chel's couch

And when she goes a bit ’crazy,’ when she starts crying and can’t stop, when she sits and stares into space for an hour because she can’t figure out what to do next or how to do it, when she doesn’t want to go for a drink after work with her colleagues and can’t bear their jollity, when she can’t concentrate at work or remember what it was that she was doing, when she lies awake at night worrying about how to pay the mortgage… when all these things happen, no one actually says that she’s gone mad. Everyone understands that she’s in grief and that it will take time, perhaps a long time if the death was sudden and unexpected, for her to rearrange her life again so that the new normal becomes automatic and comfortable and comprehensible. And even then, for decades afterwards she may contend with the why? questions of sudden tragedy and life not being as sugar-sweet as the John Lewis adverts suggest. But when we have a ‘breakdown,’ when our dissociative coping strategy that has kept our trauma or abuse at bay for years or years suddenly collapses in the lounge and dies on the floor, and we find when we come home from work that it’s not there anymore, people don’t see our resultant behaviour as normal. Even we ourselves think we have just ‘gone mad.’ We don’t have a paradigm for it. And because there’s no corpse in the lounge, no funeral cortège, no life insurance pay-out and a bank statement in a single name, because it’s all intrapsychic and hidden in the undergrowth of our mind, then our outward behaviours do seem ‘crazy.’ When we can’t go to work the next day, and we can’t concentrate, and we keep bursting into tears, and we can’t bear to socialise, and we lie awake at night, and everything seems too much, then we don’t think, ‘This is normal.’ We think, ‘I’m insane.’

yeah i’m gonna have to disagree. if you’re not from here and you don’t have family here, do not come here. don’t come to the united states. they are gearing up to deport people from foreign countries to Guantanamo Bay without even notifying their home government. as in like… citizens of the United Kingdom.

the post means what it means. it doesn’t mean come to the largest city in the country with a police force that is extremely, extremely violent and as well equipped as most normal countries militaries or come to a state with a coastline. that is, in fact, probably the riskiest thing you could possibly do.

Instead of simply reminding them about the event, just ask them about a specific detail involved in it instead. If you know that The Thing is on next week's friday, and the last moment you need confirmation whether they're coming or not is this thursday, instead of texting

"Hey you remember we have the thing on next week's friday, right?"

you can text some specific question - regardless of whether the info itself is important to you or not - that clarifies when the event is, like

"Hey are you going to be driving to the thing next week's friday, or is someone giving you a ride? We'll need to plan parking beforehand."

Because in case they did remember the thing, they can just answer you for the question you asked. And if they didn't remember and go "OH SHIT IT'S NEXT WEEK I COMPLETELY FORGOT", you still gave them the reminder they needed just the same.

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

I can pick a hurt comfort or a slow burn or an angst with a happy ending.

I can remove the tags I don’t want to see, I can check word count,check if it’s finished and it’s so much easier than books

I know these characters and I see them in my mind so they can pull me on journey into a world I love, unless it’s au universes