Tag: mental illness

nientedal:

mintedpotters:

justavpdthings:

justavpdthings:

I once said to my therapist after a particularly hard week, “I wish I could just fix all of my problems and move on to live a normal life”
And he looked at me and said, “There is no finish line”.

Those words felt like a stab in my heart, but they were words that I desperately needed to hear. There is no finish line to my problems. It’s not possible to get through a certain point in life and have my problems simply disappear. And it’s unhealthy to think that way. Up to that point in my life, that’s what I though recovery was. I thought it was like working your way forward until it seems like your problems never existed in the first place.

The finish line does not exist. Instead, everyone has a capacity for recovery. You may never completely rid yourself of whatever causes you pain, but you will move miles from where you started. Don’t set your expectations too high and create that theoretical finish line in your life, or you will only end up chasing it. Instead, focus on your own capacity for recovery, and be proud of yourself for every step you take.

Just saw Eighth Grade and reblogging the heck out of this bc wow it gets so much better if you just take it one step at a time

Okay but I cant help but hear “there is no finish line” and immediately respond with “then why am i running the race?” What is the point*? Where is the benefit of putting in the effort if its not going to ever end? If i am always going to battle I would rather just give up the fight.

*(Im not saying recovery is bad or whatever ppl wanna reach for, this is my personal view)

That’s the thing, though: it’s not a race. It’s a garden.

No matter what your garden looks like in the beginning, you have to weed it before it can grow into what you want it to be. And when your flowers are planted and growing, you still have to keep up with the weeding. You have to keep up with the weeding even after your flowers are tall. A garden can’t survive on its own. There will always be weeds.

But there will be flowers, too, if you give them space to grow. Give them room, give them time, and keep checking in to make sure the weeds don’t get too tall. You will always have weeds, but you will also have flowers.

And maybe your garden doesn’t look exactly like you imagined it would. Maybe you aren’t sure how to get rid of that one big thistle in the corner. Maybe you’ve got bindweed and nutgrass (which will always, always come back). Either way, you’ve got flowers now, and it’s a nice place to sit and look around, and it looks nicer than it did before, and it’s yours. Keep going with it. If you miss a few days, or months, or years, that’s okay. Pull up the weeds when you’re ready, uncover your old flowers and plant some new ones, and keep going.

Gardening is a process, not a project or a problem that can be solved. The same is true for your mental health. Weeds will grow, but you’ll get better and better at pulling them, and you’ll grow flowers, too.

xenoqueer:

ashestoashesjc:

hyperdragon97:

goingrampant:

cloudfreed:

30-minute-memes:

A psychiatrist specialized in gamers

This is supposed to be humorous, but if it works to keep him alive, then it works. 

Sometimes preventing suicide simply means reminding people that there are things worth living for and that is anything that makes you happy. 

Halo 3 was really important for me in this way. I had to finish the fight.

Half-Life 3?

grants you immortality

Having shit to look forward to is absolutely the way people stay alive.

All people.

Like, it’s scientifically proven.

Having concrete anticipations also gives you a solid reference point against which you can check your mental health status.

The way I knew I had slipped from morbid ideation to suicide risk was when I realized that the release date of kingdom hearts 3 wasn’t enough to make me leave a bottle of hydrocodone alone. The moment of recognition that something I had been dreaming of for 14 years wasn’t enough motivation to make it through the night was how I knew I needed an intervention.

Video games just happen to have concerts dates and strong reactions from people. They’re an excellent and accessible tool.

boopifer:

eevee-nicks:

biglawbear:

eevee-nicks:

biglawbear:

This is so real, honestly I’m just trying to make it to play Kingdom Hearts III

Years ago when my PTSD/depression was really bad I always made sure I had some kind of cookie dough or cookie dough mix in the house. And then if it escalated and I got the impulse to kill myself, I’d start baking cookies instead. And then I couldn’t do it because the cookies were baking. And once the whole process of preparing the dough, preheating the oven, baking the cookies, and letting them cool was over usually at least half and hour had passed and my meds had kicked in and I’d be like “well I guess I have to live now because I have freshly baked delicious cookies.” And then I’d just snack on suicide cookies a little bit at a time for the rest of the week and weirdly enough it helped.

This is brilliant. I need to do this. I love baking so much. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. I should make a fuckton of cookie dough and freeze it. I also need a recipe for perfect freezable “suicide cookies” because that’s just the perfect dark millennial humor that tickles me.

I’m glad you like this idea because I always want to tell people about the concept of “suicide cookies” (or really any kind of physical self harm cookies) but not everyone has my fucked up sense of humor and I worry about offending people by accident.

College me was like this with cupcakes. I’d bake cupcakes. All the cupcakes. I’d have so many cupcakes I’d be giving them away, and it was always lovely to see how happy people were when I have them cupcakes, because something nice came out of some of my darkest moments. 

rabbitindisguise:

tatterdemalionamberite:

dimestore-duchess:

Pro-tip for Autistics

When I’m out and about and need to escape being overwhelmed with noise, light, or socializing, and the people I’m with don’t know I’m autistic, I don’t tell them that I’m heading towards a meltdown or am experiencing sensory overload.

I tell them I’m getting a migraine.

Meltdowns and migraines are, from my understanding, neurologically similar events, and for me they often go hand in hand– if I get one, it’s a signal to me that I’m likely to get the other pretty soon and need to take care of myself. The remedy is the same: removing myself from the situation and retreating to a dark, quiet room.

The difference is that NTs often don’t understand and simply dismiss sensory overload if you explain it to them as such, but nearly all of them understand what a migraine is and sympathize. 99% of the time, if I tell a NT that I have a migraine or am about to get one, they treat it as an emergency and help me get away from the source of the overload as quickly as possible. I am then free to recover in a quiet, dark place without anyone trying to invalidate my needs, forcing me to “tough it out”, or thinking that I’m rude for having to leave or to outright avoid certain events or situations in the first place.

Endorsed.

One of my partners gets seizures of the kind that disrupt sensory perceptions and cognition without being visible from the outside: we just call ‘em migraines sometimes for similar reasons.

If you do get actual migraines, it isn’t much of a stretch of the truth to say you’re getting one when you’re going to be getting one shortly.

But if you don’t, and you have a state of incapacity that requires roughly the same care? You totally have my permission as a bona fide migraine sufferer to just call it a damn migraine.

There is nothing wrong with providing a rough shorthand description to a stranger. You don’t owe any random person your full medical history, especially when you’re not in a state to be able to explain it!

… Oh. I thought migraines and overload were coincidentally overlapping. This explains a lot, actually.