Flamy, a Dragon

After almost a decade on this site, I found another Tumblr user in the wild. I stopped to tie my shoe with rainbow laces this morning outside the silversmith at Colonial Williamsburg, and I heard it.

“I like your shoelaces.”

Oh. Oh no.

I responded the only way I could. “Thanks.” And then I reluctantly added, “I stole them from the president…and if that makes sense to you, I’m very sorry.”

The poor man, in full Colonial dress, stared at me for a long moment. And then burst into laughter. And said, “I haven’t thought about that in YEARS and this has never happened to me before.”

Yeah. Me neither. Not until today.

baby rattle in the shape of a dog (Athens, c. 3rd century CE)

..mother to us all..

if there's a task, especially a recurring one, that you find difficult to do and that you keep avoiding, check whether you're in pain or physical discomfort.

For a long time I would avoid doing tasks like showering because they nebulously made me feel 'bad' or i just instinctively felt like avoiding them. It wasn't until I got a shower chair that I realised standing to shower was causing me pain. My bodymind knew that on some level but didn't tell the conscious me.

Similarly with sensory aversions (things you don't like). Before I got kitchen gloves, I did the dishes but it took me a long time and I never wanted to. Afterward, it got a lot easier to motivate myself.

"But how can you not know you're in pain/uncomfortabke?" Extremely easily if your brain is wired a specific way or if you were taught, intentionally or not, to downplay your own experiences or distance yourself from your body.

Live in the UK

are an adult and have at minimum Indefinite Leave to Remain

Can scrape together about £1200 in one place for a few minutes (can be salary/your actual bank account, but better if not, as you’ll need to park it somewhere else for a month or so)

Can reasonably do mildly convoluted admin tasks (I.e., could you keep a spreadsheet that juggles a few things like “dates to cancel subscriptions”, and remember to cancel the subscriptions?)

Are confident, capable and able to do life paperwork such as opening bank accounts

Then you can usually farm a bit of pocket money with bank switching.

Bank switching is taking advantage of cash offers that UK banks offer to switch your current account to their bank. They often offer £150 cash for doing this. The definition of a “current account” is usually “has ~£1200 in it and two direct debits set up,” so if you’re willing to quickly set up a free throwaway bank account that meets these criteria, you can then switch that account around various banks to take advantage of incentives.

There’s some decent offers right now if you’re willing to do the homework (you could get up to £1500 at the moment if you’re eligible for everything), and people on Reddit write really careful hand-holding tutorials. https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoneyuk/s/DLrpVkmDOo

You can usually only max this out once a year, and then have to take a break (most banks have a cooldown period.) of course, if you have a partner or other family members, you can do theirs. You can pass the £1200 back and forth between you for this, and make double the amount.

If you only do £1000 a year, it’s about the limit of the admin most people want to do, and is tax-free.

You can mess it up - but rather than losing money, you’re more likely to accidentally fail to meet the criteria, or get into an admin snarl where you get querulous emails from bizarre institutions like the Ulster Bank of Lobsterworkers and Divinely Inspired Miners, telling you that they can’t close your bank account until you remove £0.37 from it. However, allowing reputable UK banks to hold your £1200 is a low-risk activity.

You must follow the instructions (and guides) attentively to receive the payouts.

Bank switching is a good, honourable and reliable way to raise a few hundred pounds to pay off large unexpected expenses. A big credit card bill, an air conditioner, an unexpected flight - I find it useful to know that a little bit of extra admin-headache can write off the whole expense.

If you and a partner switch to Nationwide with this June 2026 offer (obviously, it’s on you to read the instructions carefully) you will get a total of £525. That’s very helpful pocket money that could make all the difference for your household this month.

This is genuinely it. You can get £525, cash, free and clear, honest and honourable, handed to you and your partner, for the effort of reading some paperwork and temporarily changing your bank account. I can promise you that. And you won’t do it.

most of the people reading this are not going to be able to do it.

