hhhuhhh

Emo subculture was, and is a perfect illustration of the reality of widespread, normalised, psychological abuse.

As a young teen when Emo first became a term, everyone I knew who associated themselves with it did so because they had been shamed for feeling emotions. The term emo itself is a shortening of emotional, and it is a sub-culture, because it was not considered ‘normal’. This shows the beginning of the problem. Emo kids were children who had been so badly treated, so routinely shamed, they considered themselves abnormal for having feelings at all. Because the adults around them told them they shouldn’t.

“Emos” then became widely known, characterised and defined as minors who were depressed, minors who self harmed, minors who had suicidal ideation and were at risk of committing suicide. This should have been horrifying. It is horrifying to me now, to think of people so young being so terribly hurt and so badly treated that they are at risk of committing suicide before they even reach their late teens.

But the adults did not sit up and take note, they did not start caring for them or looking after the children. They made fun, they mocked them. “Emo kids” became a joke that adults passed around and shared in, worsening the emotional abuse by telling these already at risk children that their sadness was not valid, and their life-threatening depression was a joke. They just ramped up the abuse on these children who were already known to be at risk of suicide. They simply did not take it seriously. The “silly emotional teenager” narrative actually prevents minors from being taken seriously by doctors and other professionals, regardless of the nature of their ailment, purely because of their age. Yes, teens will get anxious about things they are new to dealing with, and yes they will get depressed when things are hard, but it is our job as adults to teach them how to deal with it, how to cope, and to be there for them when they need that.

The previous generation had no such idea. So wrapped up were they in the economic boom they enjoyed and the pure narcissism they inflicted on their children. They blame those same children for the things they suffered. Called them “problem children” and called them “emotional time bombs”, and pretended it was nothing to do with how they were raised, nothing to do with the psychological abuse they endured from all adults and media. And now, they continue to laugh about “silly depressed teens”, while also berating this new wave of self-loving ones. This new trend for self love and acceptance is beautiful, and necessary. Those same adults who mocked and made jokes of their own suicidal children are now mocking and making jokes of their own children who like themselves in spite of what they are being taught. They call you Narcissicstic for not being self loathing, but they made Emo Kids an international joke for self loathing.

This is the heart and soul of who I am, professionally. I interact with a couple hundred people at the library every day, ranging in age from newborns to the extremely elderly. The ones who always have my 110% attention are between the ages of seven and twenty. I talk to them, not their parents. I smile at them, make jokes at their level without assuming them to be unsophisticated. I give them book recommendations that might be a reading level challenge but still praise them for reading what they love. 

I put LGBT+ friendly books on my staff displays. I wear pride colors. I’m open if the subject of sexuality comes up. I encourage kids to talk to me about anything, regardless of how their parents might be looming.

My teenagers in Pathfinder adore me because I don’t, in their words, “Give a fuck.” And they know and I know it’s not because I don’t care about them. It’s because they’re allowed to be who they are with me and not only will I not shame them for it, I encourage it by being myself, too. When someone’s emotional about something, I’m emotional with them. If someone’s over-reacting, I do my best to defuse situations while still validating the emotional content of the argument. 

I’m nervous that people will start to refer to themselves as manic when they’re just normal but hyperactive or energized or emotional and just to get this straight?

I figured something out about myself a long time ago– it’s only just now occurred to me that I was in fact solving a problem caused by executive dysfunction, and I haven’t been implementing this solution lately because my brain went “that’s a relatively new term to me and therefore a Different problem that requires a Different solution”. thanks a lot, brain.

anyway, long long ago, before I knew these fancy schmancy Official words, the problem, as I phrased it to myself, was such: 

sometimes I get Stuck. I was doing something, or on my way to doing something, and then… I just. got stuck.

