Aretreia Studies

Regarding general inaccessibility:

Medicine is not friendly to disability, period. Signed, a disabled doctor.

Because medicine is hostile toward disabled doctors/students, we haven't placed much focus on finding ways to arrange accommodations for doctors, normalizing asking for accommodations, or viewing disability as anything other than a red flag that gets your application side-eyed. Medical training, as I will discuss below, is a really inhumane process sometimes. The things that are physically and emotionally expected of people are simply not survivable for people with various types of illnesses or disabilities. The people making decisions about who gets accepted to school and who doesn't take this into account. Anyone who says "no they don't!" or "that's not legal!" can message me directly. Again, signed, a disabled doctor who was questioned at length about it when applying to school and residency.

The end result is that many disabled would-be doctors get pushed out of the field early, already skewing practitioners toward people who are generally healthier and able bodied, and therefore less empathetic toward the disabled and chronically ill.

Quick side note before I go on: Even though the structure of training and practice is not disability-friendly, that doesn't mean disabled doctors don't make it through or that doctors who start off healthy/able-bodied cannot become ill or disabled later. There is an odd view that we are inhuman robots who do not understand or experience poor health ever, which worsens ableist expectations of medical practitioners and trainees & the overall problem here.

Due to inaccessibility and discouragement during the selection process, we are already starting with a sample of healthier-than-average people. Then the training and practice itself just kind of squeezes the remaining empathy out of people. Some of that is necessary. If I felt the full force of empathy for every patient who hurt, who cried, who died, I would not be able to walk out of the room and deal with the next patient. But even then, it isn't that I don't FEEL the emotions - I just compartmentalize them, deal with them later, when people don't immediately need me. The problem comes when the superhuman expectations on trainees and practitioners makes you so jaded that your ability to feel these emotions at all gets damaged.

It is...hard to feel sympathetic toward a patient with a chief complaint of "tiredness" when you are on day 14 of a stretch of 12 hour shifts, but also had to cover a 24 last night in which you were up all night running code blues, and now have morning clinic office hours. It's hard to be sympathetic towards another's depression when you haven't slept normally in weeks, haven't spent any time with your family in as long, have lost all your friends, missed most weddings/birthdays/funerals in the family for years, and have sacrificed most if not all hobbies (all of these things are common especially in residency). I have seen residents and doctors go through some really inhumane things, especially during residency training, and it absolutely changes you when the people around you care so little for your needs. Cries for help are often met with professional concerns for your ability to continue. Medicine teaches us that our suffering does not matter, needing help is weakness, & stoicism is necessary, so when we see our patients come to us for help for things that we also experience, it is really, really easy to feel bitter toward them. It is WRONG, of course, but easy. People are just people.

I can say both anecdotally and from personal experience: the lifestyle balance can improve, if you seek it out, after residency, but the years of being treated like a robot and the "tough it out" mindset that was hammered into our heads during that time doesn't just go away, and it impacts the way we communicate with and think about patients forever.

Side note 2: Obviously not every doctor has had experiences like the above, but it is really common, and was much worse in the older generations of doctors. Obviously not every doctor has been so deeply affected to the point of bitterness. I am just discussing in broad strokes some common things I have heard, seen, and personally experienced among myself and my colleagues.

Regarding the shift & work hours, specifically:

People who support long shifts can generally be divided into 2 camps: the "this is how I trained so you will too/it builds character/if you can't handle this you can't handle medicine" camp, which can be immediately disregarded as an appeal to authority and tradition, and the "frequent care transitions are dangerous to patients" camp, which deserves discussion.

When a doctor goes off shift and a new one comes on to take their place, a transition of care occurs. All the important information about a patient has to be quickly communicated between providers. Information gets lost because human communication is never perfect. Due to this, deceasing the number of transitions between doctors per day is best for patient care.

Doing the more standard 8 hour shifts (in hospitals, anyway) would mean having 3 doctors working that day and require 2 trade offs. This means employing (and therefore paying) more people, and increases risk of information loss or miscommunication during the day.

