatever to put them away, I break out boxes. One box for clean laundry. One box for clothing I’ve worn but isn’t dirty yet. And then the laundry basket goes right beside those boxes in my room, in plain sight. That’s my system until I feel better. If I’m feeling up for it, there’s an extra box so that I can divide my clean clothes up between ‘large’ (aka pants and shirts) and ‘small’ (underwear and socks) to make it easier on myself when I get dressed. Did my laundry? Clean clothes go in the clean clothes box. Wore something but it still smells okay and there’s no stains? Toss them at the ‘worn’ box.

Is it how “things are done” normally? No. Does it mean my clothes are even more crumpled than usual? Yes. However, it also means that there’s less clutter in my room, it’s easier to find something to wear, and there’s less risk of me just living in a pile of trash because my room’s a mess anyway.

Your idea of progress may be different from others. Your coping mechanisms might not work for other people. Your adaptive behaviours may not line up with societal expectations, and that’s fine! In fact, that’s more than fine, because they shouldn’t. They only have to work for you.

Remove forks

So the whole spoon theory is fairly well known in mental health circles, but reading about the Fork Theory was an eye-opener for me. It’s explained here, but because reading that article is another extra step (ooh, so meta), here’s the most important bit:

You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”

It’s close to the whole ‘removing steps’ thing, but less about making a task easier and more about giving you space to deal with things.

What this means for me is that when I’m having a less than stellar day mentally, I pay extra attention to what clothes I put on in the morning. Nothing too tight, nothing even slightly scratchy. It may be a tiny fork in the morning, but if I’m in a socially difficult situation, it might be a tiny fork too many that will lead to me being overwhelmed or overstimulated. I need to make sure I’m as comfortable as absolutely possible, aka remove as many forks as I can. Sometimes this means shaving my legs even though I think it’s bullshit that I care about that, or wearing clothes that draw as little attention to me as possible. No, I don’t want to care about what others think, but the truth is that part of me does, and I can’t change that right that instant. What I can do is minimize the chance that I get overwhelmed on an already stressful day.

Forks don’t have to be annoyances. They can also be tasks you keep putting off or something you keep reminding yourself of. Sometimes having a self-care day for me means doing all the easy things I’ve been meaning to do for ages but haven’t gotten around to. Sometimes it’s writing down all the things that are buzzing around in my brain, just so that I can assure myself I don’t have to remember them anymore because they’re on paper now. Sometimes it’s turning off notifications for specific apps because seeing them pop up makes me feel guilty when I’m not in the right frame of mind to respond.

Sometimes removing a fork costs spoons, like when I’m at a restaurant with a friend and I know that sitting in a spot where people walk by behind me is a pretty big fork for me, but removing it means asking them if they mind switching spots. That’s when it helps to be open about what you’re dealing with, because most of my close friends know by now that I always prefer to sit with my back to a wall, and I don’t even have to ask.

Compromise and automate

Back to the should-thinking. Sometimes removing forks means throwing all the shoulds out the window because they just aren’t working right now, and you’ll get back to them later. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think I should care about what other people think, but I’m not there yet, so sometimes making life easier for me means compromising on that and conforming to societal standards if I know I’m going to need everything I have to get through a day. Another example: I feel like I should buy whole vegetables and cut them myself and cook my own meals, because pre-cut and prepackaged things are often more expensive and just contribute to more plastic waste. Okay, cool, but that ideal version of me who has the time and energy to do that hasn’t shown up yet, and in the meantime I need to eat. Buying a pre-packaged meal with actual vegetables in it is still cheaper than ordering pizza because I can’t get myself to cook, and it’s still healthier than trying to fill up on crackers because I couldn’t deal with the social aspect of opening the door for the pizza delivery.

Sometimes, in order to remove steps, you have to compromise. Sometimes, in order to remove another worry (aka fork), you have to automate. When I first started on meds, I would write down the time I took them, calculate when I’d need to take my next dose, and set an alarm. It made me procrastinate taking my next dose, because it was too many steps. There was an app that did all that for me, but I thought it was ridiculous to pay for an app that did exactly what I should be able to do myself.

I bought the app. I tap one button and my phone sends me a notification when my next dose is due. I have my phone on silent/no vibrate all the time, because notifications are overwhelming to me, so I have an activity tracker watch that lets me reroute only specific notifications to my watch, and now my watch vibrates when I need to take my next dose. I know this isn’t an option for everyone because obviously those things cost money (and it just goes to show how life is so much easier for the rich because they can automate so much), but if there’s any way to turn something you have to do often into something that will do itself mostly on its own, it may be worth looking into. Yes, even when you think you should be able to do it yourself.

Are you sure the thing you’re worrying about is a problem?

This may seem super simple and obvious, but I legit had to change the ‘worry flowchart’ my therapist gave me to have an extra first step: ‘Do I have proof the problem exists?’ Spoiler: most of the time the answer is no.

I’m running late, I’m not sure if I’m going to make my bus to work. I’m stressing out about what will happen if I’m late. Maybe my superiors will get angry at me. Maybe this will be one too many times. But guess what? I don’t know if I’ll miss the bus. I might still make it. Until I know for certain that I’m going to be late, there’s no use worrying about what might happen. Even if I end up being late, I don’t have any proof that my superiors will be angry with me. I don’t know yet if the problem even exists, so why act like it does?

Another example: I can beat myself up over the fact that people think I’m lazy because I need to take a break. I feel terrible. I don’t want them to think I’m lazy! I can’t relax even though I desperately need to take a break. I told my therapist, and he asked me for proof. Do I have irrefutable proof that people think I’m lazy? Of course not, that’s an assumption I make. Am I a mind reader? No, I just tend to assume the worst. Okay, so why am I worrying about it if I’m not even sure the problem actually exists? Right.

This is not a moral failing and it does not affect your worth

Building on that: even if people think I’m lazy (and I don’t have proof that’s true!), that doesn’t mean their opinion is fact. Their perception of me is not a moral failing on my part. My therapist made me provide proof for and against the hypotheses that I was lazy, and there was way more proof against that statement. At the time, I was in school four days a week, working three, and had two other projects on the side. If, for example, my parents thought I was lazy for having no energy to do chores on my one free day in two months, (again, I had no proof they even thought that), they would’ve simply been wrong. They could’ve thought it all they wanted, but it did not mean I was lazy.

A lot of symptoms of mental health issues can be perceived by others as negative character traits, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to discuss sometimes. The thing is: their perceptions and opinions do not actually reflect on you or in any way determine your worth. Your brain going about things differently than theirs is as much your fault as needing glasses is (it isn’t).

And last but not least:

Emotion comes first (and goes last)

That sounds nice and cryptic, right? What I mean is that knowing your immediate reaction to something is unnecessary and that things aren’t as bad as they seem is different from feeling it. Your knee-jerk reaction is going to be emotion. Likewise, it’ll take a while before your emotions catch up with where your brain is going when you reroute your thoughts away from negative places.

The RSD, or Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, that comes with ADHD means that sometimes I have extreme negative emotional reactions to situations. When someone responds a little less enthusiastically than what I’m used to, for example, or when friends talk about something they did without me (even if I wouldn’t have wanted to do that particular thing and they know that), or even when someone didn’t hear what I said, it can cause this void to just open up in my chest and swallow every sense of happiness I may have been feeling. It happens suddenly and drags me straight down to my lowest point.

Lately, in those moments, I’ve been able to check in with myself and analyze what it was that triggered this meltdown. Thanks mostly to therapy I can rationalize that things aren’t so bad, and I can claw my way out of that pit, but that always comes one step after that first instinctual emotional reaction. Likewise, knowing things are fine does not mean the negative emotions disappear straight away. They take some time to dissipate, and I’m a little more emotionally vulnerable for a bit while they do. Emotion happens first, and leaves last.

It can be disheartening. It can feel like progress isn’t being made, but that very realization is progress, even if you’re not feeling it yet. Emotions follow the path they know best, and if for you, like me, that path is automatically assuming the worst, you’re gonna feel the emotions associated with that for a while, even when you rationally know it’s all crap. The thing is, practice makes perfect, and redirecting your thoughts into a more positive direction will, eventually, make that path the easiest one to find. Your feelings may take a little while to figure it out, but they’ll find that path eventually.

I’m not saying I’m cured. I’m not saying I know everything. I have bad days and struggles and all that, but I have been doing better.

I mentioned it briefly at the beginning of all of this, but I started tracking my mood in July. It’s just one general mood a day, which obviously doesn’t quite display the ups and downs I deal with, but I tried to log the average for the day. I started doing so because I sort of knew I was doing better and better but of course once you get used to something, it becomes the new normal and it’s hard to tell when progress happens, so I tracked it:

#this is the first thing I've written in one go in so long oops #ofc right after that I had a bit of a mental health setback for a few days bUT #that's part of the process amirite #mental health #mental health advice #adhd #actual adhd #actually adhd #depression #mental health support

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avahuang · 7 years ago

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Shock Velocity

I. ANESTHETIC IDEOLOGY

Because in certain pockets of the world we’ve become divorced from the idea that achievement is heavily impacted by factors outside our control, the modern secular analogy to religion is the industry that’s been created from Maslow’s idea of self-actualization as a supreme expression of human life. The anesthetization of inner turmoil has been married to outward success–not only will you feel better, but your performance will also be optimized. You have the power to live a rational life in service of others.

Much of it seems like a rehashing of the 60s’ human potential movement as a counter-cultural rebellion against mainstream psychology and organized religion. It’s not so much a religion as much as it is a psychological philosophy and framework that focuses on a particular set of values, but it’s meant to be followed obsessively and provide meaning in the same vein.

Some basic tenets: you should take responsibility for everything that happens to you. Deal with whatever crisis comes up and move on from it as cleanly as possible. You aren’t like those postmodern softies who need to obsessively control their outer environment and suppress free speech. Everything is based on merit. You square fully with the harshness of the world and you are going to triumph by making a lot of money (while working on something appropriately meaningful that addresses the human condition).

