More fandoms than you can handle

Therapist: Oh! Sounds like you need to do YOGA! That will help!

Me: *signs up for yoga*

Therapist: ok lets refocus on things you like about yourself. This week i want you to try and journal about good things you’ve for yourself and others.

Me: *does the homework* yeah but i still hate myself but feel bad cause i shouldn’t

Therapist: feeling like you shouldn’t hate yourself is a step in the right direction. Mental health is complex and isn’t something that will ~magically~ improve. We have a lot of hard work head of us but I’ll be here to help you.

As a psychologist the amount of bullshit on this site, the amount of fucking dangerous bullshit on this site about how therapy is neurotypical bullshit and isn’t worth it and how exercise is pointless and good diet is pointless and that therapy homework is pointless DRIVES ME UP THE FUCKING WALL

Exercise is fucking important. good diet is fucking important therapy is fucking important. WHY???

because pills alone don’t help. they improve the hormonal imbalance (as does exercise and good diet which ALSO are a form of very real self care as your physical being is sorta connected to your mental one but go fucking figure right?), but guess what? the suicidal thoughts, the thoughts of harm, the thoughts of hating yourself, they’re still there.  suicides actually increase when medicated.  why? because suddenly you have the energy to fulfill thoughts of harming yourself.  which is why you NEED therapy alongside pills.

it has taken you years, or decades to create your maladaptive thought processes and behaviours.  that shit doesn’t disappear overnight. core beliefs don’t change overnight. these are the very fucking core of your personhood, your being and personality. THAT TAKES TIME TO CHANGE

Therapy in addition to meds is important, and finding the right therapist is important, not every therapist specialized in depression and not every therapist who specializes in depression will work for you.

Also this is in my experience: while exercise did not really help me with my depression, it did help me manage the side effects. The “do things” “muscle” in your brain is engaged when you make yourself exercise, so it gets stronger over time, and then it will be easier to do other things. If you need to start by doing simple anaerobic moves in bed like leg lifts, russian twists, and bicycles? That’s a start and you should feel proud of yourself for doing it. It’s a step in the right direction. And you might find that it actually does help with your depression!

somebody: hmm well….

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

Fourteen days since I first watched the new Bo Burnham special Make Happy and I haven’t had a thought unrelated to it since. So to rid myself of these ceaseless thoughts—to make my way out of this labyrinth—I thought I’d write and write and write about it. I thought I’d think too much about thinking too much. I thought I’d get introspective and never make some fucking noise.

So. Bo Burnham. Modern self-consciousness. Existentialism. Metafiction. Social media.

Segways are weird.

Look at the following quote:

“I look at the young people and I feel like, I was born in 1990 and I was sort of raised in America when it was a cult of self-expression, and I was just taught, you know, “express myself, I have things to say and everyone will care about them.” And I think everyone was taught that and most of us found out no one gives a shit what we think. So we flock to performers by the thousands because we’re the few who have found an audience and then I’m supposed to get up here and say “follow your dreams” as if this is a meritocracy. It is not. Okay? I had a privileged life, and I got lucky, and I’m unhappy. They say it’s like the “me” generation, it’s not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated, it’s self-conscious, that’s what it is. It’s conscious of self. Social media, it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said “Here, perform everything, to each other, all the time, for no reason.” It’s prison, it’s horrific, it is performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. Classic. Comedy.