#esting issues

[rachellaurengray]

The Illusion of Control: Breaking Free (trigger warning)

Many of us have faced moments where we felt overwhelmed by the need to control aspects of our lives. For some, this manifests in extreme behaviors around exercise and eating. I want to share a story that might resonate with many of you—a story of finding oneself trapped in a cycle of control and the journey to break free.

The Need for Control: A Common Struggle

It all starts with a common struggle: a desire for control in a world that often feels chaotic. For me, this need turned into an obsession with exercise and diet. I found solace in the rigid structure of my daily routines. Spending hours working out each day, fasting, and then eating around 8 PM became my way of managing the chaos in my life.

This isn’t just my story. Many people use exercise and strict dietary habits as a way to cope with stress or emotional turmoil. It’s a way to impose order when other areas of life feel out of control.

The Paradox of Control: Loving Food, Yet Feared

Ironically, despite my love for food, my relationship with it became fraught with anxiety. After carefully planning my meals, I’d indulge only to feel a deep sense of guilt. This guilt often led to destructive behaviours and self-talk that seemed like a way to regain control. This paradox—loving something yet fearing it—can feel incredibly isolating.

If you’ve ever found yourself caught in a similar cycle, you’re not alone. Many people experience this conflict between their desires and their fears, creating a constant internal battle.

The Cycle of Control: From Empowerment to Entrapment

The pursuit of control can start with good intentions but quickly becomes an all-consuming force. What was once empowering—structuring my workouts and meals—turned into a rigid routine that dominated my life. The quest for control can easily become a trap where the initial sense of mastery turns into a source of suffering.

This cycle can feel like a prison, where every effort to control one aspect of life leads to losing control over another. Recognizing this entrapment is a crucial step in the journey towards healing.

Breaking Free: A Collective Journey

Breaking free from this cycle involves more than just altering habits; it requires a deeper understanding of the underlying need for control. It’s about acknowledging that the quest for control often masks deeper issues, such as anxiety, low self-esteem, or unresolved trauma.

For many, seeking help from a mental health professional is a vital step. Therapy can provide tools to address these issues and develop healthier relationships with food and exercise. It’s about learning to embrace balance rather than perfection.

Finding Balance: The Path Forward

The journey to balance is ongoing and personal. It involves shifting focus from rigid control to flexible, mindful living. Enjoying food without guilt, exercising for health rather than punishment, and allowing oneself to experience life’s unpredictability are key aspects of this balance.

This collective journey towards balance is shared by many. It’s a process of learning to navigate the tension between control and freedom, and finding peace in the imperfections of life.

Conclusion: Embracing the Journey Together

The illusion of control can be powerful, but it’s essential to recognize when it’s causing more harm than good. For those who find themselves in this cycle, know that you are not alone. By seeking support and working towards balance, we can all move towards a healthier and more fulfilling relationship with ourselves and our bodies. Let’s embrace the journey together, finding strength in our shared experiences and the hope for a balanced future.

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[bumblingest-bee]

i was completely, blissfully unaware that people on other social media sites were making up whole conspiracy theories about the emergency alert test today until i heard someone talking about it in class this morning. meanwhile on tumblr everyone is just like happy Loud Noise Wednesday to all who celebrate <3

[havendance]

Inspired by a comment @upswings left on my last post:

Note: Kill in the figurative sense

Note 2: Get published either in the current or retroactive sense, whichever you prefer

[harusitoftc]

I started drawing circles, then Dave, and ended up with Dee, I'm not complaining tho

[sarahcantread]

list of 20 things to do before eating <3 tw: ed

1. clean floor 2. clean desk 3. go through closet 4. dust 5. learn how to play/sing a song 6. count money 7. paint something 8. do homework or missing work 9. paint nails 10. read 2+ chapters of any book (annotate if u want) 11. do dishes 12. laundry 13. try new hair/makeup styles 14. walk dog 15. call family 16. go out driving 17. meditate 18. learn a craft you really want to do 19. find new music 20. facetime friends

i love you and good luck <3

[thinnerinaz]

any workouts on how to slim down calves and thighs?

pls help a girl out…

[torchickentacos]

SUPRISE ART DROP! May you enjoy this May.