There are remarkable similarities between the principles currently in vogue and things taught by human potential-focused movements like est, Landmark Forum, neuro-linguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, Impact Training, Lifespring, Complete Centering, Scientology, etc. A lot of the parallels revolve around personal responsibility as freedom:

Jordan Peterson: “Every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it.”

Landmark: there’s a concept in the Landmark Forum called getting complete. To get complete means that you need to address what is “incomplete” with the other person, which is a fancy way of saying getting emotional closure. To complete, you take responsibility for what is incomplete and relinquish reside emotions, resentment, etc. and extending forgiveness the other person. If you do that, you are completely being responsible for your own life.

Scientology: to become clear is one of the major states practitioners strive to reach on their way up the Bridge to Total Freedom. The state of Clear is reached when a person becomes free of unwanted emotions or painful traumas not readily available to the conscious mind. By applying Dianetics, every single person can reach the state of Clear.

Stoicism: “When you are offended at any man’s fault, immediately turn to yourself and reflect in what matter you yourself have erred.”

Since we can no longer trust in a higher power to guide our lives and imbue it with meaning, we’ve turned to believing that the only way to control the external world is through mastery of the internal world. There’s a lashing out against the postmodernist renunciation of structure and meaning, a rampant nostalgia for the idea of meritocracy, excellence, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The anecdote to emotional pain is inner calm and material success. It’s discipline, it’s not worrying about the things you have no control over, it’s letting go of the things that move you if they’re destructive to your life.

Believing that you are in control of all of your reactions and that controlling your reactions can radically affect the outer world is a good psychological trick on several levels: 1. It removes anguish over the “other” because everything is about you and your actions 2. It legitimately can catalyze action in people who might otherwise be paralyzed by a lack of meaning 3. It puts a focus on performance and hierarchy as a way to easily gauge success.

People are looking for an alternative to the confusion of being alive and not knowing why and what to do about it. Successfully selling a life philosophy gives you just about more influence and capital than anything else. But successful adoption of a life philosophy has little bearing on whether it’s true or not. From Simone de Beauvoir:

The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with “rights,” he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the stress of existence. . . . [The serious man] chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself.

We’re trying to be serious men. So much remains thematically the same between different belief systems: the hope of eternal life, a belief in (AGI-assisted) miracles, a sense of purpose and value. The problem is often not in the particularities what we believe, but how blindly we believe it: when we start thinking about a framework not as guidance for how to look for answers but rather what to answer, it devolves to ideology. Even ideologies that claim to promote curiosity and an environment for learning can end up enabling what James Carse calls “willful ignorance”: an intentional avoidance of knowledge and ways of thinking that contradict your religion. Believers like authority. Even people on the margins of modern political thought are drawn to ideological purity.

The problem with every ideology is that it’s ultimately reductionist: it reduces the world to one thing, and then explains the world in terms of just that one thing. It’s extremely useful because the world becomes simplified and you have something to tie yourself to emotionally, in this case internal and external performance. From the inside, a closed and consistent framework of truth looks more or less like joy.

II. HYPEROBJECTS

In Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, he introduces the concept of objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity. The examples he gives are as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. I think the concept can also apply to technology that is disruptive on such a large scale as to fundamentally alter our experience of living.

Growing up, my political beliefs were more or less shaped by neoliberalism and third wave feminism. In recent years those frameworks seemed in many ways inadequate to diagnose and deal with what is happening around us: human beings have more or less become neurolivestock for corporations like Google, Facebook, etc--your personal information is taken from you, and you are rewarded with short-term conveniences like targeted ads but your long-term prospects are gradually reduced because you have less privacy, less freedom. We live in an operating system set up by “the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” distracted by “libidinal- and reality-engineering, advertising, branding, media, the happiness industry.”

In the 1970 Albert Toffler wrote Future Shock. He defines the term as the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change. According to Charles Stross, his “working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Tofflers underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.”

I’ve been thinking lately about accelerationism, which is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and in its modern incarnation came from texts that Nick Land began producing in the 1980s when he was involved with Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The CCRU argued that the institutions like government, academia and the established sciences more or less slow progress down, and to break out we need to encourage “an accelerated culture” where new ideas could flourish. In a lot of ways, the accelerationism of that period (before Land had an amphetamine-induced breakdown and started spouting alt-right ideas) connects with a belief in Silicon Valley that markets need to be fast-moving and tech must be disruptive. Accelerationism “goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.” I don’t necessarily espouse accelerationism as desirable, but it seems in many ways a prescient diagnosis of where we’re heading.

We are moving towards a post-industrial society: even skilled workers will lose value with the advent of robots that are sophisticated enough to provide medical procedures, sophisticated enough to program. There are technologies that are coming that will drastically alter what it means to be human: gene editing, brain computer interfaces, AGI. I don’t think anyone disputes that, but we’re all collectively unprepared to deal with it politically and philosophically. We are moving towards a world dominated by high-tech capitalism, post-liberal humanism. For better or worse, it is moving towards us.

We need cliches to help us to adjust to a world transformed by future shock. I think individualism--being tough, being rational, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps--seems to people like a way to regain control over the present moment, which is defined by radical change and a loss of control over information. But to me it kind of feels like saying that being a good surfer is going to help you in a tsunami. A sense of agency might be pleasant in an individual life, but we live among networks that require a large number of people who participate in them to generate value but have the effect of centralizing wealth and power. We live on a dying planet, in a society that’s been transformed--and will be transformed--by hyperobjects that are difficult to predict and difficult to control.

Being on the cusp of a seminal moment is exciting in a lot of ways. Questions that seem interesting to me:

1. How do you expect a society to orient itself politically and philosophically when there is not anymore a stable baseline for what to expect in our lifetimes economically, technologically and otherwise?

2. It’s good and comforting to believe that we function autonomously and take responsibility for ourselves, but how do we reconcile that with knowing (I’m cribbing Foucault) that the individual is the product of power and that language, in the form that we interface with it in the media, is not made to believe but to be obeyed? I.e. as Chomsky says, “mass media amuses, entertains, and informs, and inculcates individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” Is it possible to avoid conflating the comfort of feeling like rational actors with actually pursuing independent thought? Which leads naturally into

3. Is there any way to bridge that gap between what we know to be true and our relative inability to generalize it? As Jared Leoner describes, the hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden age. Sharing is good. However, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.” What are the most effective ways to go from “I believe something to be true (i.e. privacy matters) and will live my life in accordance with it” to “I will also convince other people that this belief is true?” If you believe, which I somewhat do, that people are motivated mostly what what they find emotionally appealing and choose values using that as the primary criterion, the answer might very literally be to design and sell an ideology whose tenets consist of the things that you believe to be true. Which is, of course, a separate thing from successfully convincing people that they should care about what is actually true, separate from ideology.

III.

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent–be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

- Ernest Junger, Forest Passage

#writing

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archerwindsor · 4 years ago

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How to Reduce Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

reduce symptoms of hypothyroidism

You probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your glands. I mean, why would you?? But I’ll tell you what, even your body’s tiny glands can have a big impact on the way you feel day in and day out.

I know that first hand. I’m years into my hypothyroidism diagnosis, and I finally feel like I have a handle on my symptoms.

Quick refresher: hypothyroidism is a condition you get when your thyroid gland — the little butterfly-shaped gland in your neck — doesn’t make enough of its hormones. Since it’s such a small gland, that might not seem like a big deal. But my hypothyroidism symptoms absolutely shaped my life until I got them under control!

Whether you know you have hypo or you’ve been feeling off and you’re trying to figure out what’s up in your body, this blog is for you.

Common hypothyroidism symptoms

Hypo affects different people differently. (The big bummer? It affects more women than men.)

On top of that, hypo symptoms can ebb and flow or totally change over time. That said, there are a bunch of hypothyroidism symptoms I want to list here so you can get a better idea of if this condition might be affecting you. Some of the top signs of hypo are:

Brain fog/trouble remember things

Fatigue

Mood swings

Weight gain and a puffy face

Dry skin

Constipation

Weak muscles

Thinning hair

Achiness and stiffness in your muscles and joints

Constipation

Being more sensitive to cold

Depression

Like, what the heck? It’s not enough that hypo can make you exhausted or irritable, it also has to make it harder to lose weight?? It’s a bum deal, I’m telling you.

If a bunch of those symptoms sound like you, I can NOT encourage you enough to go see your doctor. Figuring out the right medication to balance out your thyroid hormone levels takes time, but the sooner you start, the sooner you get to feel like yourself again.

And you don’t have to wait until your first doctor’s appointment to start doing things to help reduce symptoms of hypothyroidism! Here are a few things that made a big difference for me:

Foods for Hypothyroidism Symptoms

The cleaner and healthier my diet is, the better I feel. It doesn’t have to be crazy complicated just because you have hypo. Really, you should try to get lots of fruits and veggies, high-quality protein, and whole grains. Avoid packaged foods, especially ones with trans fats, lots of sugar, or a bunch of sodium.

Beyond that, those of us with hypo may benefit from getting more of certain nutrients, like iodine and zinc. I have a bunch of other resources you can use to dial in your diet and help reduce symptoms of hypothyroidism:

My 4-week hypo meal plan

What I eat in a day with hypo (video)

What to eat with hypo (blog)

The best nutrition for hypo (blog)

youtube

Get in a routine — and stick with it

When it comes to managing your hypothyroidism symptoms, it’s definitely a trial-and-error situation. That’s why I’m SO reliant on my routine. When you’re in the groove and you’re staying consistent, it’s easy to know what caused you to feel differently.

Like, if I’m sticking to cooking at home but I eat out one night with friends and I feel my hypothyroidism symptoms flare up after that, I can pretty easily trace it back to what I ate/drank at that dinner.

Try to get in a routine with what you’re eating, how much you’re exercising, when you’re sleeping and waking up, and your self-care. That way, you can get a better feel for what affects you positively and negatively. And then you can keep tweaking to feel better and better!

Don’t forget the little things

Here’s the thing with hypo. Doing all the things you should do to feel your best can def feel like a lot of work. And when I’m feeling good, it’s easy to be like, “Is it even worth it??”

But then I slack off with my supplements, or maybe even my medication, and soon I’m not feeling so good anymore. Now I’m back to managing my hypothyroidism symptoms.

