#why why why why has mental illness and trauma ruined every fucking aspect of my interpersonal relationships

[fagutt]

gets shot

[rainbowwhimsyart]

TRAUMA SURVIVORS DESERVE BETTER (aka I just finished the ADSOM trilogy, and I'm not okay.)

Cw: Suicidality mention, intrusive thoughts, trauma. Also, kinda spoilers for ADSoM trilogy, but I kept it pretty vague. This can be read as a more general critique on how authors/creators often handle characters that have survived terrible trauma.

Okay. This is my take on the ending of A Conjuring of Light. Please note that I am a trauma survivor and an advocate for mental illness stigma reduction and awareness, and that this is where I'm coming from.

My opinion is that to put a character through hell to the point where their trauma has eclipsed all other aspects of their life and then having the answer to this be "well, they finally find peace in death" is pretty fucked up way to frame things for trauma survivors. Particularly when literally nothing that happened to this character is their fault and somehow, despite circumstances that would have easily crushed anyone else, this character survived for long enough to save the fucking world, at great personal cost to themselves, and then? They are just? All used up? Not good for anything else?

And like, my question is, why give a character this super painful redemption arc via brutal flashbacks and extensive character development, just to let them finally give in and give up at the end? And like, everyone knows what's happening and no one stops them? Like it's pretty fucking clear that they are going to kill themselves or just give up and die and no one bats an eyelash? And everyone else just gives up on them? And that's okay!?!?

To me the message that is being communicated here is that some people are so fucked up and damaged that they have literally zero chance at happiness and if they have fulfilled their societal role then they are now worthless and the best they can hope for is peace in death?

Yeah, that's the kind of shit that my intrusive suicidal ideation likes to tell me every day. That I'm too damaged, that I'm too broken, that the most I can hope for is a clean death. That the trauma I've lived through has unfortunately ruined me as a person to the point where I will never be able to find lasting happiness. That I'm only worthwhile and valuable as a person if I have something to contribute to society. That if I have lost my usefulness and ability to contribute, that I am no longer worthwhile and that I no longer deserve love or care or kindness. That the people around me would be sad if I died, but would recognize and understand that sometimes letting someone take themselves out is the kindest thing you can do. That ultimately the world would be a better place if I just give in to the darkness.

I try really hard to fight those thoughts. People that I trust to be honest with me try to remind me that they are not true. But HOLY FUCK is it hard to not believe them when you see that message literally echoed in books and shows. Because obviously other people agree that this is true.

Yes, it's fiction. But for those of us who tend to hyperfixate on things as a means of coping, messages like that can be so fucking damaging.

Also my personal opinion is that it's kind of lazy writing. There are so many more complex and interesting options for what you could do and explore with a character like that. Just letting them give up and die, and letting everyone else give up on them...come on. The entire rest of the series was so fucking good, so I just don't understand why she dropped the ball at the very end?

It just hurts my heart so much. I think that he deserved better. I think that trauma survivors deserve better.

[sheroars95]

The best way I can explain it is imagine being in an emergency, like someone's following you down a dark street at night, but you don't have any access to a phone, police, help, anyone to help or stop it, and the emergency has activated a flight or fight mode, certain receptors are releasing stress hormones and coping hormones and it’s “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” in your head during this DISASTER and your ability to ironically get out of it which is the goal of your brain putting you in JUST SURVIVE THIS mode, is compromised because in a disaster, your body tenses up, you can’t think straight and you just, as mentioned, FIGHT or FLIGHT while feeling extreme peril and hope your clouded, loud and debilitating mind doesn’t land you into a deadly situation..The DISASTER feeling non-anxious folks have during very rare moments of disaster, is an ALL THE TIME feeling, no-exaggerating for anxious people.That’s why so many of us say even getting out of the house is a huge accomplishment. Non-anxious folks, when feeling anxiety for a few minutes or hours once every blue moon during a crisis can’t overcome it, don’t know how to function with it and need help and usually get it. We went through that, and the fear never went away so we learned to function despite that crisis mode. Imagine writing an exam with the same feeling you’d have as if you witnessed a murder. Imagine making small-talk, finding somebody to be with, maintain any sort of a life? To function in an emergency state is hard, but if that emergency state is permanent as in the case of an anxiety disorder, some of us have no choice and some of us make permanent solutions that show everybody else just how hard life can be with anxiety and little compassion for it from society or even those closest to us. So if you don’t have an anxiety disorder and think back to when you had a crisis and how scatter-brained and not yourself you were until a solution was found, and you barely handled the maximum couple days of excruciating stress you had, imagine how much strength anxious people have for not only handling A LIFETIME or since-trauma of time until death of THAT EXACT DEAFENING CRIPPLING FEAR feeling. There isn’t a situation to be fixed, situational anxiety is human: and that may be the worst part. Imagine in that mindset, doing anything let alone getting an education, having friends, having a relationship: basic life expectations are milestones for the anxious because, as mentioned, to be above ‘just making it through the terror’ is defying physical, chemical wiring saying ‘no, you will hide or run and not advance in life’ with actions, because anxiety tells us how to feel and if we can’t act opposite to how we feel, it would take us under.Achieving things is hard when you’re just focusing on surviving today and not killing yourself over the limitations anxiety has on your life which depress you: just fucking stop hating on anxious people for 'just not getting a job,'  'being inside all day' ,'being lazy':imagine if during a crisis you were asked to socialize? Enroll in classes? Work from morning to night? You wouldn’t be able to at all if anxiety hadn’t become a frenemy you learned to eventually live with. So when an anxious person AVOIDS triggers, because we can never fully have assurance as our anxiety is not situational which would be fixed with a solution, or a crisis-state which ends with eventual relief, we can experience less anxiety, but it never goes away. If not socializing until we are able to helps us handle life, at least we are not driving ourselves insane and ruining our lives pushing ourselves to do that which OUR DISORDERS DO NOT ALLOW. If we have to plan our lives around avoiding panic attacks because anxiety is inevitable, and our brain chemistries or PTSD, other disorders have to be accomodated like any other illness, who the fuck are you unless you have this to deal with, to judge? If you were a diabetic not scheduling your life, plans, choices around what you can and cannot do because of it, you’d probably end up really doing some damage. So yes, we also wish hanging out with us was more fun and we could just ‘stop being anxious’ or depressed for a bit so you could have a good time, or so we could enjoy our own damn lives but it does not work that way. WE SUFFER ALL THE TIME how non-anxious people have experienced rarely and were given all the comfort in the world to recover from it swiftly and keep leading normal lives.Lucky bastards!