In the inpatient setting, I really think 12 hour shifts are fine. You can have a day and night shift doc, 1 transition. This issue I have is not with 12 hour shifts themselves, but that people are sometimes expected to work way too many in a row. I have had to do 14+ days of 12s without any breaks, and that wears you down fast when you consider how mentally exhausting this type of work is. You have to always be at your best or you could kill someone.

I think 24+ hour shifts should never happen. There is no good justification for it outside of true emergencies. The risk of hand offs is not greater than the risk of a sleep deprived doctor caring for you. We know way too much about how sleep deprivation works for any good doctor to feel this is ethical for their patients, who often have no idea just how little sleep we have got when they agree to be under our care. Our patients deserve so much better than this dishonesty and it should be considered equivalent in unprofessionalism to coming into work drunk or high. I once was in a trauma surgery where one of the residents actually dozed off while standing over the patient. Explain to me how that was safer than calling in another resident.

People like to say the long hours or multiple days/weeks without relief is a necessary part of medicine. It isn't. The problem could be improved by creating more doctors to meet demand. This would mean entirely revamping the medical school + residency process and creating more positions. Physician salaries would end up lower, but who cares if by increasing med school accessibility we lower its cost, so we don't all have 3-400K in student loan debt that necessitates high salaries to manage, and are not so bitter and sleep deprived that our divorce rate is like 70-80% and suicide rate is ridiculously high? We need a greater push in the culture of medicine to prioritize physical and mental well being of trainees and doctors so we aren't churning out people whose empathy has been burned out of them. We need a greater culture change to find ways to accommodate doctors with disabilities, to get more perspectives in the field and to force the issue of improving work-life balance in medicine.

That is really over simplified in terms of a solution, of course.

—

Curious Georgiana (via grrrlstudies)

I know I’ve reblogged this before, but it bears re-reblogging (?).  This is how you respond to abuse, this is how you give people control over their bodies/uteruses, this is how you act as a generally non-judgmental and compassionate person.  I love this story so fucking much.

Sometimes, you are your own caregiver. Isn’t that a job even when you are the one doing it? When people can’t pay someone else to do it, they have to be their own caregivers, providers, emotional support, all in one, all while feeling sick, on your own.

Being sick and trying to heal, trying to care for your body and keep yourself alive when you already are in pain and exhausted… that is hard work.

People who are sick or disabled are not useless. They are working so hard just to get out of bed. We could use some compassion. Our worth is not measured by work. Our worth comes from the fact that we are all human, no matter how we look, how we feel, if we’re healthy or sick, none of this diminishes your humanity, your human rights - and every human being deserves equal treatment.

Remember this: you are not lazy, you are sick. You are not useless; you are in recovery. You are not unproductive; you are trying your best to live your life while dealing with your health all the time. See the effort it takes to be you. And appreciate the things you do for yourself, be proud of you because you are still going. You are still here, still alive, and those ableist people don’t want to see any value in people unless they are making money. See your own worth. Don’t let some ableist person who knows nothing about your life determine your own self-worth. Your self-worth should come from within, and to start building it, try giving yourself credit for how much you try instead of being so critical of everything you do!

Go get your rest, go searching for recovery, try to heal, try to build your own life and your own sense of self. You have been battling these issues for so long, give yourself some credit for how much you overcame. For how much you fight. For how much you try. For the time you take to care for your health.

helloooo today i finally had a meeting with the disability office and have accommodations after 2 years of being in college without them. im autistic and have cptsd/dissociative issues and had a hard time finding what was even available to me to request for accommodations so i wanted to make a list to help anyone else who might be having trouble.

• Priority registration

i get to register for classes earlier each term to make sure i can create schedules that’ll work for my routine

• Extended time on assignments

self explanatory i think? was also offered extended time on tests or a separate room to take them but testing isnt where i struggle

• Flexible attendance

as long as i email beforehand i dont have to stick as strictly to professors attendance policies

• Alternative formats

if i buy a physical textbook i can request the ebook/pdf/audiobook for free to have multiple methods of studying depending on what works for me on a given day

• Note taking

allowed to audio record class and send to a service called messenger pigeon who will give me a transcript of the class and professional notes based on it

• Access to lecture notes

able to access professors lecture notes prior to class/instruction

• Devices

allowed to have phone/ipad/laptop for social buffering and notes in classes that may have policies against electronics

• Flexible participation

no cold calling, option to work alone for group projects/assignments, not required to present in front of class

if anyone has any questions lmk these are just what i have been able to get at my school so far! hope it helps

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

cw: rape and racism

Dracula's got some really fucked up narrative motifs explicit statements about the sexual violence of foreigners and how it corrupts white women and how the offspring of their unions spreads like a plague. It's really, really fucked up.