If little things help you feel better, stick with them!!! Even when you feel awesome — because they’re probably a big part of why you’re feeling good.

For me, a huge part of feeling my best is sticking with my supplements and vitamins. It’s such a little thing that it can feel easy to let it slide. But if I miss my doses for a bunch of days in a row, I start to feel worse and worse. And then I’m playing catch-up.

Really, it makes so much more sense to stick with it so you can just keep feeling better and better! It might be helpful to make a list of all the stuff that helps you keep your hypothyroidism symptoms under control. Then, keep that list somewhere you’ll see it regularly. That way, if a little thing starts to slip through the cracks, you’ll get reminded to work it back into your routine.

Managing hypothyroidism symptoms is an ongoing project. But I’m right there with you! Together, if we keep our diets clean, stick with our routines, and continue doing the little things that help us, we can all feel our best! Let’s stick it to those stupid thryoid glands, girls!!

The post How to Reduce Symptoms of Hypothyroidism appeared first on Love Sweat Fitness.

How to Reduce Symptoms of Hypothyroidism published first on https://olimpsportnutritionuk.tumblr.com/

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lilswriting · 6 years ago

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Mental Health Awareness Month

So, I've really wanted to start a blog for a while now. I really love writing, and I wanted other people to be able to read it. But, at the same time, I was really afraid for other people to read it. What if no one even read it? Or what if no one liked it? I felt like it's really mainstream to make a blog now and I didn't want people to think that's why I started it. Which brought me to another problem: what could I write about? What's something different? I don't want to write all about life advice or struggles that I've faced. I want to write about things that matter to me; things that I'm passionate about, things that I think should be said (or heard). So, for the most part, this blog might be slightly subjective, or not necessarily factual. Then again, I'm still unsure of all the subjects I want to write about, so that may change.

So here's how I resolved this problem. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and being that mental health is an issue that many people (myself included) struggle with, I thought this would be a great time to start a blog. Just please keep in mind that, while these are topics that I have at least researched some, a lot of this information is based off of my personal experience or observations. This can also sensitive topic, so I'll try my best to avoid things that may trigger people. If I ever write anything that upsets you, or if there's anything I didn't include that you want to talk about, feel free to message me.

So, I guess we'll start with listing the knowns: I have depression and anxiety. I won't get too in detail on my diagnosis. Usually, during the school year, anxiety takes the reins and my depression is out of the picture for a while. Once summer hits, though, the anxiety subsides, but I begin to feel like a slave to depression. It's probably because I don't see my friends every day and my routine is destroyed, leaving me with nothing to do but think. These past few months have been enough to push me to get help.

That itself is pretty impressive, considering that I've struggled with my mental health since sixth grade but have never received any kind of help. I never received help because, well, I never branched myself out to get it. For whatever reason, I felt that any sort of treatment (whether it be therapy, getting medicine, or simply talking to others about it) was just an indication of weakness. Along with that, I felt like looking for ways to cope was only further confirmation that something was wrong with me. I didn't want to talk to people about it because I didn't want them to worry, and I especially didn't want them to treat me with extra fragility. I didn't want my friends to always feel as though they needed to be cautious around me. My way of thinking was simple: since nearly every obstacle I face is created by myself, I should be able to cope with them myself. I'll just tell it to you straight-- I was wrong.

Even though most of my problems sprout from my depression and anxiety, I don't understand them. I don't understand why some days I feel like I barely have enough energy to eat, let alone enough motivation to get out of bed. I don't understand why my mood changes so quickly and so often, and when I'm feeling particularly strong, negative emotions, I don't understand them, either. Depression doesn't always have a cause or a trigger. Sometimes it just comes upon you. Sometimes it just completely engulfs you so quickly that you don't even have time to figure out where it came from. It's hard to understand because mental disorders aren't always just that; sometimes they impact you physically, too. When I finally realized that these weren't things that I could continue to battle myself, I decided to try therapy.

To backtrack a bit, it really, really helps to talk to your loved ones about this kind of thing. It helps them understand better why you are the way that you are. They can also be there to recognize when you seem to be struggling, and they can offer help to you. Mental health is something that no one should ever have to stay quiet about, nor is it something that anyone should ever have to deal with alone. If you have a support group of patient, understanding loved ones (like I do), it makes coping so much easier. (As a side note: if you feel like you don't have anyone who understands/tries to understand or who is willing to be there for you, please feel free to come to me.)

If you have depression (or any other type of mental disorder), I honestly salute you. It's kind of ironic, because due to my depression, I could barely motivate myself to write this post (which is why it's being posted on the last day of May). I know that it can leave you feeling unbelievably terrible, but you are so, so strong. You may not have confidence in yourself and your ability to overcome this season of life, but I know that you can. I urge you to do everything you can to benefit yourself. Searching for help for yourself can make you feel ashamed of your mental disorder, but trust me, there is no reason for you to feel ashamed. This isn't your fault. That's something that I need to get better at; I need to learn how to be patient with myself and not blame myself for the way that I feel. It feels like you've lost control to your disorder, whatever it may be, and in some way, you have. In my case, I feel like I have absolutely no control over my emotions in response to the things that I face in life. Still, I manage to blame myself, or to tell myself that I'm being ridiculous. There is a healthy way to remind yourself that you are bigger than the situation, without making you feel worse about yourself. You should never feel like your situation isn't important enough to talk about. I really enjoy all of the movements and organizations that are trying to break the mental health stigma. Mental health is a serious problem that no one seems to take very seriously. For some reason, the topic of mental illness is taboo. It's something that needs to change, because those who already feel the need to be silent are only being silenced further. If anyone tries to shame you for your mental health, remember this: nothing is more important than your mental health and your safety. Please don't let people trivialize your problems. Your problems are valid, and they are important, just like your wellbeing.

This is a topic that I could probably talk about for days. I think that for now though, I’m going to leave it here. Below are the links to the movements and organizations that I mentioned earlier:

https://idontmind.com

http://silencetheshame.com

https://www.nami.org

https://www.breakthestigma.org

💚💚💚

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loopy777 · 4 years ago

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I have to agree with the fact that Sanderson is so much better when writing an overarching story. I very much regard stormlight archive as his best work ever. That said, some of the problems you mention about warbreaker is still present for way of kings. The storyline is essentially broken into 3 main characters. Kaladin, Dalinar, and Shallan. Dalinar's story is good, but not exactly amazing. It's very, very predictable, but it's executed well enough, at least up until the climax.

Shallan's storyline is far and away the worst of the 3. Like no contest. Like, there is a lot of promise in the idea, with the whole section being focused on a couple of scholars, rather than warriors and slaves carrying siege equipment. Brandon would revisit the concept of scholars in book 4, to much greater effect, but here it's not particularly interesting. The big problem is shallan.

Shallan In book one is not particularly interesting, and the narrative is way too afraid to let her witty comments stand on its own, instead feeling the need to have characters who comment on how clever her dialogue is. Which it generally isn't. Which is bizarre, because there is a lot of genuinely witty characters in the book, shallan just isn't one of them. To make matters worse, her book one climax is completely removed from the books actual climax.

Which is kinda problem, because the climax of Dalinar and Kaladin's storylines is the big, emotional climax of the book, which just makes shallan's storyline feel even less compelling and interesting by comparison than it actually is. Shallan thankfully is much, much better in book 2 and onwards, after some character development.

The heart and soul of stormlight archive though, and way of kings more than any other, is Kaladin Storm blessed and his crew. The tale of the surgeon turned soldier, turned slave is easily the best storyline of the entire book, and it is the overarching story of the series. Kaladin's tale basically the story of the underdog personified, which by its very nature makes his story very compelling.

Kaladin is basically a superhero, in that his most defining trait is his chronic need to protect people, whether it be random innocents, his men, or others. However, Sanderson makes his story incredibly compelling by taking advantage of this. How do you prect your men when your men's job is to essentially soak up arrows for the real troop? How do you protect your men when you have no resources? How do you take what little resources you have to achieve your goals?

Add this in with the fact that unlike Shallan, Kaladin is generally challenged(Especially in book 2, and to a lesser degree in book 1) on his beliefs. Kaladin a very flawed human being. He wants to save and help people. Above pretty much anything else, but he's also incredibly flawed, and people aren't afraid to challenge him on it. People question him, he makes the wrong assumptions, he makes TERRIBLE mistakes due to lack of understanding certain things.

And every single time Kaladin makes big mistakes, they have big, massive consequences that have an immediately negative impact. I don't wanna spoil it, but one of my favorite moments in book 1 is when Kaladin thinks he's finally found a solution, but he fails to take into account how it affects literarily everything outside of his own actions, and is very quickly punished for making this mistake.

However, like any good shonen protagonist, Kaladin keep rising up every time he's struck down, which makes for a very compelling storyline. Especially in book 1, where his exploration of his part of the planet's magic system is very limited. To put it bluntly, this book is where the technical aspects of the magic of stormlight works the absolute best, because Kaladin is very limited in what he can do, so he has to actually use the limited powers he has to his advantage.

All of this culminates in book 1's climax, which is really the best part of the book. It's where Dalinar's storyline reaches its climax, and it's well executed, but it's how it relates to the far more interesting Kaladin storyline that makes it glorious, as it's his storyline that reaches its climax, and fuck me is it amazing. It's where everything that has been built up and developed over the course of the war part of the book finally reaches the point where it all comes together into one.

If there is one bad thing I can say about Kaladin's storyline, it's that book 1 doesn't really do a good enough job of making you realise that Kaladin's depression isn't something that is exclusively tied to his shitty, shitty situation. The bouts of self-loathing and bouts of clinical depression the eternally snarky paladin has isn't going to be magically fixed. It's an ongoing problem he has to deal with long after his life actually gets better. It's extremely realistic is what I'm saying.

And the books deals with that very well over the course of the books, but doesn't really make it clear enough in book one that this is going to be a permanent fixture of Kaladin's life.