And the thing is, I fully get that. My partner is the person who does the bank switching in our house. My brain slips a gear when I try.

it is frustrating. It is frustrating that people in the UK who are able to earn/beg/borrow a one-off £1200 could farm it to pick up reliable cash in big, generous, free chunks. But the admin gap exists, and bank switching requires activation energy and a bit of attentiveness. And that admin gap is enough for banks to exploit. It sounds completely absurd, but it’s true. Free money? Nope, can’t brain, executives can’t function.

Banks can do this in the first place because they’ve carefully calculated the cash incentive against people’s abilities . They know that - despite being a very easy task, about as hard as completing an online shopping trip without using autofill - it somehow takes tremendous effort to change your bank. For most people that price is, genuinely, £200. £200 cash in your bank account is just about enough to make an effort for. Banks are banking (ha!) on the fact that it would take another £200 and MORE effort for you to leave them.

Thus, bank switching remains anyone’s game. Banks know full well that bank-switching guides and subreddits exist, talking people through the process of maxing out the offers. Banks know that a small fraction of people are even motivated enough to make a game of it and cheekily farm cash with a burner account. And they know perfectly well that your attention span taps out at a £200 reward. That’s why banks do it. They know you’re not actually going to.

This is calibrated to neurotypical executive function, btw. That’s the price of the average UK person’s spare executive function to spend on an irritating task. £200.

It’s pretty odd to think about. Yeah, you’re tumblr broke - but not make-a-burner-account-and-get-£200-for-it broke.

Traumisia: The oppression and stigmatization of people with psychological trauma.

Examples:

And like... you do get that that is kinda insane, right?

Because this is something that so often leads to suffering. And I am saying this as someone disabled, who had so many issues due to this in his childhood.

Just three examples: when I was 7, I was supposed to get checked for autism. My mother did not want an autistic child. Since she just could have a "neurotypical" child by refusing diagnosis, she did just that.

When I was 12, my mother had decided I needed a certain plastic surgery (one that had a minor health benefit, but still was largely a beauty thing). I did not want it. I really, really did not want it. We still went through almost the entire process until thankfully there was a doctor who went: "Wait, this is elective. I am refusing to do this on a child that does not want it."

And when I was 14 my mother refused to get me to the hospital when I had severe food poisoning. She refused me hospital treatment for almost two weeks. By the time I got actually taken to the hospital I was almost dead.

And here is the thing: all of this should just not happen. The doctor when I was 12 was cool, but... he refused to do the surgery because he had the right to make a conscience call. Legally my mother was in the right to force me into that elective surgery. And that just should not be the case.

A lot of children die and suffer due to their legal inability to consent - or refuse consent - to medical treatments. And I wish y'all would understand that.

yeah. maybe that would be fair to say about say, discrete viruses. but about syndromes?

like. the conditions of the human body don't know that they're taxonomically discrete. they don't know that they have different names or lists of symptoms. if a human body has a consistent issue with say, its heart rhythm, or its inflammatory response, or its glandular response, or immune system

the reason that ehlers-danlos syndrome (EDS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), IBS (irritable bowel), autism, and even shit like coeliac and PMDD or endometriosis overlap is bc like. these are largely inflammatory issues or issues with the fascia

It's not "what the fuck, how can this person have all these different things wrong with them", bc these are largely like. syndromic definitions of how x bodily issue manifests in different systems, structures, or organs of the body

many of these conditions change in definition over time

and that's bc they're studied and understood more over time where people more meaningfully understand underlying causes and issues, such as through hormone or genetic profiles, or largely like. immune response

it's also how "rare" conditions become understood as more common over time

A lot of us were raised with the idea that “its normal for wives/children to get hit! it helps them learn– only white folk don’t get beaten when they misbehave”. That’s not true, white people aren’t the only ones who deserve a safe and abuse free environment. Black and brown people can and do have loving families. 

Everyone participates in chores, sure. And helping out your family with projects etc. can be great, but there’s a line when it comes to being forced/coerced into excessive labor against your will and at the expense of your health and/or education. That line is usually clear to people when they see it happen to white kids, but for the rest of us, especially children of immigrants, it gets written of as a normal part of the culture.