With that said.

The other half of how Bram Stoker handles sexual assault is a balm on my soul. Because it's not perfect by our standards, but it's Victorian era commentary on sexual assault which doesn't pull on Freud. It's really clear that instead Stoker is pulling on the research of doctors of the day who were investigating women's 'hysteria' (specifically, freezing up, panicking, hyperventilating, having flashbacks, becoming angry/defensive, fleeing, etc, when stripped and vulnerable in the presence of male medical practitioners, or more generally when interacting with men) as, for the first time in a very long time, the post traumatic stress symptoms of sexual assault and society-wide sexual harassment.

Mina's reactions to being fed upon by Dracula and forced to drink is blood might as well be a (then) textbook example of sexual assault trauma. This isn't Freud's monstrous ideas that blamed women for their assaults when he didn't outright dismiss them as hallucinated fantasies, but the ideas of his predecessors who tried to understand and help these women. The book is even explicit, really explicit, that talking about her experience with trusted friends, and not being treated as if she's a frail weakly who can't engage with her own traumatic experience, is what Mina needs. And that's exactly the kind of thing these early proto-therapists were championing, as they realized that letting these women talk about their experiences in safe environments reduced their symptoms.

Now again, Stoker's doing some pretty ugly fucking racism in his October 3rd section, make no mistake.

But with respect to the women's experience of sexual assault he's trying to portray? He's doing literally the best and most considerate depiction that would have been possible at the time. He's pulling on research that was very heavily associated with feminist movements at the time, and controversially so, to depict the grief and trauma of a woman who's been raped. And in the process he gives people a template for how to help such women which would have been controversial and strongly counter to common assumptions, but would have been far better than the code of silence and repression that existed around such matters in Victorian England.

I have been angry for so long at Freud, how he deliberately covered up an epidemic of incestuous rape among well-to-do English households with his Oedipus theory, and how he set the field of talk therapy back decades in the process, that it's easy to forget the good things which were happening at that time. That before Freud, doctors were starting to acknowledge women's trauma with regards to sexual abuse and learning to treat it well. That this must have helped so many women.

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.

I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.

But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.

And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.

It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.

But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”

Do you closely follow Lolita’s fate? I feel obliged to keep up with the destiny of Lolita. After all, people stop me on the street and ask me to comment on opinions. So I have to know what is being said about me. Lolita is an indictment of all the things it expresses. It is a pathetic book dealing with the plight of a child, a very ordinary little girl, caught up by a disgusting and cruel man….But of all my books, I like it the best. The last bone always tastes best.

Nabokov…predicted: “Those who keep looking for spicy bits will not find them. They will not be able to read the book through—they will get bored too soon. The only thing that might be attractive is the diary H.H. keeps. And then, who would be attracted by a 12-year-old girl?"

Vera Nabokov…refilled his glass. “Tell them about the child,” she said. “Oh, yes. I am rather bitter about this. I am in favor of childhood—in fact the very first book I ever did was a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. Anyway, a few nights ago, on Goblin night, a little girl—she was 8 or 9 I think—came to the door for candy. And she was dressed up as Lolita, with a tennis racquet and a pony tail, and a sign reading l-o-l-i-t-a. I was shocked.”

I really wish the first interpretation never existed. I wish the author's naivete over expecting utter shock and disgust from everyone wasn't naivete but how society really is.

I don't believe censorship is the solution, but I do think such books should be restricted to the classroom with a good learning structure so as to give people context, or at least they should be released with additional commentary so a new reader can understand the entire context.

As frustrating as it is that people read things "the wrong way," and they do, and they always will, making sure people "read the book in the correct and approved way and take away the correct and approved meaning" is... not a thing that should ever be hoped for.