And now that I'm fully awake, I realise I probably didn't link the problems with word of kings to the problems at warbreaker. The connection is basically, that Shallan in Wok is an incredibly reactive character, who generally never actually does things. She almost always just reacts to character around her doing things. That gets better in words of radience, but it is very much the case with way of kings.

Hm. I’m not sure if I agree exactly with your diagnosis of Shallan, but I don’t entirely disagree, either. Her storyline is definitely the weakest in the first book, and while I don’t think she’s entirely reactive (Jannah is essentially her antagonist, and the interplay between them is most of what that subplot is about), what driving actions she takes are obscured by all the mystery surrounding her. And that, I think, is where the problem overlaps with Warbreaker. Siri and Vivenna might, according to Sanderson’s outline, drive the plot of the story, but because we’re stuck in their POV and there’s so much mystery, it’s not apparent to the audience what they’re really doing.

At least with Shallan, I don’t think her subplot in ‘Way of Kings’ is meant to climax with the same power as that of Kaladin and Dalinar. They get a proper climax, but Shallan’s subplot in the first book essentially ends with the reveal that she’s not the person we think she is as she comes into new power. I think it’s supposed to be an ominous note, a cliffhanger, as opposed to an ending.

But this is a bit deflating, because this mystery creates a disconnect between Shallan and the audience. We thought we knew her, but it turns out we don’t. And full clarity about her doesn’t even come until the third book in the series. I understand why Sanderson did that (parallels with Dalinar and his arc in the third book, IMO), but it means that Shallan remains at a distance for a long time. With Stormlight Archives, though, it’s more tolerable. It’s a series, so we can wait for ultimate payoff on Shallan and cool our heels for three books until we fully understand her. Plus, as you note, we have really powerful subplots for Dalinar and Kaladin that give each novel a proper solidness.

But with Warbreaker, it’s just one book (I’ve since found out that a sequel is apparently planned, but it’s going to be a long wait), and the book as it stands doesn’t come together fully and seems to be focused on characters who wind up not being the protagonists of the story. Even the villain suffers for being wrapped up in mystery, so that by the time we learn what’s really going on, the reaction becomes, “WOW WHAT A TWIST!!! ...but eh, cool motive, not really interesting.”

That said, I don’t mean to be so down on Warbreaker. It’s fine. I’ve read far worse, and I enjoyed it. It just has some flaws I would not have expected from Sanderson, but perhaps are indicative of weaknesses that his penchant for multi-books epics mitigates.

#thekingofwinterblog

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emandme · 7 years ago

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Its not personal

The last two weeks have been incredibly stressful. I haven’t felt this pressured since, lets see, 2018. No one told me this job was ever going to be easy, but at least leave me the right to crib about it. I don’t usually though. You might ask “Well, isn’t that what this blog is all about?” No. This blog is an outlet in my journey towards self realization, so don’t be a douche about it. This post is a tale of personal trial and tribulation and how this has had a profound impact on how I treat my patients. Needless to point out, like every other blog post, this is fairly long, so brace yourself.

I had just come back from an evening shift and was catching up on season 2 of The West Wing, nothing different from the usual post shift nights. It was around 1 am when my neighbor knocked on my door. His father who lived 3 hours away from the city was taken to a nearby hospital with complaints of severe retrosternal chest pain. The doctors there diagnosed it as a cardiac event and did not have the facilities to handle the patient. My visibly worried and flustered neighbor, who is other wise one of the most calmest people I know, had come to me for counsel. I spoke to the doctors over the phone and their diagnosis was clear - ST depressions in the ECG and typical nature of the pain - this was likely an NSTEMI or Unstable Angina. I asked for a cardiac enzyme panel and an immediate transfer to my hospital in Hyderabad. The cardiac enzymes came negative in the time they were arranging for the ambulance, So most likely an unstable angina. I asked my neighbor to relax and bring him to Hyderabad immediately. This should be pretty straight forward to handle. We both left to my hospital in anticipation of his arrival. I spoke to the managers on duty before hand so we could get the financial conversations out of the way early. This was around 3 AM in the morning and I was in the ER following up lab and radiology reports of the patients I admitted the previous night as I awaited their arrival and my neighbor waited at the hospital entrance. The ER door slammed open with a trolley being wheeled in in a rush and a patient lying in a pool of vomit, semi conscious, and then right behind the trolley, I saw my neighbor running in breathless, looking for me. Shit. This patient was my neighbor’s father. Something had gone very very wrong.

We moved him to Priority 1, me and two other ER docs took charge. The patient was now coming around and writhing in chest pain radiating to his back. He was incredibly restless, bouncing up and down the trolley to a point where we had to physically restrain him just to get the ECG. Pain score easily at 9/10. Non medically speaking - imagine being awake watching a bear maul your guts. The cardiologist was right by side, ecg now showed a qRBBB pattern - this is bad, very bad. I was holding the patients hand trying to calm him down as pain meds were being pushed in in rapid succession, and then it happened. I was talking to him, calming him down, and in that moment, he stopped talking, his eyes rolled up, he protruded his tongue, clenched his jaw, squeezed my hand in a death choke, started seizing and crashed. My colleagues crash intubated him and as I looked away in despair, my eyes met with my neighbors.

I was at a loss of words to explain the turn of events over the last five minutes. Most likely vasovagal, but this was unanticipated. I felt responsible and I felt helpless. A 70 year old in cardiogenic shock on mechanical ventilator and likely aspiration - I knew the odds. I knew I was staring down a barrel of potential complications most likely ending in death, but little did I know there was far worse in store. For now though, I tried to explain to my neighbor that we’re doing whatever we possibly can, that we’re taking him to the cath lab and I’m going to be there by his fathers side through all this. One look at his father lying motionless on the bed with an Endotracheal tube down this throat, he held my hand and broke down crying.

We rushed him to the cathlab, angio showed double vessel disease with stenosis but it didn’t explain the pain. This was not an infarct and the flow to myocardium was still intact. It had to be something else. We took the cue of the severe tearing type of pain radiating to the back he complained of on presentation and took him to CT aortogram to rule out a dissection, also because there was some disagreement over how his distal pulses were. It was negative for dissection but I noted a mildly bulky pancreas and asked for a serum amylase and lipase to cover that base. It was 6 am by now and there was nothing more to be done than wait and hope the vasopressors held on to dear life. I walked out of the Cardiac ICU, mustered all my courage and told the family that this is looking bad. We’re doing our best, but with no concrete diagnosis, I had little to offer. The neighbor drove me and his family back home. His sister and his completely unaware mother sat in the back seat worried and . The silence on the way back home was defeaning.

I hadn’t felt a depressive episode like this, not in the last 8 years. I tried to sleep it off, but that was futile. I was responsible. It was my decision to treat him at my hospital and he was my responsibility. Despite doing everything we possibly could, I was going to lose him. The very thought that I would have to face my neighbor everyday, and be seen in his eyes as the guy who couldn’t save his father, broke me. I came home at around 6 30 am and got a call from my HOD at 8 am that there’s an acute shortage in the ER and they needed me to come in to work and help out. If this were my older self, I would have been there in a jiffy, but on this morning, I could not get myself out of bed. I felt despair, I felt pain and I felt hopeless. I did not want to disappoint my HOD and I also wanted to know how my patient was doing, so I pushed myself and got to work to one of the most messed up shifts I’ve done in a while. May be it was just my depression, but it was a one hell of a busy republic day morning. Why oh why do people save their illnesses just for the holidays?! My patient was still on the ventilator, high inotropic support, an unreasonable no. of ectopics on the ecg and pretty bad lungs, but negative amylase and lipase. I still had no hope to offer and everything seemed so futile. I don’t even recall how the next few days passed. I barely ate, barely slept and I still put up a face at work, try and be the most pleasant doctor you could find in the ER.

On the third day, he started improving rapidly. No more vasopressor support, no more ectopics, resolving TLC. On day 4, he was extubated and I finally breathed a sigh of relief. I finally slept peacefully. I finally smiled at home and spoke up to my worried sick mother. I haven’t seen her this helpless before. She knew I only had the best intentions, she liked to believe that I did nothing wrong at all, that I was their best hope. Can’t blame her. Mothers are like that. Unconditional love, unshakable confidence in you and blind faith. She could not do or say anything that would make me feel better. She knew how much I cared about this, how much I’ve put myself into this, but for now, she was helpless. That all changed like I said. The patient was off the ventilator and on his way to a full recovery.

He came home today. After two full weeks in the Cardiac ICU, he came home today. I paid him a visit and he himself pulled up a chair to offer me a seat. Today is a good day. I smiled with all my heart and a sense of satisfaction I haven’t felt in ages. I cannot take credit for all the hardwork put in by some of the finest cardiologists, intensivists, emergency physicians and nurses to bring him back. I am proud that I can look up to these people at times of despair and I am lucky. As for his loving wife and caring son, I can only feel happy and thankful. I did give him a thorough dressing down for popping NSAIDs like tic tacs and trusting his local pharmacist more than his doctor, but that’s just most Indians.

The purpose of this post is not to talk about a very odd presentation or a difficult case management lesson. The purpose of this post is to talk about physician wellness. The toll that the responsibility of someones life in your hands takes on your mental state of being is indiscernible to someone who has never faced it before. I spent the last two hours on this particular sentence trying to come up with a way to explain it and I’ve failed. Writers block? No. It is a sense of duty and privilege we can never fathom fully.

This is a tale of a very personal emergency. I went the extra mile with this patient. This made me ask myself if I’m not doing to this every patient. Is it humanly possible to feel this deeply about all of my sick patients and live a normal life without going absolutely mad?. It’s like having 40 to 60 of your family members fall incredibly sick in a span of 6 hours and all come to you for treatment. That’s my ER’s average foot fall in a day. I will most definitely die an early death , not that i’m not going to now. It is tough, what we do. It breaks us and yet, we keep going. It takes a different kind of crazy to go back to all this, everyday, every patient. It is my hope through this blog that my people realize that these heroes don’t wear capes or don’t have billboards. They’re fighting a system rigged against humanity in general and doing their part as best they can. Cut them some slack, because they’re walking a thin line - to feel, yet not to feel.