Anxiety feels how non-anxiety disordered people do when they're nervous (first dates, interviews, rollercoasters, first day of school, driving for the first time) but non-stop, always. Try thinking and planning your life, making good choices, even talking, if you felt like you were about to miss the only bus coming in 5 hours and had to run to it- you can't talk to anyone, get out your phone, take a break- you're just trying to make it through and settle that fear by conquering it. Thing is, anxiety is a disorder, there is not a situational reason, but a chemical response luckily non-disordered people don't have triggered all the time and it is diagnosed as a disorder, not exagerrated as 'nervousness' because it affects social, personal, professional and all aspects of a person's life negatively. So please understand if your anxious friend doesn't keep plans, goes away for a while, any of that, they're doing their best and fuck, I have seen many good people lose their lives because living with this supposedly common and 'not a big deal' mental illness is too underexaggerated in terms of pain, and it's one of those things you suffer alone. The depression resulting from the isolating nature of an anxiety disorder is the worst and I don't care if you're ignorant enough to believe every human's experience of depression and anxiety at some points is what having an actual disorder is like, but I've read too many obituaries of my fucking friends because of exactly that.I had someone taking Psychology who used to be my best friend tell me my depression was 'too negative' for her when I was having an incredibly hard time. With anxiety you can't really ask for help unless something bad, which is exactly what we're anxious about happening, happens, otherwise it's like "hello friend? i have an anxiety disorder and am anxious can you please be there for me as you would always have to be because I will always be anxious?" and eventually you realize you're a burden, no one wants to hear how hard life is for you and you lose the desire to share any of your experiences, because they're all bad,lmao.Basically, if you don't get a mental illness or disease that the DSM-IV classifies as such and people who have medical degrees can diagnose, it is not 'a trend', too common to be serious and respect it as any illness and educate yourself about how to not worsen the symptoms in those who have it because one day you might witness something unforgettable that makes the world turns bright and crack into other experiences you may have had before , which felt just as horrible, and the PTSD nightmares will have you waking up in cold sweats and during the dy you'll be checking behind you, making sure that it won't happen again and everything will seem like a trigger letting you know IT WILL HAPPEN again and when you experience anxiety, which is common because TRAUMAS CAUSE ANXIETY even in non-anxious-disordered people....that's what happened to me...you will have the sympathy and love of people who can help you because you were kind to their anxiety and they can save you through yours. It's like a little community where we hate everyone else but find out you feel that way too? Come here nugget! You know? So just know that's what it's like and anyone can get it-it's the mental cancer we treat like a trend instead of an epidemic which is fuckkkked.. TAKE ANXIETY SERIOUSLY PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES OVER IT OR SOMETIMES IT LEADS TO WORSE MENTAL STATES AND PEOPLE DO EVER WORSE THINGS SO TAKE IT FUCKING SERIOUSLY AND DON'T SUGGEST DEEP BREATHS BECAUSE YOU WERE NERVOUS ONCE AND THAT HELPED.

Obviously this post is directed to a specific sort of ignorant bastard and all of us who are fed up with this bullshit. 