Anytime you say "make sure" or "must" about reading, it's a form of enforcing one way of consuming books, and that's a bit of backhanded enforcement of correct opinions. If someone wants to read the book and never talk to anyone about it? That is one of many "correct" ways to read the book.

And the thing is... even when we're talking about something like Lolita, where there is definitely a wrong way to read the book, people are allowed to be wrong about art. Yes, even this art. Yes, even this book. They have to be allowed to be wrong about art, because the minute that you start trying to force people to observe the Correct Way of consuming art or thinking about it, you aren't just doing a big ol' censorship, you're holding the door open and yelling "QUICK, ALL YOU BAD ACTORS! I'VE JUST MADE IT OKAY TO MANDATE CORRECT OPINIONS ABOUT ART! QUICKLY, COME BAN ALL THE ART YOU DON'T LIKE!"

And that always, always lands on marginalized artists first, last, and hardest.

So, yeah, a robust community with the option to join into meaningful discussion about what you're reading? Super great. Super awesome. Fully agreed.

Any kind of "must only read in classes or talk to people about it so we can be sure you interpret the art 'correctly'" is a big no.

People have to be allowed to be wrong about books.

I read Lolita at sixteen. A teacher who was also a family friend suggested it to me. (At the time and over the intervening decades scrutinized our interactions and all the many things I know about his psychology and backstory. He never did anything inappropriate to me or my sister. One can never know what happened behind closed doors, but I didn't see any signs anything was wrong at his house when we were over their playing with his son and daughter, and i was pretty good at spotting that sort of thing for safety reasons. He did have weird boundaries issues, but not in the was you are likely picturing. I do not think this was some sort of creepy grooming attempt. I think he was trying in his socially awkward way to help. I have some pretty strong suspicions as to why that particular book was important to him as a teen, and I don't think it was H.H. he was empathizing with, if you follow me.)

I started dodging pedophiles at 7. I trained and rehearsed my sister on what to do strategies, which she followed when the several pedophiles in our neighborhood came for her/us. I've written about this extensively.

Once I hit adolescence I stopped getting chased by pedophiles, but I sure got constant attention from adult me who sometimes thought I was of age and sometimes knew damned well I wasn't.

It was constant. It was exhausting.

I remember I finished reading Lolita in an empty hallway of the top floor of my high school, one afternoon after most of the kids had gone. I sat there, quietly furious, and full of empathy for Dolores. I sat there with a whole new perspective on the systemic nature of abuse, on the way sexualization of kids just trying to live their lives saps so much life and joy and energy out of everyone targeted, whether CSA actually occurs or not. That the small scale struggle of kids in my neighborhood was part of a bigger system that let people lie to themselves that what they were doing is okay. I thought about the endless victim blaming in the media and how easily people seemed to excuse Sexual abuse.

I thought about the teachers quietly rating the legs of the girls in their uniforms during SAT proctoring. I thought about the twenty six year old man at work who kept bringing me presents and trying to seduce me. I thought about years of trying not to be cornered by gangs of guys at school or in my neighborhood aimed at violence of one sort or another. I thought about the ridiculous amount of thought energy I had to put in to keep my little sister and I safe. I thought about all the kids in my neighborhood who hadn't been so lucky, all my friends of assorted genders I had as a teen who's uncle or father or whoever, I had wished I had the power to kill because of the horrific shit that they had done.

I thought about how tired Dolores was at the end of it all. I felt for her. I felt for her so hard.

I don't think I needed to be guided by some adult on how to read or think about this book. I am glad I read it at that moment. It was indeed the right book for me right then. I felt validated in my anger, in my exhaustion.

Over the years I've seen so many cases of victim blaming usually around older survivors, but not always. Over the years I've heard a million gross jokes about make survivors molested by teachers, about girls who weren't 'perfect enough' victims for late night comedians or the public at large. I've heard arguments that adults who had been held by monsters since they were children must not have been harmed because they did not preform their trauma the way people wanted and expected them too. I saw people publicly mocking an shaming people who were of age, but groomed regardless by someone with a massive power imbalance. I saw my second university allow a prof in the math department coerce exchange students from conservative cultures into sex the women did not want semester after semester and not only refuse to intervene, but silence anyone trying to warn the next batch as it would be bad for the school's image. I saw people say "why didn't she leave" in cases of domestic abuse.