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naturopathycanada · 5 years ago

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5 Health Tips From a Naturopath

As a naturopath (in a former life!) I was typically asked what recommendations I would certainly provide to assist my clients to improve wellness and wellbeing. Occasionally we need to look 'outside package'-- below are 5 naturopathy tips that can assist you get healthier ...

1. Listen To Your Body-- Don't Ignore it:

Some people obtain themselves into actually big trouble due to the fact that they neglect their body when it's delicately murmuring that something is wrong. Ie-- that scratchy rash that you slathered with cortisone cream isn't necessarily 'far better' or 'taken care of' even if it's gone away currently. The conditions in your body that created/ generated that rash are most likely still present, & you've made no effort to change what you're doing-- just whacked some lotion on 'make the sound go away'. That usually will not be the last of it-- usually that rash will re-emerge elsewhere, worse than before-- or you'll obtain a few other symptom (which might seem entirely unconnected) popping up.

One of our leading naturopathy pointers is never to disregard your symptoms! Symptoms are best dealt with as signals to pay greater interest to your wellness & make an adjustment, not as inconveniences to simply remove ASAP. You can even utilize ongoing light signs as a gauge to monitor where you go to, & to aid court if an adjustment you have actually made has actually been a good one for you. Regard your body's efforts to communicate with you-- if you neglect the murmurs, you'll need to manage some shouting later on!

2. Diagnosis & Treatment-- Shop Around, Obtain a Couple Of Point of views:

One more of our top naturopathy ideas is to always obtain a 2nd (also a 3rd, fourth & fifth) viewpoint when a Doctor suggests medication or surgical procedure, or any type of invasive therapy that comes with its own set of risks &/ or side effects. I speak to sooo many people who're medicated unnecessarily, who have actually undergone surgery when other choices would certainly have been much better. These are not decisions to ignore, this is your body & you deserve to question your professional & obtain an additional viewpoint or 3 if you feel also somewhat worried about the recommendations being given. I'm not suggesting that you disregard the diagnosis & suggestions of your professional, just placing it around that different specialists will have different methods, various training, different experience & various devices to work with your concerns. And no Dr has all the responses. You don't have to go with the first item of suggestions you're offered.

3. Diet-- Be Open to Change, Be Flexible:

No one really understands what diet is the best one for you-- regardless of what they may state! But if you're not really feeling 100% on your existing diet plan, it makes good sense to try something various. There are a great deal of people that feel terrific on a vegan diet plan, a great deal who really feel much better on a paleo diet, some just require to steer clear of dairy products or gluten ... some appear to grow on the blood group diet ... & then those who really felt excellent for some time on some diet or other then slid for no apparent factor.

We actually just know the tip of the iceberg regarding how our intestine functions, the means we absorb & take in nutrients & the interactions between the gut microbiome & our brain & immune system. My individual sensation is that we require to stay open & adaptable to try different strategies when we're 'out of order'. You can find negatives in almost every food if you look (also many vegetables), so don't flip out when you check out/ listen to something negative about among your favorites that you assumed was healthy-- perhaps it does have some harmful bits, however often the overall impact is a good one when you take into account all the great bits!

This is how many individuals have stumbled upon Blend11, our morning meal booster that has created such a big follower base! Word of mouth and individuals trialling it have found it to be so healthy and life-changing! So attempting new foods and diet regimen choices are absolutely among our leading naturopathy tips!

4. Care for Your Feelings-- They're A lot more Effective Than You Believe:

No matter just how healthy & balanced your diet plan is, or how active you are if you're feeling out of balance mentally. Unfavorable feelings can definitely trigger you to come to be unwell, specifically anything that takes place for too long without you acknowledging it, resolving it & overcoming it. Things like solid unhappiness, despair, loneliness, anger, work or relationship anxiety. We all have our obstacles & stress and anxieties, we wouldn't value the ups if there were no downs-- but, if there's something in your life that is a consistent niggle or a big loud disruption to your mental-emotional wellbeing, it requires to be taken care of as a top priority! Don't establish the assumption that you need to be a totally zen monk-like human being, however if you're placing all the concentrate on diet & workout, & asking yourself why you're not seeing outcomes-- look into the mental-emotional side of things. So one of the best naturopathy pointers I can give you is if you're not laughing, playing, attaching, finding out, testing on your own, unwinding ... doing whatever it is that really feels most nourishing to your spirit-- do something regarding that today !! And if there's an apparent stressor that is influencing you strongly, do something about that today as well. Often you simply require to change the way you're considering it, sometimes you require to make large scary changes.

5. Nature-- Obtain Amongst It! You Were Developed To!:

So easy in this insane concrete day & age to go for days/ weeks without spending quality time immersed in (and even touching) nature. If you live & operate in a home in the middle of a giant city, & have little downtime-- it can be especially difficult. A couple of naturopathy pointers to aid you 'remain connected':

Open your windows (unless your location is fairly polluted, let the sunshine & outside air right into your home-- it will certainly generate loads of all-natural & healthy microorganisms & avoid your indoor environment from going stale & expanding toxic mould). This could not be appropriate in spring if you're suffering a hayfever flare, but also for everyone else-- open!

Plant interior plants (they can aid filter & oxygenate your inside air, they bring in healthy and balanced microbes & they cheer up your room). Ask at your neighborhood baby room for plants that more than happy inside in pots, it doesn't fit them all!

Begin a veggie yard-- even if it's just a few natural herbs in pots on the veranda! Horticulture is a proven antidepressant, it can be quite meditative & very enjoyable-- plus you obtain all those beautiful dust microorganisms when you service it & when you include your uber-fresh fruit and vegetables into a dish.

Head to the coastline, lake, park, forest, ranch etc in your downtime. Breathe deeply, hug trees, play in the mud, rub the animals, roll in the fallen leaves/ sand, swim & don't wash too quickly ... get covered in microbes from healthy and balanced all-natural environments! You'll provide your immune system something to do, & present some 'old good friends' (microorganisms we progressed with) right into your individual microbiome.

Obtain an animal. Yes, they drop hair all over the place & walk dust from outdoors right into your house, & lick the youngster's faces-- but that really makes your room healthier! Overcome the decay & embrace your unpleasant pet dog. They make you healthier in many various other means also (studies in fact show that pet dog owners are happier & much healthier). Bear in mind that as you're sweeping hair & grabbing poo:-RRB-.

Buy farm fresh organic fruit & veg (shop at the marketplaces), or expand some of your own. Plants taken fresh from a healthy organic dirt ecological community have a totally various microbiome than those expanded on a chemical drenched traditional farm in chemically fertilized soil. Chemicals kill things/ interrupt ecosystems. Even if the produce looks & tastes the very same, you're not getting the exact same good pests with it. And pests can have a massive effect on your wellness. It's a good thing when you see a slug on the lettuce you've simply purchased ... it indicates the food you're consuming assistances life & that a living creature has actually chosen to consume it/ make it's house there ... it's far more frightening if you never ever discover creatures in your food!

The post “ 5 Health Tips From a Naturopath “ was first seen on goodmix.com by Brad & Jeanie

Boost your overall health and disease prevention with the help of naturopathic medicine. Contact your nearest naturopathic doctor - Dr. Amauri Caversan.

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rosafaen · 5 years ago

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I’ve been struggling a lot with my emotions, I’m in therapy, off medication. I’ve had a lot of bad reactions to medication, but I am trying to pursue a new potential diagnosis recommended by my therapist. I’m waiting for a psychiatrist referral from my doctor to move forward with that. I feel like I’m doing all the things I should be doing but every step forward I get pulled back. Everything is so much more difficult than I think it should be. I’m not having any irl interaction with people, except my fiance, and I keep just word vomiting bad feelings at him, but he’s overwhelmed with his own stuff and seems to try to shoulder blame for anything bad I’m feeling, regardless of if it’s his fault or not. I’m trying to only bring up the things he can do something about, but I’m struggling to not bring up everything that bothers me at once. So, I’m hoping maybe I just need another outlet. I’m going to try to update this daily or weekly. I thought about doing it privately, since this exercise is more just for me to have somewhere to let my feelings go rather than to get feedback on them. I decided to do public anyway because maybe this will help someone else going through the same thing.

Everyone I know right now is as raw as an exposed nerve emotionally. It’s not bringing out the best in most people, myself included. It’s weird for me, like I am for sure having more good days than I was before quarantine, but my lows are lower and my highs are higher. A lot of my stress was work related. I will go more into that later on, it isn’t relevant for the things I am feeling today. I had been mostly dissociated for about 2 years until this March. COVID did do me a solid in that, it snapped me out of my autopilot, shut down state. But, this does also mean that I have to allow myself to feel everything rather than suppress it. With my dissociation, when I start burying feelings, it’s sort of like burying my own emotional casket. I’m an all or nothing person, according to my therapist. I don’t know how to just be in the middle.

With me being awake again, we’re noticing my high and low cycles are less indicative of anxiety and depression, more so something called cyclothymia. I don’t quite fit bipolar, but it takes bipolar meds to help. Anxiety/depression meds have given me such bad reactions before that I have given up on them. They seem to suppress my daily reactions, but it just comes back up with an explosion that makes things worse overall. I have full blown panic attacks when I take them, and I don’t when I don’t. I am willing to try a different category of medications, but I’m also a bit afraid because I have always been told bipolar meds were more... I guess volatile is what I’m looking for? Not quite the right word. But, I am willing to try a new thing to fix this lump of grey matter. I am having a hard time interacting with people. My social anxiety has been amplified, it’s been difficult to keep that voice back that screams no one actually likes me. I know that voice is a liar, and I can name at least 5 people who literally would go to the end of the earth and back for me if it’d help. Most people I know don’t get that from anyone, so I do count myself fortunate with them. But, I don’t do groups of people well, online or otherwise. We started a DND group irl before COVID and have moved it to roll20 for the time being, but even though we handpicked the people to get along with me, I’m still feeling isolated and at odds with everyone. I do not feel valued in game, and that’s very frustrating. I’m about a breath away from quitting it, but my fiance has poured himself into this (he’s the DM) and he sees me thinking of leaving as a failure on his part. One of the members int he group is also my fb friend and is Christian. I’m not, I’m actually an eclectic Pagan, but I have several friends who are. However, she keeps posting things on any posts I share religion based that come across very “not all men” but replace men with Christians. As someone who has been harrassed by Christians my whole life, this is very abrasive for me. She’s going through a lot, I don’t think she’s a bad person, but it’s negatively impacting my day when I read her comments. She is very aggressive right now, her emotional state isn’t great, I GET that. But I don’t feel like I can calmly bring this up in a way to not trigger her to be aggressive with me, based off how she’s reacted with other things. I can’t just block her, she’ll see I’m still in the fb group for it and I absolutely believe she’d bring it up and bring yet more stress to DND for me. I recently cut my toxic mom out, She’s.... a hot mess. She’s on her 5th divorce, none of the exes were my father. She’s not divorced but is on her second relationship this year already. He’s a truck driver, she drove around the country with him when quarantine started. I’m considered high risk due to bronchial issues and an autoimmune disorder and my brother’s wife just had a baby (she was pregnant at the time mom took off) and she just abandoned all of us to go off with a man, again. There’s a lot more trauma there, but I’m word vomited out.