  #stopbeingignorant #anxiety is worth accommodating #dontbeadick

[observationsofanislandgirl-blog]

On cow grief

It’s just one of those days. I felt sick all last night, having semi fallen victim to the bug that has kept my parents awake and coughing for the major part of the past several nights. 

Since I don’t start work at a particular time, I stayed in bed a bit longer to catch up on some rest and find some inspiration for the day. I walked out to find Mum taking down the Christmas decorations and telling me that the baby cow had died. Maybe he was weak, she was told, and had an infection as well as his poorly formed front legs. It was glad you got a picture, he was beautiful. She gives me a hug as I burst into tears, and I’m surprised at myself. I like to think of myself as fairly tough when it comes to aspects of country life. I’ve looked after or helped neighbours look after sick or injured animals, with varying levels of success. I’ve seen the light go out of tiny creatures’ eyes and felt that odd twist deep in my chest at the irreversible nature of it all. There was a kookaburra that I hit with the car as I was driving down the road once. Panicked, I wrapped it up in a scarf and brought the rather dazed-looking bird back home. Mum and Dad made him a home in the little garden shed, away from our cat, and cooked some delicious-smelling meat scraps for him to eat. The next day, cured of concussion and general what-the-hell-just-happened, he was flying around in the trees with his kookaburra mates. There was also a cow who had what looked like a huge pimple on her eye. At the same time, she had begun showing signs that she was in calf. That pimple, with frightening speed, progressed into a hideous, foul, weeping cancer that consumed her entire eyeball, and you could smell its rotting meat odour from metres away. A few months later, a beautiful calf was born, and occasionally I’d sit with them up in the bush as she gently looked after it. She was tame and didn’t mind me about, but sometimes she decided that they needed to be alone and would prod the baby with her nose, the two of them walking off into the trees. She’s probably in pain, I thought, but she knows what to do. Her baby is well looked after. A little while later, once the calf was eating grass instead of milk, our neighbour - their owner - shot her and buried her on the property. 

I tell myself that I saw the signs with the New Year calf. I did, but chose not to think about them. Whenever I happened to walk past, he was curled up on the ground asleep. I’ve seen enough calves grow up to know that although they nap often, they also spend a huge amount of their time happily exploring the new world and having a big old suck on Mum’s teats, using her milk to rapidly grow bigger and stronger. This little fella barely nursed and spent most of his time lying listlessly on his side, heaven knows what was making him ill or causing him pain. I tell myself it’s for the better. If he had an infection, that would have been terrible, so I hope it was quick. 

I’ve got the window open as I download the audio to work for the next five or six hours. It breaks my heart to hear the mum cow bellow. I’m not sure if cattle grieve. There is a butcher who lives nearby and does his job by visiting the property and slaughtering an animal where it stands in the field - this is a good thing because it avoids a long and traumatic truck ride to a filthy slaughterhouse. It’s a morbid scene to witness, however, as a newly dead cow is strung up with its soft fur lying in a pelt on the ground, and all its herd just stand around quietly and watch. These are generally brothers and sisters and cousins, or sometimes randoms who just get bought and put into a herd. In the natural world, mums and babies are often different. I can’t help but feel that the mother cow is confused right now, and she’s mooing to try and find her little one, probably in the instinct that he’s wandered off. I decide not to go out and investigate because it will only make my mood worse. 

Why am I upset over two animals that are a) not mine and b) not pets in the first place? They would only have stayed on the property a few years before being killed for meat. I still eat meat myself. It’s hypocritical to feel this way. I put it down to being run down and having that ruin my mood. Research has shown, with increasing sureness, the link between inflammation and depression. Inflammation occurs when the body is trying to heal itself from invaders, whether that’s a virus, or a bacterium, or just a poor lifestyle in general. I’m a prime candidate for that right now and certainly feeling it, not physically, but mentally. Shit just ain’t fun today. Christmas is over for another year, and what a fucking doozy of a Christmas it was. Family illness managed to ruin pretty much every attempt at having a good time. I was going through what I guess one looks back on as a quarter-life crisis, and two weeks ago already feels like a lifetime away.

We’ve decided that once we’re all over this godforsaken lung complaint, we’re going to do a belated New Year’s celebration barbecue outside. It seems fitting; it’s only early in the month still, and everyone was either away or sick on the day itself, and the ones who were around managed to spread their crap mood to everyone else. There’s no point moping about the past.

                                                           - - - 

It’s now ten in the evening and Mama cow is still calling out for her baby. I still want to cry when I hear her. She’s sent out her call since late last night. Call it instinct, or call it grief, it hurts to hear it. I’m not sure how cow memories work (is anyone?) but I’m hoping that by tomorrow, she’s forgotten the trauma of the past twenty-four hours, and it will just be another beautiful summer day.