“Stuck” looks like refreshing my feed or dashboard repeatedly. or it looks like staring at a spot on the wall. or chewing my fingernails. or picking at a stubborn sticker. all the while, my brain drifts through various unrelated topics I wouldn’t be able to recall if asked. sometimes I can get Stuck for hours before realizing I am Stuck. sometimes I get so Stuck that I go to bed that way (feeling especially bad for being unproductive) and I have to just reset everything by sleeping.

one day I asked myself, “why is this happening? why am I stuck, right now, at this moment in time?” the answer, as it turns out, was pretty simple: I was trying to make a decision, and I got distracted. I haven’t moved forward because I haven’t answered that one question or made up my mind.

let me rephrase this in terms of executive dysfunction: many people have expressed that it feels like knowing you need to do a thing but not feeling “ready” to do it. many with ADHD may also be familiar with the feeling of needing things to be “just so” before you embark on a task- you need your setup to look a certain way, or you need to set a timer, or have the right music playing, etc.

when I get Stuck it’s often because I got lost somewhere in that setting-up process, and my brain took the opportunity to nyoom off into Distraction Town.

getting myself Unstuck is solved, 95% of the time, by tracing my steps back to the original decision I was trying to make- often something small and inane- and then troubleshooting from there. (out loud! verbal processing is totally punk.) 

“what was I trying to do?” 

“was I trying to decide between two things?” 

(the answer’s usually yes.) 

“what were they?” 

“okay, let’s decide. 

“okay, that’s settled. let’s move on.”

and then I am free as a bird to nyoom in the direction of The Thing I Wanted To Do All Along, in the amazingly disorganized, scattered, yet rapid-fire way that I do many things.

so!!! in the case of my first post, where I hadn’t showered for 2 hours? turns out I had been trying to decide what music to listen to in the shower. (another hack: my chances of getting Stuck while showering decrease by 75% if I have music playing to help me keep track of time.) I couldn’t immediately make up my mind, got lost in thought, got distracted, and drifted. once I stopped and asked- “why am I stuck?”-  then I remembered- “oh yeah! I wanted to listen to music”-  and then decided- “I want to listen to Daft Punk’s Discovery album”- I was finally heckin able to shower. and also eat, and also throw my clothes in the dryer.

and may I add I only zoned out once, during the slow part of “One More Time.” :P

1. Amnesia - this is when you can’t remember incidents or experiences that happened at a particular time, or when you can’t remember personal information.

2. Depersonalisation - a feeling that your body is unreal, changing or dissolving. It also involves out of body experiences, such as seeing yourself as if watching a movie or floating above.

3. Derealisation - the world around you seems unreal. You may see objects changing in shape, size or colour, or you may feel that other people are robots or generally unreal.

4. Identity confusion - feeling uncertain about who you are. You may feel as if there is a struggle within to define yourself.

shoutout to the people who have been through abuse and are trying to be better than that.

to everyone who’s going against all of their instincts telling them to shut down, and trying to communicate well anyway.

to everyone using the hashtag #metoo. to everyone who can’t use the hashtag #metoo.

to everyone who doesn’t remember what happened, but they’re trying to be careful.

to everyone who used to externalize their pain, and now are internalizing it, or vice versa, but are trying to find a balance.

to everyone who isn’t sure if they’ll ever be mentally healthy enough to have “good” relationships, but they’re trying their hardest anyway.

to everyone who apologizes really strongly when they mess up.

to everyone whose parents have given up on them, to everyone wounded by the bystander effect, to everyone who was the last one to know about their own trauma.

to everyone with physical and mental illnesses.

to everyone who’s used to being dismissed by people who should care about them, and they’re trying to take care of themselves anyway.

to everyone whose memory isn’t enough.

to everyone who’s trying to live past when they thought they would kill themselves.

to everyone who isn’t sure what happened was “bad enough.”

to everyone who needs more validation about trauma stuff but even their most supportive people are invalidating or triggering.

to everyone with a personality disorder who worries that their mental illness invalidates their abuse.

to everyone who can’t tell how much information they’re saying is oversharing because they were so used to being invalidated and then not talking.

to everyone whose therapists haven’t called it abuse, but know it was abusive.

to everyone discovering their anger after being so quiet for so long.

to everyone whose anger feels explosive.

to everyone who has really mixed feelings about the people who abused them and/or their abuse.

to everyone who has a mix of repressed memories and flashbacks.

to everyone who wants and needs to talk about their trauma, but they’re not sure who they could trust and who would be validating.

to everyone who feels repulsed by compliments about their positive characteristics.