#mentalhealth #wordvomit #emotionalwreck

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travisandersondatingblog · 6 years ago

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13 Signs of a Bad Relationship and How to Leave One Fast!

If you’ve ever experienced signs of a bad relationship, I think you’ll agree: the stress you felt impacted every area of your life.

Work seems tougher because you were just a little off, thinking about the big argument you got in last night…

Your social life suffered because no one wanted to hang out with your miserable self…

You ended up gaining weight because Ben and Jerry seemed to be the only men who understood you…

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And if you’ve ever gotten out of a bad relationship, you’ll also agree that after a few months go by, you look back at that time thinking,

“Why the hell did I waste my time with that guy?”

I wanted to talk about the signs of a bad relationship in this video and article to speed up the process to help you realize if you’re in a bad relationship now…or if you’re single, to help you avoid a bad relationship in the future.

Your Coach,

P.S. The best way to avoid needing to look up the signs of a bad relationship is to first understand more about how the male mind works. I designed the Male Mind Map to give you secrets that most men would kill me for revealing…but if it helps you find love, then I’m glad.

Introduction

I get it. Sometimes you settle for less-than-perfect in a relationship because the alternative — getting back out into the big scary world of dating — is just overwhelming. You tell yourself no relationship is perfect…and yet you brush aside the fact that you are downright miserable.

I get it. I’ve talked before about a Good Enough Relationship, where you simply accept that, while things are far from perfect and you’re not entirely happy…it’s better than being alone. I’m not in any way endorsing this, because I completely believe you should never settle in your life. But in this article, we’re talking about a relationship that’s gone one step further into being downright negative or even toxic.

Absolutely no one deserves to be in a bad relationship.

And if you’re miserable, chances are, he is too. It’s time to start monitoring those signs of a bad relationship so that you can get out with minimal emotional damage.

1. You’re More Miserable Than When You Were Single

You thought being single was bad, but…

I know you’ve been telling yourself that being in a relationship — even a bad one — is better than being single…but is that actually true?

People moan and groan about how awful being single is, but I’m willing to bet you realized at least some benefit from it. You didn’t have to factor in someone’s gluten intolerance and hate of Thai food when planning where to go to eat. You didn’t have his dirty underwear on your floor. You could spend the entire weekend bingeing that Bravo Tv series he hates if you wanted to.

And now…you’re constantly fighting with your boyfriend about stupid things. You never see your friends. You’re pretty much unhappy all of the time.

So…remind me why being in this relationship is better than being single?

In reality, you probably fear being alone again. In a survey conducted by Everyday Health, researchers found that one-third of women are more afraid of being single than of having a cancer diagnosis! That’s just insane to me. Being single, especially if the alternative is to be in a bad relationship, is far from a death sentence.

If you’re already nodding your head, saying that you definitely see these signs of a bad relationship, deal with your feelings of being alone. I promise you: you’ll be better off without him.

2. You Feel More Alone Than You Did When You Were Single

Whether you feel alone now because your man has isolated you from your friends and family (BIG red flag) or you simply don’t feel like he’s around for you physically and emotionally, this is a major sign of a bad relationship, and one you shouldn’t ignore.

The point of being in a relationship is to have a partner you can rely on when things get rough…

When you want to celebrate a big win in your life…

Or you just want to curl up on the couch, not even talking.

And a healthy relationship is one where you still spend plenty of time with other people who matter to you. If your boyfriend has made it clear that you shall have no other friends than him, then understand that he has serious issues that have nothing to do with you. It’s time to set yourself free and get back to surrounding yourself with people who love you and care about your wellbeing.

3. You Constantly Misunderstand Each Other

via GIPHY

While some bickering is okay or even healthy for your relationship, if you’re constantly fighting over misunderstandings, there’s a problem.

You: “Hey would you mind doing the grocery shopping tomorrow?”

Him: “OH! What are you saying? I NEVER do the shopping? That I’m lazy??”

When things are strained in your relationship, you both may tend to read things into what one another say that aren’t really there.

Sue Kolod, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst in New York City, says: “As couples get to know each other better, there should be a progression toward more understanding and less misunderstanding.”

When you’re constantly misinterpreting what the other person is saying, your relationship can’t grow in the right direction.

I’ve found that in any good relationship I’ve been in, the more I’ve gotten to know my partner, the easier it is to get past whatever issues come up. For example: if she brings up the fact that I haven’t done the laundry in weeks, while that may be true, I may realize that she’s lashing out because she’s been stressed at work. We can sit down and talk about that situation…right after I start a load of laundry.

4. You’re Always Walking on Egg Shells

You can’t talk about anything without worrying that he’ll blow up or it’ll start a fight. You’re to the point that you just come home from work, swig a bottle of wine, and try to get into bed before he gets home.

Is this really how you want to live for the foreseeable future? I didn’t think so.

5. Your Partner Implies He Only Values You For One Thing

Whether it be sex, your looks, or your ability to earn money, this guy has made it clear that he’s not emotionally invested in you. Why the hell are you wasting time on him? If you’re in a casual relationship, that’s one thing, but if you’re hoping this guy is The One, I hate to break it to you…he’s not.

You should value yourself for all the things that make you amazing. That might be how great you are in bed, your looks, and your financial security...in addition to your empathy, the fact that you love animals, and that you’re funny as hell. Any guy who doesn’t see that isn’t worth your time.

6. You’re Not a Good Influence on Each Other

One of the signs of a bad relationship? You’re adopting each other’s bad habits.

Maybe he drinks a lot…and that’s got you drinking more than you used to.

Maybe you love junk food…and now he’s packing on the pounds as he shares your bad habit.

Whatever the negative behaviors, you’re bringing out the worst in each other…when you should be bringing out the best.

If the sum of your parts makes you worse than the whole, you are not in the right relationship.

7. You Catch Your Partner Lying Repeatedly

I think lying is truly the worst thing you can have in a relationship. If you find that you’re with someone who cannot just be honest with you, and who will lie even about the smallest thing…this is one of the biggest signs of a bad relationship.

Be aware of this, too, in your own actions.

I recently read the book Lying by Sam Harris, and I realized how totally toxic lying is in our lives. I was never a big liar, but once I became aware of the little white lies (responding to “do I look good in this shirt?”), you start to realize the importance of living by a code of honesty.

8. You Feel Trapped in the Relationship

I feel like this should go without saying: you shouldn’t feel trapped in a relationship. You should want to be in the relationship. If you don’t want to be in it, you should leave.

If you feel trapped in your relationship for logistical reasons, like you can’t afford to move out, or you’d have to relocate entirely, I encourage you to start putting together a plan. Set aside even a little money so that you can become free of this toxic relationship.

9. Your Partner Thinks That You’re Lucky to Have Him, But Not the Reverse

He may feel like he has more value than you do, or at least he acts this way. In truth, he’s probably very insecure and is doing his best to make you feel like no one else would want you. That way, you never leave him.

Don’t fall for this. You are a high-value woman and a man who really believed that would express his gratitude for finding someone so amazing every day.

10. Your Partner Threatens You

If he threatens you in any way, get the heck outta there!

He might threaten to tell your family a big secret. Or refuse to let you leave (indicating he might inflict physical harm if you try). He might threaten to take your kids away.

Realize that this kind of coercive behavior usually indicates emotional abuse. You need to get out of this relationship immediately…but do so smartly. Ask for the help of friends or family…or even the police.

11. You or Your Partner Can’t Talk About Important Relationship Topics

Whenever a major topic comes up, such as when you’ll move in together or get married, one or both of you change the subject.

Back when I used to do a lot of one-on-one dating coaching, I’d have clients who would talk to their boyfriends about these major life topics…and the men would disappear for days. No text, no call, no nothing.

If this happens to you, realize that this is one of the signs of a bad relationship. If this is happening now, how will he handle talking about having kids or other topics if you were to marry him down the road?

12. There’s No Respect in the Relationship

He might call you names. You might roll your eyes whenever he talks. Whatever the action, it’s clear you don’t respect one another. So why are you in a relationship with someone you don’t respect?

13. There is Relationship Violence

If he ever lays a hand on you or touches you aggressively…I can’t imagine how hard it would be, being in a relationship where you are physically threatened.

Men have the advantage because they are usually physically more capable of hurting a woman (though they don’t have to be larger or stronger to do so, nor are men the only abusers), so it’s scary to worry about your physical wellbeing. I urge you to get help if he even threatens violence.

Conclusion: If You’re Seeing Signs of a Bad Relationship…

You’ve got to do what’s right for YOU.

Now that you’ve reviewed the signs of a bad relationship, I hope you can walk away realizing you’re not in one. But if you are, I really need you to acknowledge it and do what’s right for your health and wellbeing.

You deserve a happy and healthy relationship. If you’re not in one, it’s no reflection on you; this guy just isn’t compatible with you. Let it go and move on. You have to know that you will find the right guy. But you’ve got to trust your gut when those signs of a bad relationship pop up so you can keep moving forward.

Comment below: have you ever been in a bad relationship? At what point did you realize it?