It's like if we called cars "spaceships" because a car salesman once lied about their product being capable of space travel

My intended message was not "all of these things are 100% made up in Myrrh's head and all of her problems are her fault and anyone who is lonely or scared is a villain who is hurting themselves and others and should feel bad because all of their problems are their own fault"

My intended message was meant to be "all these problems are real and miserable, but sometimes your brain might be exaggerating a little, or sometimes your fear might be holding you back, and you have to get out of your head and figure out what's true and what isn't".

I tried to frame the comic in a way that didn't explicitly place the 'blame' on one party or another -- I think that a lot of the time stuff like this isn't really anyone's fault, so I didn't want it to seem too blame-y or one-sided -- but in hindsight I might not have done the best job. The last thing I wanted was for anyone who feels the same way I feel to read that comic and come away from it thinking I was blaming them for their loneliness or dismissing their problems, so I'm genuinely really sorry that some people read it that way.

Every one of Myrrh's thoughts in the comic is a real thing that has happened to me, or a real thought that I have had about a real thing that has happened to me, sometimes distorted or exaggerated, sometimes not.

These problems weren't meant to be "all in her head"; they're all things that do happen, they're all at least a little bit real, it's just that Myrrh's perception of these events, their severity, and the things that she assumes is causing them, may not always be accurate, because her brain is always telling her that the only possible explanation for everything is the worst-case-scenario.

I was trying to say that the truth is often somewhere in the middle, and that Myrrh has to actually talk to her friends in order to find it. Maybe her friends really don't care about her at all, or maybe they really do but there's something else getting in their way, or maybe they like her, but not quite enough to want to put in any real effort, but whatever the truth is, she has to get out of her head and have the scary conversations in order to find out for sure before she can fix anything.

In the last panel, when it's revealed that we've been looking at Myrrh's thoughts, we see her friends gathered around her. Some of them look worried and sad and confused, some of them look just confused, but, crucially, none of them are reaching out to her or moving to comfort her, they're all just standing there and watching. I'd hoped that this would imply that at least some of Myrrh's perception is real -- her friends, intentionally or not, are neglecting her. None of this is her fault; even if it was all in her head, none of this is her fault. She is, at worst, a victim of her own brain, and, like everyone else in the world, an occasionally-imperfect friend.

I have had friends that genuinely did not care about me. I have had friends that did care at least a little but were unable or unwilling to put in the work. I have had friends that REALLY, REALLY cared about me, but I thought that they didn't because I have a brain that likes to hurt me. I often have a very hard time telling these situations apart.

I wanted to make a comic that could acknowledge these problems and how miserable they are while also giving people -- including myself -- some hope, like "hey it sucks to feel this way, it sucks to be treated this way, it's so miserable it makes me physically ill and I can't stop it and I don't know what to do -- but maybe it's not always as bad as you think, maybe if you can just be brave and communicate with people, things will get better".

But, I was in a very bad place when I wrote this comic, and in hindsight I might have written it sort of clumsily and self-loathingly because of that. Sometimes I have an easier time blaming myself for everything than I do blaming people I care about, and I didn't consider how that bias might bleed into the story a little and make some people think the underlying message was "If you're sad, you're imagining it and it's your fault".

Obviously, I can't know everyone's situation, and I can't control every possible interpretation of my art, and I can't avoid every single misunderstanding or uncharitable read, but this time I feel strongly enough about it that I just want to say: that is not what I was trying to say at all. I'm sorry if my art made you feel worse. Your problems are real -- even when they are "all in your head", they're still real problems and you're not crazy and you deserve to have those problems solved. And sometimes those problems aren't your fault, and sometimes they are, but none of that really matters. This was never about whose 'fault' these things are.

I just wanted to push myself -- and everyone reading -- to have the courage to acknowledge all the unaddressed problems and feelings they're afraid to talk about, so that we can all figure out what's real and what we're imagining, identify the true nature of the problem, and then try and fix things. I wanted to encourage myself, and everyone, to try and do something, anything, instead of just sitting around torturing themselves in their heads for the rest of their lives.