….

I need to explain something very complicated but very important. I almost don’t know how to approach it, other than to preface it by telling you a little bit about my mother. My mother is a therapist who specializes in reprocessing traumatic memories with people with post traumatic stress.

She uses several techniques, most prevalently EMDR and I have learned a lot about how these techniques work and about trauma and the process of recovery, and the symptoms of trauma all along the road to recovery.

My mother is an abuse survivor herself, so she thoroughly understands the symptoms and the process of recovery, both through her extensive education as a trauma therapist and her personal experience and struggle with it.

What she has explained to me is that nearly everyone has experienced trauma at least to some degree in our lives. We are particularly vulnerable in the early stages of our brain development, because it is here that an earth shattering experience can most fundamentally shape our view of the world, of the people around us, of ourselves.

I’m going to try to explain all this with an example:

A 3 year old girl watches her little sister drown. She blames herself, even though she was powerless to do anything. This self-blame is actually a defense mechanism that her brain uses to protect from the experience of complete powerlessness. The experience of utter powerless is too much to bear, so she reshapes her reality such that if she had only done something differently, she could have saved her sister.

This perception of reality comes to shape her life into her adulthood. She is driven, constantly takes on the responsibility herself, determined to never again let someone down, as she had let her sister down. And yet this entire approach to her life is based on the false premise that her sister’s death was her fault. However, because this approach protects her 3 year old brain from experiencing that utter powerlessness, she holds onto it, at nearly any cost.

Now, this woman will have many relationships in her life, and she will share her experiences and her life with usually either a partner or her therapist. And these people with whom she is sharing her intimate experiences with, will start to notice the negative cognitions that she has built her life around, see them for what they are - essentially bullshit - and they will start to poke at them, call her on them.

What her brain does at this point is extremely drastic, and very irrational, and completely uncontrollable. That first experience of powerlessness is still too much to bear, and she now associates either that therapist or her partner as a symbol of that powerlessness. Her brain is now in survival mode, anything to protect her from it, even if it means completely demonizing the person who is trying to help her.

So I asked my mom if we should all be getting treated for trauma, if we all have it, and she said probably not, because it’s such a scaling thing, and the severity is completely dependant on the individual. However, what she said was a really important and underrepresented piece of this, was the cultural awareness about how trauma can affect our understandings of the people in our lives, the people that love us, as we project on them the pains that are to crippling and earth shattering for us to face.

keep the windows open as much as you can

keep your curtains open & let all the sunlight in!!

try to get outside at least once a day

exercise (even if it’s just taking a walk or doing a yoga video)

drink lots and lots of water!!!! i carry around a 32oz nalgene every day!!!

make sure you have comfy socks/shoes/sweaters/clothes for the season!!

get scented candles

take up a hobby (like knitting! i make wreaths and i bake!)

accept that you’re going to have bad days and do things to try and make them less bad (like drinking water!)

