#obvs geared more towards systems than outsiders

[kkoct-ik]

kottik i think ive already said it before but i SO so appreciate your perspective and attention to detail with dissociative stuff. trying to wade through scattered info on the internet for reliable resources feels like an impossible task sometimes lol so having the DID writing guide + your alter worksheet definitely helps a lot! 

feedback on the guide itself: i loved it!!! the only parts i didn’t personally find relatable were the parts discussing later stages of healing/recovery (since im not quite there yet) and some of the functional neurological symptoms, but everything else felt like it was describing my own journey and experiences with DID perfectly. i also really appreciated the section on amnesia and different types of dissociation, plus the lesser known symptoms, since a lot of the time i see conflicting and confusing info on that + i feel like a lot of writers who try to write DID and describe how amnesia feels miss out on that stuff and just skim webmd or something for their info. and honestly even in online And offline discussions of DID ive seen other people try to describe how it really works and feels and its… not always described well lmao . but that’s a whole other can of worms etc

i think, though it’s just a writing resource, it was also very affirming to see it all laid out like that. like Oh shit yeah i do all of that. that’s my life on the page!!! the whole time i read it i was like ‘i knew this stuff already, but i never knew how to explain it properly.’ and it’s definitely the kind of thing i wish id been able to see when i first started noticing my symptoms. many years of misinfo and confusion have messed w my perception of myself n my disorder for a long time so it feels like a breath of fresh air to see someone else pushing against that and actually doing their research to try and clear things up. not to mention how clear your descriptions are + how easy it is to comprehend your explanations, while still being concise and to the point. so great work!!! 5 star rating, will definitely be recommending it to others :3 hope to see more from you + hope that it helps others write cool stuff!

i missed this ask!!!! sorry for missing this yesterday

thank you!!!!!! mwa mwa mwa. im so glad. so happy yaaaay

yeah, i definitely relate with the struggling to articulate experiences, being muddled by things online, and feeling like other people really dont quite get it when trying to represent whats going on. it makes me happy i can help with that!!

i feel like i'm in a good place that i've read a Lot of DID & CPTSD lit and i've been stabilising in treatment (processing some stuff, working on myself, getting a better understanding of therapy practice). i think it's given me a lot of perspective on my disorder that i wouldn't really have otherwise, and that a lot of people might not have either.

(rambling...)

cuz yeah. i think trying to understand DID on the internet is a monumentously difficult task. on one hand, you have personal accounts from people with DID, and on the other, you have doctors and generic websites. both don't quite give a full or reliable picture.

if you try to understand DID by listening to individuals, you're vulnerable to being incredibly confused and misled. and most of the time it's not intentional - it's hard to communicate what your symptoms are when you think half of it is normal and the other half is conflicted and fragmented - but it can give others very strange ideas about what the condition operates like at large.

it might also seem respectful to take everything we say at face value, but that ends up meaning that our flawed / misguided perceptions of ourselves and our symptoms become solidified as fact. we are mentally ill, we are not necessarily educated, and are a patient base prone to daydreaming and suggestion. we can get things wrong, and we can emphasise the wrong things.

when people take our unreliable accounts as fact (vivid recounts of psuedomemories, venting about feeling like seperate people, or expressing any number of mistaken symptoms), our experiences can start to sound like fantasy. suddenly DID sounds like a disorder you could not fathom having or ever truly understand, rather than a disorder that is simply inherently confusing to live with.

that said, if you try to avoid that by learning about DID soley through medical accounts and websites, you will only ever hear about reported symptoms, the most extreme & notable case studies, patient observations, and generic criteria, leaving a Lot to fill in the gaps (when you try to deduce what it feels like to live with it / be in our brains), that leads to other kinds of inaccuracies.

(for my health i'm not even going to try to touch on hollywood and online influencers that sensationalise the condition for clicks and thus dominate the algorithm. but obviously they are a factor too. pop culture is a powerful thing.)

the internet is a mess! and while not everything that is misleading is untrue, it can be very easy to just, not quite get it, or misunderstand things fundamentally, in any number of ways.

so yeah, it makes me happy that between my life experience, therapy, and obnoxious amount of pages read, i can actually make what goes on somewhat digestible. i want to help contextualise medical criteria, pull out relevant snippets, and point people to some really good resources.

it's not to say i'm a spokesperson or expert. i am very much just a huge nerd who happens to suffer from a disorder and is very invested in understanding myself. but the positive feedback does reassure me that i haven't gotten anything heinously wrong.

ty again :)) yaayy

[hooksforeverything]

Study: soil 1.2

What did I once read about sunflowers pulling poisons out of earth?