My endless fury at those things: that they had happened and that people were minimizing it and framing it as romantic (as in the Letournau case) or funny, or the survivor's fault likely would have been there regardless, but seeing how much of society was seeing it from H.H.'s side instead of Dolores' side? That book gave teenage me a framework for that.

I don't know whether or not the term "rape culture" existed at the time, but reading Lolita was the moment I came to understand it, to see it as a systemic issue and not a set of particular people I had to spend an inordinate amount of time planning for and dealing with. When I did here the term much, much later, I understood instantly what it meant.

i've just lost hundreds of docs and pdfs and i'm beyond pissed right now

okay so, gonna tell ya'll something awesome rn

google drive is a mess sometimes with its storage things and if you're unlucky it might delete some of your files and you won't realise until it's well past the point where they won't be in 'trash' anymore and you're fucked

all is not lost however!

if you're on drive via browser, hit the little ? in a circle next to the settings cog and select "help"

search for "file recovery"

it'll show you the ways to try and recover your files on pc, android, and mac etc

these don't matter

you need to scroll down to the bottom and just hit the "contact us"

you'll be logged out automatically

log back in

click the little box to give google permission to attempt to restore your files for that account

click "submit"

give them some time to work but it's an automatic process

i've got most of my files back in less than 10 minutes

- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that: 

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56 

- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:

“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380

- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441

- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:

“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71

- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source

- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:

“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here 

- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:

“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source

- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:

“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145

So to recap: 

A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.

Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.

Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.  

This article talks about the validity of anger in your healing journey, and how while anger can be destructive, it can also be productive and help you in your healing journey.

Little ways to connect to the elements while you’re bedridden or stuck inside.

Earth:

Keep jars of dirt from special places.

Grow cacti or succulents.

Make a mini sand garden.

Hang macrame with crystals or stones.

Keep a bouquet of flowers.

Hang herbs from your walls/ceiling.

Get a little plant starter kit, keep seedlings by your window.

Keep some books on plants and geology around.

Watch nature documentaries.

Keep pebbles and crystals under your pillow.

Make a miniature garden/landscape using fake or real plants!

Reach down and feel the energy of the earth below you. Sometimes this is easier on the floor.

Burn candles that smell like the earth/forest/your favorite place.

Drink herbal tea.

Water:

Get a mini waterfall or fountain.

Keep plants that grow in water.

Get a water essential oil diffuser.

Make a spray from infused water.

Open windows when it rains.

Set up a bird fountain outside.

Fully savor your next glass of water.

Keep blues and sea green colors around.

Watch videos or documentaries on aquatic/marine life.

Watch the raindrops or condensation on your window.

Keep a bowl of water around. 

Listen to water/rain ambiance.

Burn candles that smell like the ocean or the rain.

Use a washcloth to wipe down your face/body.

Keep jars of water from your favorite places.

Air:

Open your window.

Use room spray/mist.

Burn candles that smell like the wind.

Hang wind chimes.

Listen to air/wind ambiance.

Get a small fan for some air flow.

Burn incense and watch the smoke move through the air.

Use your breath.

Hang feathers in your room.

Hang scarves and cloths around your room, watch the breeze sway them around.

Get some air plants.

Use an app that lets you see the sky/night sky.

Watch the clouds from your window.

Meditate, allow your senses to explore the air around you.

Fire:

Burn candles/incense.

Hang red or orange curtains.

Get a Himalayan salt lamp.

Use a wax melter.

Get an electric candle.

Use a heating pad or electric blanket.

Listen to fire ambiance. 

Use the heat of your body.

Watch gifs/videos of fire.

Keep a lighter nearby when you need a little flame. 

Place a little tealight in a fireproof vessel near your bed.

Feel the warmth and strength of the sun.

Build up energy with your hands, imagine it’s fire.

Drink tea with warming spices (cinnamon, cloves, etc.)

Click here for my other posts in this series!