｡◕‿◕｡

emergency compliment  calming manatee calming paintbrush soothing techniques the thoughts room the quiet place daily puppy draw a stickman self injury recovery masterpost need a hug?? comfort box alternatives for anger and restlessness happy thing masterpost when you’re sad? click here to smile feeling stressed? cheer up! the dawn room

isnt the rain beautiful are you feeling okay? calm down weave silk to calm down do nothing for two minutes match the colours look at the stars!

wanting to self harm or worse? maybe you want to comfort someone else wow beautiful nature sounds! really good game to get feelings out nature not your thing? coffee shop noise

sand patterns speak to people how to care for self harm cuts distractions and alternatives for self harm how to fade and cover scars what to do when someone notices your cuts/scars? resisting the urges 25 ways to avoid self injury tips to help stop cutting helping someone who is suicidal stupid games to cheer you up (pointless games) the butterfly project just relapsed? reasons to live

eating disorder support groups coping with exercise addictions bulimia recovery coping with weight gain overcome your eating disorder

bipolar self help living with bipolar dealing with bipolar without medication 10 more ways to cope with bipolar bipolar coping skills

how to cope with depression natural depression treatments ways to deal with depression/stress overcoming loneliness  finding the right antidepressant

understanding and managing anxiety understanding and coping with panic attacks tips and tricks for dealing with anxiety anti stress breathing tips coping with social anxiety cope with panic attacks

self defence tips rape escape how to break out of a zip tie

depression resources masterpost cool game called ‘the end’ to distract you “how to cut” (not what you think) big master post of masterposts

HOW TO stop skipping breakfast stop biting your nails work through feelings of social isolation understand types of anxiety deal with anxiety calm down calm down during a anxiety attack do yoga to cheer  yourself up learn how to mediate cope with ocd coping with social anxiety disorder coping with schizophrenia coping with depression coping with bipolar coping with borderline personality disorder coping with eating disorders coping with autism spectrum disorder

GET HELP WITH

disorders/mental illness low on cash but wanting help? panic and anxiety coping with PTSD never say these things to someone having a panic attack what is ocd? more about ocd what is PTSD? what is social anxiety/social phobia supporting someone with PTSD tips living with someone who has OCD what is depression? what is autism spectrum disorder? what is bipolar? what is borderline personality disorder? what are eating disorders? what is generalized anxiety disorder? what is panic disorder? what is schizophrenia?  suicide prevention hotlines more hotlines (UK) list of hotlines for everyone mental health hotlines

8TRACKS PLAYLISTS CALM/CHEER UP MUSIC

note to self good feelings spring fling coffee shop acoustics rad covers good feelings a little bit of everything good morning breathe acoustic conquer school wheels on the road choose happy sleepy tunes coffee shop tunes

BACKGROUND NOISES

A lot of weird visualizations pop into my head when I’m stressed out and put on the spot. My anxiety is the boss and I am a puppet. These are my panic daydreams. 

1. I just start throwing pennies everywhere. They bounce off people’s faces and the floor. Minutes pass by. I’m still throwing pennies.

2. I run. I run through the walls and out into the road. I run across the country. I run across the ocean. I buy a disguise and start a new life in New Zealand. I get two large dogs to bite people who come near my property. 

3.  I calmly and diligently take off my clothes. I undo my hair. I walk confidently out into the street. I start pumping my arms and levitate off the ground. I fly up onto a cloud. I am never seen again.

4. I throw eggs at moving vehicles and passerby. I hold an egg up high and crush it in my hand. I throw the goop at a cyclist.

5. I wistfully look across the cityscape as I stand on a tall downtown city building. I turn on a playlist of classical Russian piano. I do some ballet stretches and pirouette off the building to the street.

6.  I painstakingly build an igloo using geometry and hard work. I wrap myself up in the softest fleece blanket imaginable and crawl into my snow cave to die.

7. I pour a large container of runny jello all over my head and down my back.

8.  I play Disturbia by Rihanna as loudly as possible and shave my head. I revel in the catharsis. 2007 Britney had the right idea.

9. I unzip my skin and my anxiety pours out like steam up to the sky. My skin melts away. I turn into a skeleton person and smoke a cool guy cigarette. I am finally at peace.

1. Okay, this is obviously a delusion.

2. I know it’s a delusion but… what if it’s real?

3. It’s probably a delusion but… what if it’s real?

4. It’s probably real.

5. I really think it’s real.