In Part 2 of this article, I’ll help you find a GREAT guy that will show you that this bad relationship was sooo not right for you. But to get access to this exclusive content, you have to sign up to be a Sexy Confidence member first.

In Part 1, we looked at signs of a bad relationship. So I’m going to assume you ditched the toxic guy and are now ready to find love. I’ve got a few tips for you.

1. Be Open to Opportunity

Don’t roll your eyes! You never ever know where you’ll meet a guy. I have had coaching clients who met at a coffee shop…

Dating online…

At a party…

Even at the grocery store. So always be open to the possibility that today might be the day you meet Mr. Right.

2. Be Ready to Commit to the Process

I don’t want to hear you complain about there being “no good men out there” if you work from home, spend all your time with married friends, and prefer to binge Netflix than get out into the world of possibilities.

Finding the right guy can take some work…are you ready to put in the effort?

Sign up for singles groups on Meetup.com. Join a dating site. Ask friends if they have any single guy friends. Put the effort in and you’ll get results out.

3. Flirt with Men

If you’ve been out of the game a while, you will hate this assignment, but trust me: it will pay off. Practice your flirting skills whenever the opportunity arises. Wink at the barista who gives you a free shot of whipped cream. Smile at a stranger on the street. Flirting doesn’t have to be hair-twirling, eyelash-batting. Your goal here is to build confidence in being around men.

Coaching Assignment: Make a list of at least three opportunities you could find this week to interact with men more and practice your flirting!

The post 13 Signs of a Bad Relationship and How to Leave One Fast! appeared first on Sexy Confidence.

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endowarrior877 · 7 years ago

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Endometriosis in the bowel.

Endometriosis can also be found in your bowel and bladder, although I'll be focusing more on the bowel since that's a big problem area for me. These types of endometriosis are the most commonly misdiagnosed. It's easy to see why as most of the symptoms are the same as many other bowel, bladder, gastric and reproductive conditions, so most people are diagnosed or considered to have these types of endo, after all other tests and treatments have came back negative. This more than likely will mean most woman will wait longer for a true diagnosis because they have to rule out various other things too.

Most woman will find that they will be diagnosed as having IBS or other bowel conditions and treated for that first. The difference between IBS and endometriosis in the bowel is that the symptoms can change as you go through your monthly menstrual cycle where as IBS usually stays the same all the time. IBS can also a symptom of endometriosis so it can be hard getting a proper diagnosis.

You may be prescribed laxatives and fiber supplements if your doctor thinks you have IBS. In some cases like mines, fiber gel and laxatives make my cramps a lot worse and the best way to help my bowels stay healthy and moving is by drinking loads of water and eating loads of fruit, vegetables and soluble fiber.

Typical symptoms of endometriosis in the bowel are:

* Constipation

* Diarrhea

* Pain when opening bowels

* Pain during sex

* Rectal pain

* Rectal bleeding

* Cramping in the abdomen

* Nausea and vomiting

* Difficulties in emptying the bowel or feeling like you are not completely empty

If endometriosis effects the small intestine or the ileum then pain might be felt on the right side and can sometimes be identical to acute appendicitis. Constipation is also common and something I struggle with. It doesn't matter what i do or what laxatives I take sometimes it can be days between each painful bowel movement. Some people won't have all the symptoms on the list and some will have all. I have experienced everything on the list and most of the symptoms are still on going to this day.

If you're concerned about any of these symptoms you should always speak to your doctor. To diagnose endometriosis in the bowel a laparoscopy and proctoscopy should be done. Tests may also be carried out to rule out bowel obstruction which I've had plenty of and they've always said I'm not impacted. To treat endometriosis in the bowels then it must be cut out from the root. If the endometriosis is deep infiltrating and has penetrated the bowel wall, in most cases a portion of the bowel will be removed.

So how does this effect me? I'm pretty sure my symptoms are due to having endometriosis in the bowel. Yesterday was a good day for me pain wise. It was grandpas last day with us and the plan was to go with him to the bus stop and see him off. I woke up and did my new, stay still for 15 mins until i felt the pain was okay and then I got up. I took some meds and got on with the rest of the morning. It was good, I didn't have to go through the usual morning brutality and it was looking like I would make it out after all. I wanted to see hubby's dad off. So I was in a pretty good mood. My bowels didn't open all day and I don't think they moved much to be honest but that was good because it meant less pain too! I'd deal with those consequences later.

I should have known that if I don't move my bowels the next day might be a bit iffy. I woke up, lay still and eventually got up and had some cramping so got a bath. I got out the bath and carried on with the day slowly hurting and then made me and teeny some lunch. I got the sharp shooting painful message telling me to go to the toilet so off I speed walked to the loo. The pains were creeping and intensifying and i sat down to do what I needed to do. The whole process of opening my bowels is just horrid and painful. Once the pain starts to come I know I need to quickly finish what I'm doing and go and lay on the bed, sofa or floor until it eases off, which is anyone guess as to when it will stop. I've been out shopping with the kids on a couple of occasions and this has happened and I've just had to lay on dirty disabled toilet floors clutching my tummy until the pain eases up enough to let us run to a taxi and get home to the bath. It's soul destroying when that happens. So I stay in doors where things like that can't and won't ever happen.

The one thing I want most is to be able to open my bowels without being in the worst imaginable pain. I wouldn't wish this pain on anyone, not even my worst enemy! I'm not so bad now but I went through a stage of being absolutely petrified with the thought of doing the toilet. Now I've accepted this is how it's going to be for the time being. I can't stop it so I've had to learn how to cope with it.

Today was no different and as I sat on the toilet, the sweat started dripping off my head and I was feeling like I was on fire, it feels like someone is twisting all of my insides into a tight knot and trying to focus on the task at hand is nearly impossible. All i want to do is stop the pain, anything to try and stop this god awful pain. I try to finish quickly and then I can go and get in the bath until the pain killers kick in again.

When I started to go to the GP about this I would always have my tummy examined and one thing that was always noted by a few different doctors, was that there were some protruding lumps on my left and right sides which they thought were always backed up stool. It was now suspected that I had a possible bowel obstruction and i was prescribed laxatives and stool softeners but even drinking 8 sachets a day didn't move the weird lumps. Even after my bowel prep for one of my colonoscopies I still had them, I never agreed that they were just backed up stool.

So currently I can only move my bowels when I get the sharp shooting pains and then I know it's go time. Gas doesn't just come out naturally anymore and i have to push that out which is sore and uncomfortable. Pretty much every time I move my bowels I have to take some form of pain killer and/or get a bath. If this happens when I'm out and about then I'm in a lot of trouble. No matter what I do with my diet it doesn't help. The only thing that does help is not going to the toilet and that isn't possible. This has effected my mental health so much because it is just sheer madness that anyone should have to suffer this much pain and discomfort when they trying to do something that is so natural to us all. One thing that is strange, is that during my period I have less pain when opening my bowels, and less mucus. I know that means something, I'm just not sure what.

This particular flare I'm having just now has lasted about 3 hours and was triggered when i opened my bowels. This will happen every time. I have an MRI scan next week and I can't speak to my specialist until the day after so all I can do is check in with the GP maybe, and wait until I can update the specialist. I was advised by my new GP to contact the specialist if my symptoms are persistent and very painful so tried to call the other day and I couldn't get a telephone/face to face appointment to my disappointment.

So now the flare has been tamed, I'll fix myself once again, take a deep breath and go wake teeny from her nap and give her a big cuddle. It's not too late so if we go to the shops shortly I can make something tasty for dinner. It's funny how you just dust yourself off and carry on with life as if nothing ever happened. It's horrible living in fear of my bowels and maybe one day I'll be able to go to the toilet like everyone else. Now that would be nice.

#endo #endometriosis #bowel #bowelendometriosis #misdiagnosed #chronicillness #blog #awareness #fight #pain #painful #toilet #number2 #bath #meds #disease #illness #warrior #endowarrior #findacure #hope #sore #tired #cramp #cramps #uterus #woman #girltalk #mentalhealth #raiseawareness #flare #test

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sherristockman · 8 years ago