[ohtobeskinnyandtiny]

I found out that when im around people its so much easier not to eat and stay in control but the moment i leave and get home i start binging💀💀 help is it just me or??

[ameesdiary]

List of things I hate

1. The feeling before binging

2. Binging

3. The feeling after binging

[randomnameless]

L'administration le week-end de Pâques c'est quelque chose

Hier - j'ai une réunion prévue de longue date et je me suis fait enguirlander parce que je n'avais pas fini un truc

Aujourd'hui : "au fait, la réunion de hier est décalée à une date ultérieure"

Hein? Mais elle a déjà eu lieu!

"Oh, et puis le truc qu'on t'avait dit de faire mais que tu n'avais pas fait? Ben en fait, il ne fallait pas le faire."

Quoi?

"Bonnes fêtes :)"

Tout ce que je comprends, c'est que malgré un mal de tête carabiné, hier je me suis tapée le combo "malaise voyageur + colis abandonné + attention il y a du vent on va rouler plus lentement!" pour me rendre dans une ville à la con, me faire hurler dessus, puis passer 10 heures à ruminer dans mon coin pour qu'on me dise à la fin "tkt c'était pas important!"?

Heureusement que j'ai mon lapin en chocolat.

[whetstonefires]

Hey here's an angle on the Jiang family dynamic and its impact on Wei Wuxian that I haven't seen discussed:

Wei Wuxian grew up seeing Jiang Yanli routinely having her agency cut off and denied in both large (betrothal) and small ways. That were largely tied up in her gender, sure, but this was also a family containing Yu Ziyuan. A daughter in this household had every chance of having her gender treated as of secondary importance.

She just had to earn it.

The way Jiang Yanli was hemmed in and her potential as an independent actor dismissed was at least as strongly correlated with her failure to be a powerful sword cultivator.

So Wei Wuxian's total refusal to let anyone know that he'd lost access to his cultivation and his violent reactivity against being diminished or condescended to during his Sunshot-to-death period, when before he was pretty immune to being looked down on, could have a lot to do with having been presented with this clearly labeled diagram of how your personhood gets stripped away when you are, by the standards of your society, disabled.

[dailydefunctmangamagazine]

Monthly IKKI (月刊IKKI) / Shōgakukan (小学館) / Sep 2010 issue

[havendance]

I read the first couple issues of Wonder Woman: Black and Gold and it’s interesting to see how the stories shake out compared to say the Batman: Black and White anthologies. It might be since I read the Wonder Woman anthology more recently so the stories are fresher in my mind, but it feels like it’s easier for authors to write a passable Batman story than Wonder Woman. Like, in the first issue it’s such an interesting mix. We’ve got a story with no passing resemblance to like, any, Wonder Woman canon that I know of that feels like it’s using the characters as stickers or something, a story clearly based on movie canon because Diana’s immortal in it, a story so inspired by comics canon that it’s referencing specific plot points from Rucka’s post crisis run, a light-hearted golden age inspired story, and an origin story for her lasso that lines up with zero existing canon that I know of, but that’s presented as something that may or may not have happened and is otherwise an interesting and well executed story given the constraints. It’s all over the place in terms of who Wonder Woman is.

Compare that with the first issue of the 2020 Batman Black and White anthology and the Batman one has 4 out of 5 stories focused tightly on different foes/aspects of Batman’s past, three of which are written by veteran Batman writers (Dini, Tynion IV, and J H Williams). It’s honestly unusually strong for anthology series. It feels unfair to stack them against eachother. But from what I’ve read other Batman Black and White books, even if the stories are mediocre, they usually feel rooted in Batman and Batman comics (with some exceptions).

I think part of it is the inherent problems that inherently arise with these types of anthology comics (uneven quality, limited space etc), but also does feel like DC’s putting less into the Wonder Woman, both in terms of artistic talent and her having a unified identity.

[volfoss]

i quite honestly cannot stand this book at the moment

[sab-teraa]

Hijabi ban?????? In the democratic republic of South Africa?????????????????? SICK!!