problem loading posts

opens instagram

takes picture

cycles through filters…

…twenty-three times…

can’t pick one

deletes picture

Something i think would help with mental illness awareness…

…and with earlier intervention amd better coping skills is to teach emotional awareness and regulation skills, such as cbt/dbt, in schools. Also teach students where and how to seek help and recognise and deal with general signs of emotional distress in themselves and others.

You are all in so much pain and I care so much and it kills me that I can’t make it go away but i want you to know that i am here and i care and i am thinking of you and in that way at least, you are not alone

Exposure therapy and my problem with it

My physio was trying to push exposure therapy on me for BDD. I know this works for some people and for some forms of OCD, trauma, and phobia, but in some cases, it can make things worse.

Today, I read something that explained this really well.

It’s not simply a case of pushing yourself to experience the fear or relive the trauma associated with your trigger. If you simply relive it in this way, it will re-traumatise you and make you feel worse because you are essentially showing yourself that you will not protect yourself from it and will actually be complicit in inflicting it.

In order for exposure to be therapeutic and not the cause of further damage, you have to be able to connect with a safe ‘anchor’. It is not enough to be told or to know logically that you are in a safe place or have safe people with you. It is necessary that you be able to believe that inside yourself, to really know you have a safe anchor - to know emotionally.

For some people, until they are at that stage, exposure therapy may be at best, useless, and at worst, harmful

I have the same number of followers as I have inbox messages.

It is also a perfect number, divisible by all my favourite numbers and just generally a very pleasing figure.

So can everyone just not follow or message me except in groups of five.

OK good. Thank you.

If I ever took a medication, I would choose Xanax. It has a good symmetrical name.

Also, it starts and ends with an x, which is the roman numeral for ten, which is two fives, and five is the best number in existence in my humble (and correct) opinion.

And ‘X’ is symmetrical, as is ‘A’, and so, almost, is lower-case ‘n’.

Yup, xanax is my drug of choice.

bettyrizz:

mental illness is constantly either demonized or romanticized by society and there is no space in that dichotomy for real people with mental illness to exist without feeling shamed and invalidated and that isn’t fair

(via i-d-k)

Anorexia and autism

My eating disorder has a lot to do with being autistic. It started with a significant person in my life showing me that I had no right to exist. They told me over and over how I was too much in every way. So I literalized it. If I am too much, I must be literally too much, i.e. too large.

This person also criticized and punished/shamed me for every ‘flaw’ they saw in me. So I tried to figure out what the rules were. If I could figure out what was OK and what wasn’t, I could be good enough and not have to feel shame any more. But since the rule was that I could never be good enough, that didn’t work out so well.

I never got that, though. I thought I was just not trying hard enough and not getting the rules strict enough. In the true spirit of autism, I have completely globalized this now. I add new rules to my list every time I meet a new person or learn something new from someone I know about what they consider is/is not acceptable. It’s not just what they say, it’s what I interpret, and as you can imagine, that is often wide of the mark.

So now I have this enormous list of rules I have to adhere to. Many are contradictory, so that one person says something is OK and another says it’s not. In those cases, I am either paralysed, full of anxiety and unable to decide anything, or simply not allowed to even participate in that area of life because I have no idea how to do so in an accepteable way.

When I say ‘acceptable’ BTW, I mean in a way that protects me from feeling this indescribable, crippling shame - the kind of blinding shame that dazzles your brain with a blinding dizzying whiteness that thrusts you into and unbearably heightened awareness of everything painful inside you. It’s like having to stare into your worst pain, the pain you pushed deepest down inside you so that you would never have to even hear a whisper of it again - that shame.

Anyway. So I have all these rules and they have accumulated over years and years. The rules cover literally every tiny aspect of everything I do. I have rules for which hand I use to pick something up, the way I breathe, the way my hair falls on my shoulder, the colour of the pen I use for different things, the length of my shoelaces… Every. Little. Thing.

The trouble is, this has become who I am. I have no idea what I would think or do because there are only the rules. And for many of them, I no longer think about their origins, I just do things that way with the vague awareness that if I don’t, something terrible will happen (the shame I described).

This is why I feel so hopeless. I have done such an awesome job of infecting every last molecule of my existence and thought processes and perception that unraveling it all would take longer than I probably have left on this earth. And yet if I don’t, I won’t get better.

I would like to think that there would be some kind of domino effect so that when I feel unashamed of my fundamental self in the broader sense, the details will iron themselves out and I will find myself just dropping the rule by osmosis. But in truth, the rules have become so distant from their origins that I fear what will actually happen is that it will end up being a lot more complicated.

It makes me very sad that I have so successfully wiped out most of my self before it even had much chance to develop. I wonder how much me there really is under there and I suspect not that much. It’s all such a tangle.

Maybe everyone is a tangle to some degree, but still. When I observe other people with problems, the problems tend to be a lot less globalised. There are still small pockets of themselves in which they have remnants of confidence. They have a very basic level of human confidence.

I can’t explain this very well, but I watch people on youtube and I just sit there astounded at how in certain ways they have this basic ability to be themselves. They aren’t even aware of it, I don’t think, and by most standards, they don’t have a lot of confidence, but I notice.

And I think possibly, this is an autistic thing; possibly what I am observing is the basic confidence someone who’s not autistic develops because they are not baffled by the very fundamental encoding that non-autistic people communicate and perceive the world through. Maybe that is it. I call it confidence, but it’s not the same as self-esteem. It’s more the confidence a native English speaker has in their ability to communicate in English. It’s something they never see, but something a non-native speaker envies and sees  in stark relief.

And here endeth another unfocussed ramble. ;)

I have a nasty feeling that cleaning my braces has turned into another OCD thing :/

I am spending about two and a half hours (at least) cleaning them every day. After I eat anything, I use a waterpik, floss, interdental brushes, and three different toothbrush heads, plus mouthwash.

I’m not actually sure if this is excessive, and I certainly don’t want to stop doing it, but IDK, it seems a little bit much. But I can’t stand the thought of them not being clean enough. I keep imagining all this grossness and bacteria being in them and I hate it. I guess this is more the problem than the time I’m taking.

Eating is just the most disgusting experience and ugh.

Not sure what my point is. Just needed a rant. OK I’m done. Sorry for those wasted forty-three seconds reading this. TTFN.