I know it was on paper and in my school days so I suspect it was in New Scientist or Scientific American, but a search for ‘sunflowers toxins earth’ gives me the keywords phytoremediation and (specifically for metals) hyperaccumulator.

“Hyperaccumulating plants can contain more than 1% of a metal in their dry biomass. For example, the hyperaccumulating plant Berkheya coddii was found to contain as much as 3.8% of Ni in the dry, aboveground biomass, when grown in contaminated soil. It is possible to extract metals from the harvested biomass in a process termed phytomining.” DUDE. THIS HAD NEVER OCCURRED TO ME AND I LOVE IT.

What does too much ‘organic matter’ do to a plant

https://www.gardenmyths.com/compost-is-it-poisoning-your-garden/ is pretty clear on the matter: it’s about the NPK ratio. Many plants need less phosphorus than the other two, and phosphorus doesn’t wash away like the other two but sits around year on year while you add npk after npk.

But wait. We mine phosphorus. From rock. It’s a limited resource.

ttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus says so. “Perennial vegetation, such as grassland or forest, is much more efficient in its use of phosphate than arable land. Strips of grassland and or forest between arable land and rivers can greatly reduce losses of phosphate and other nutrients.”

And in case you weren’t already getting a headache: “the current system of manure management is not logistically geared towards application to crop fields on a large scale. At present, manure application could not meet the phosphorus needs of large scale agriculture.”

What’s wrong with that compressed coir stuff?

https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-coir-1403141 says not much is wrong with it at all. It’s renewable because it’s made from shaved coconuts, it’s light and fluffy so seedlings and growing roots don’t have to work too hard to shove it aside. It doesn’t, of itself, have much nutrition in it, and because it’s so light a liquid fertilizer would probably drop straight through it like prunes through a short grandmother. But it’s great for starting seeds, because they already contain the energy they need to throw their first leaves and after that they can make sugars, obvs.

Why is it N for leaves?

How neat! This is a perfect segue: they need nitrogen to make chlorophyll! And as they make more chlorophyll, they make more leaf surface area to use it in. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroplast

Excess nitrogen gives excess green growth at the expense of flowers (and therefore fruit). It will also “increase the soil’s mineral salts; excessive elemental nitrogen takes water away from the plant while leaving the salts behind. As a result, the leaves take on a burnt look from dehydration.” – https://homeguides.sfgate.com/effects-much-nitrogen-plants-43755.html

Why is it P for roots and flowers?

It isn’t, and gosh, these people feel strongly about the sales pitch that it is: https://www.gardenmyths.com/bloom-booster-fertilizer-nonsense/

I massively don’t understand the details of this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosynthesis but phosphates are involved at every stage of complicating sugars, and P is in fatty acids?

Why is it K for stems?

Hmm, this may have been another oversimplification: “The main role of potassium is to provide the ionic environment for metabolic processes” And then I add the word ‘phloem’ into my searches and everything suddenly gets a lot more polysyllabic: I very suddenly stop understanding the abstract of this paper between the sixth and seventh sentence. 

Find a summary of crop rotation.

Phew, this is easier. https://www.allotment-garden.org/crop-rotation/three-year-crop-rotation-plan/ brassicas and beans AFTER roots and potatoes, is the main point. If you have more time or more space, roots after brassicas after beans after potatoes. The site assumes you’ll be adding a lot of soil modifications in, though, which I genuinely thought rotation was instead of. 

Find a summary of organic certification.

https://www.soilassociation.org/standards/ send you through an unusual number of links and pages and I very uncharitably think that it might be in order to make it seem more difficult than it needs to be so that you pay a professional to handle it for you, like tax. I naively expected it to be ‘no synthesized treatments or interventions’ or something simple like that.

I did find this: “In the UK you do not need certification if you only sell organic products directly to the final consumer or user provided that you do not produce, prepare, store organic products other than in relation to the point of sale or import such products from outside the EU or have not contracted out such activities. In other EU countries certification may be required for these activities.”

And this: https://www.organicxseeds.co.uk is THE complete list of seeds supplied by companies that have acquired organic certification for those seeds. 

What connects those answers?

Plants have been managing themselves long, long, long before cave people decided to grow them in places that were convenient for us. Plants will compensate their growth in ways that make it more likely that they’ll outlive the unfavourable circumstances: they’ll wait out excess heat or cold or water or, I dunno, deer. It’s the minimal intervention principle, innit.