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Orange Essential Oil Could Help PTSD Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola Just like the name implies, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a trauma- and stress-related disorder. It may develop after exposure to any intense, frightening or stress-filled event or ordeal. PTSD is most often linked to a traumatic accident, act of violence, military-combat experience or disaster. Experts suggest nearly 8 million adults in the U.S. suffer from PTSD, a condition which historically has been difficult to treat.1 Antidepressants such as Effexor, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft are the most commonly prescribed drugs for PTSD, but their effectiveness varies widely. As with all pharmaceutical drugs, these medications carry with them the potential for harmful side effects. Due to their dangers, as well as the reality that research has shown placebos to be as effective as some prescription drugs, I would like to draw your attention to research suggesting a potential natural treatment for PTSD. Specifically, scientists at George Washington University have suggested orange essential oil may offer a non-drug option for PTSD sufferers. Research performed on lab mice has demonstrated the value of orange essential oil in the reduction of fear and stress associated with the disorder.2 Of course, similar studies involving humans would be needed to fully validate this body of work. That said, this research marks a promising step forward in identifying potential natural remedies for PTSD that could be used alongside other non-drug interventions such as cognitive therapy, exposure therapy and EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). PTSD's Effects on Your Body Can Linger for Years According to Psychology Today,3 if you suffer from PTSD, you may relive or re-experience aspects of your traumatic event(s) through flashbacks and nightmares long after the original occurrence. PTSD effects are particularly noticeable when you are exposed to anything reminiscent of the original trauma. The effects of PTSD can linger for months or even years, sometimes profoundly affecting your ability to enjoy a productive, high-quality life. PTSD sufferers often experience one of more of the following symptoms:4 ✓ Anxiety ✓ Intense emotions such as anger, guilt or sadness ✓ Breathing difficulties ✓ Intrusive memories or flashbacks ✓ Dissociative experiences ✓ Irritability ✓ Emotional numbness ✓ Lack of concentration and focus ✓ Heart irregularities ✓ Sleep disturbances As mentioned above, pharmaceutical drugs are a common approach used to treat PTSD, even though the medications may have little or no long-term effect in eliminating or reducing symptoms. Mice Study Suggests Orange Essential Oil Counteracts PTSD As noted above, research performed at George Washington University with lab mice evaluated the impact orange essential oil may have on the symptoms of PTSD.5 The influence of orange essential oil was tested using a method called Pavlovian fear conditioning (or classical conditioning), a behavioral paradigm applied to mice as a means of uncovering how fear memories are formed, stored and expressed as a model for PTSD. Medical News Today explains:6 "Pavlovian fear conditioning pairs a tone with a negative stimulus, such as a shock to the foot, which provokes fear as a response in the mice. The mice form an associative memory between the tone and the stimulus. When presented with the tone alone, the mice exhibit a fear response and typically freeze. This response diminishes slowly as time goes on. [Researchers] divided the mice into three groups. The first group of 12 mice was exposed to the audio tone alone, 12 mice received water and fear conditioning, and the remaining 12 mice were exposed to orange essential oil by inhalation 40 minutes prior to and after the fear conditioning." Notably, mice exposed to orange essential oil were significantly less likely to exhibit fear-based freezing behavior. In fact, the oil-treated mice stopped freezing altogether and earlier than the mice receiving other types of treatment. Moreover, these mice experienced a significant decrease in the immune cells linked to the biochemical pathways associated with PTSD.7 Based on these outcomes, researchers recognize essential oil as a potential nonpharmaceutical option to help alleviate symptoms of PTSD in mice. How Might Orange Essential Oil Affect Humans With PTSD? Cassandra Moshfegh, research assistant in Paul Marvar's laboratory at George Washington University, says additional studies are needed to better understand the specific effects orange essential oil may have on your brain and nervous system, as well as how it may counteract fear and stress associated with PTSD.8 About the benefits of orange essential oil, Moshfegh said:9 "Relative to pharmaceuticals, essential oils are much more economical and do not have adverse side effects. The orange essential plant oil showed a significant effect on the behavioral response in our study mice. This is promising because it shows that passively inhaling this essential oil could potentially assuage PTSD symptoms in humans." A 2012 study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine10 validated sweet orange essential oil for its anxiolytic effects in humans, meaning it was shown to be an effective treatment for soothing anxiety. The study was composed of 40 male volunteers, separated into five groups, who inhaled one of the following: Orange essential oil (aromatic test: 2.5, 5 or 10 drops) Tea tree essential oil (aromatic control aroma: 2.5 drops) Water (non-aromatic control: 2.5 drops) Immediately after inhalation, each participant was engaged in a model of anxiety involving the Stroop Color and Word Test, a screening tool that requires participants to read a succession of color words or name ink colors as quickly as possible. Compared to the control groups, participants exposed to orange essential oil during the anxiety-provoking test presented with little to no changes in levels of anxiety or subjective tension during the experiment. The study authors stated:11 "Although more studies are needed to find out the clinical relevance of aromatherapy for anxiety disorders, the present results indicate an acute anxiolytic activity of sweet orange aroma, giving some scientific support to its use as a tranquilizer by aromatherapists." PTSD Is a Serious Concern Requiring Professional Help Related to Moshfegh's study, neuroscientist John Bekkers of Australian National University cautions people to await for further research to confirm the connection between aromatherapy and PTSD. Says Bekkers:12 "I wouldn't want to encourage people to depend on aromatherapy. PTSD is a serious problem, and people shouldn't think they just need to smell something to feel better." I agree it may be premature to rely only on orange essential oil for help with PTSD. If you have not yet sought a professional opinion for your condition, it's best to start there first, and this will help you to be certain of your diagnosis as well (although it can't hurt to try orange essential oil in the meantime). That said, it is also worth your time to evaluate your diet and lifestyle choices to see if anything related to them may be contributing to the levels of post-traumatic anxiety and stress you may be experiencing. Non-Drug Options for Dealing With Anxiety and Depression When considering your mental health, it's important to recognize your diet and lifestyle as foundational factors that must be optimized if you hope to fully address mental health concerns of any kind, including anxiety and depression. Your body and mind are closely interrelated, so while you may think of your brain as the primary organ in charge of your mental health, your gut may play an equally important, if not more important, role. In my opinion, the drugs available today to treat depression fail miserably in addressing mental health problems. Often, the side effects of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs can be worse than the original complaint, running the gamut from lack of emotions to sexual side effects and irritability, to sleep disturbances. These powerful medications can even put you at risk for homicide and suicide! Because antidepressants may result in chronic, long-term, worsening depression, you'll want to avoid them unless absolutely necessary, and generally only as a "last resort." Healthy Diet, Lifestyle Are Crucial for Optimal Mental Health As with most medical conditions, your diet is a crucial first place to start when looking for ways to improve your health and sense of well-being. Research tells us that the composition of your gut flora not only affects your physical health, but also has a significant impact on your brain function and mental state. As such, your gut microbiome can be quickly impacted by dietary changes — for better or for worse. Research has also revealed a number of other safe and effective ways to address depression that do notinvolvehazardous drugs. So, if you suffer from an anxiety- or depression-related disorder, please consider addressing the following diet and lifestyle factors before you resort to drugs. If you are already taking a prescription medication for mental health, you can make these changes along with taking the medication until you are able to successfully wean off the drugs — with the help and oversight of your doctor, of course. ✓ Eat real food Making a commitment to eat whole, organic, naturally-occurring food will mean you also choose to ingest less processed foods, sugar (particularly fructose), grains and genetically engineered (GE) foods. High sugar and starchy carbohydrates lead to excessive insulin release, which can trigger hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia causes your brain to secrete glutamate in levels that can cause agitation, anger, anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Sugar also creates inflammation in your body. Processed foods typically contain high amounts of sugar, damaging omega-6 fats and many chemical additives that can affect your brain function and mental state. Aspartame and MSG are two I would most definitely seek to avoid. Gluten sensitivity is a common, hidden cause of depression, so you may want to consider implementing a gluten-free diet. Recent research also shows that glyphosate, used in large quantities on GE crops like corn, soy and sugar beets, limits your body's ability to detoxify foreign chemical compounds. As such, the damaging effects of those toxins are magnified, potentially resulting in brain disorders with both behavioral and psychological effects. ✓ Increase your consumption of fermented foods Reducing gut inflammation is imperative when addressing mental health issues, so optimizing your gut flora is vital. To promote healthy gut flora, increase your consumption of probiotic foods, such as fermented vegetables, kefir, kimchee and natto. If none of these foods is available, consider taking a probiotic supplement daily. ✓ Get adequate vitamin B12 Several vitamin B deficiencies are capable of producing symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, B vitamins can be a valuable adjunct in the treatment of anxiety, attention deficit disorder, depression and schizophrenia, among other mental illnesses. I recommend you pay attention to vitamins B1, B2, B6, B8 and B9, but most especially B12. One in 4 people are thought to be deficient in vitamin B12. ✓ Optimize your vitamin D levels Vitamin D is very important for your mood. Remember, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a type of depression related to sunshine deficiency, so it would make sense to optimize your vitamin D levels through UV exposure. Be sure to check your levels via a blood test at least annually to ensure you achieve the therapeutic range of 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) year-round. If you cannot get sufficient sun exposure to meet the ideal range, taking an oral vitamin D3 supplement, along with magnesium and vitamin K2, would be advisable. ✓ Get sufficient animal-based omega-3 fats Since your brain is 60 percent fat, DHA, an animal-based omega-3 fat, along with EPA, is crucial for proper brain function and mental health. Although anchovies, sardines and wild-caught Alaskan salmon are excellent sources, most people don't get enough omega-3s from diet alone. If that's you, make sure you take a high-quality omega-3 supplement, such as krill oil. ✓ Evaluate your salt intake Believe it or not, sodium deficiency creates symptoms similar to those of depression. Take a pass on processed salt (regular table salt), however, and choose all natural, unprocessed salt like Himalayan salt, which contains more than 80 different micronutrients. ✓ Get adequate daily exercise Studies have highlighted a strong connection between aerobic activity and improved mood. There is also growing acceptance that the mind-body connection is very real, which means maintaining good physical health can significantly lower your risk of developing depression in the first place. Exercising also boosts your levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, which help elevate your mood and counteract the effects of stress. ✓ Get enough sleep You can have the best diet and exercise program possible, but if you do not get enough high-quality sleep, you put yourself at risk for depression and other illnesses. The two are so intricately linked that it is often difficult to tell if depression is causing your sleep problems or sleep problems are causing or contributing to depression and other mood disorders. Regardless of the connection, most adults require seven to nine hours of high-quality sleep a night. Children and teenagers require even more. ✓ Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) EFT can be very effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression by correcting the bioelectrical short-circuiting that causes your body's reactions. This technique is particularly powerful for treating anxiety and stress because it targets your amygdala and hippocampus, parts of your brain designed to help you decide if something is a legitimate threat. In the video below, EFT practitioner Julie Schiffman demonstrates how to use EFT to address panic attacks and other anxiety disorders. For serious issues such as PTSD, you will be best served by seeking out a qualified health care professional trained in EFT to help guide you through the process. Important Considerations When Using Orange Essential Oil While more research is needed to validate the benefits of orange essential oil for the treatment of PSTD, we already know it can help improve your digestion and is effective for constipation relief. Beyond that, orange essential oil also has been found to inhibit angiogenesis, metastasis and cell death in human colon cancer cells in a 2012 study, prompting researchers to assert that oil from blood oranges "may offer great potential for prevention of cancer."13 Orange essential oil is also effective for nourishing dry, irritated and acne-prone skin when mixed with a carrier oil and used as a cream or ointment. It also may be used effectively to soothe foot calluses. When using orange essential oil, it is important to avoid direct sunlight because it may cause phototoxicity. Also, if consumed in large amounts, orange oil may result in vomiting and nausea. No matter where you apply it to your skin, it's always best to dilute orange essential oil with a base oil or lotion. Keep in mind using this oil in high concentrations may cause dermatitis or skin inflammation. If you are pregnant, epileptic or have other medical problems, you should consult a professional aromatherapy practitioner before using orange essential oil.

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