Mariendall

Oh!

Well. I set up a Shabbat/Vacation routine on my phone that prevents me from opening or getting notifications from my work apps.

Do New Things. Go somewhere you haven't been before. There are probably a million free events near you. When you do new things, your brain registers them differently than doing the same things over and over. It's part of why time seemed to move slower when you were a kid.

Talk to people. Small talk is social glue, and in appropriate doses, it gives you dopamine. People are communal animals. You need community and online only goes so far.

Eat with people. Eating is an important communal human activity. It matters.

Engage your senses. Take a bath with things that smell good. Wear clothing with pleasing textures.

Make art. It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be art. Draw, paint, sing, dance.

You have the ability to make your life An Experience. It doesn't have to be expensive. Put your cheese, bread, and olives on a cutting board and look up online how to fasten a chiton and use sheets to have a Fancy Roman Emperor feast with your friends. Make tea every night with your partner. Get books out from the library and set yourself a reading goal using one of the 2025 reading bingo cards out there.

The more that you engage different parts of your brain when you're offline, the more your brain remembers those events.

If nothing else, remember that you are, at the end of the day, a mammal. Treat yourself like you're a beloved pet or a priceless and rare zoo animal if it helps you get over the way our society shames us for meeting our animal needs. You need enrichment in your enclosure. You need proper medical care. You need appropriate food and enough rest. You need socialization. You are your own zookeeper. If it helps, you can trade Keeper Responsibilities with a friend and take care of each other.

As @achillesisnotcomingdown and @h0bg0blin-meat have pointed out before or we discussed before I so think Achilles would be a contra tenor! And this guy Jacub Józef Orlińsky gives me so many Achilles vibes that is almost uncanny! And as we discussed with @smokey07 on the fact that Achilles would definitely look like Michelangelo's "David" and this guy looks like it in a way that is not even a joke anymore is like fantastic! And as per @hermesmoly discussion on emotions and Achilles and @deadbaguette

Last but not least my beloved friend's amazing comments @yararts and our development of our stories using inspirations from everywhere for our project (GO CHECK IT OUT GUYS IS AWESOME!)

And the passion man! And the expression! Yup! You can't change my mind!

LMFAOOO this image is so funny because I imagined like everyone fighting and then Achilles starts singing loudly out of nowhere everyone else is like O.O

It’s not that they sometimes forget they put things away, they’re always forgetting they put things away. 

Saying things like “oh, that’s normal, everyone does that, you’re not special” genuinely undermines, devalues, destabilizes, and minimizes actual experiences that aren’t necessarily fun. Don’t do that. Don’t claim something is ordinary and normal just because your experience is occasional. The point is that we are divergent, we are out of the ordinary, we are not part of everyone.

My best friend from school and I are very similar in that we have always been able to go months without speaking and then pick up as if we never stopped. We’ve been friends for over 40 years and there have been actual years between conversations but when I needed her she was there, every day, for several months. And when she needed me I was, too, 20 years earlier.

It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!

buying him time

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

Mostly because third limited and third omni are so fuzzy around the edges of where they meet, no one can really tell you what it means and it will vary from writer to writer and editor to editor.

So what ends up happening is they strip it all out and it becomes this very, yes, cinematic type of experience, an ultimate 3rd Omni if you will, even if they're doing it in 1st POV. In some cases, this is leading to what I call a lack of "physicality" where the author won't even describe what the character's body is doing emotion wise. "I hate those cliches, they pull me out..." I hear. I respond, "your book is flat and lifeless. I don't feel any weight with these characters. I don't feel anything with them." Interiority and physicality give heft to the writing as much as pretty descriptions and snappy dialog. It's simply a tool in a toolbox that needs to be practiced and learned like any other.

What I love about reading is I get to know what the character is thinking and feeling. This is how I connect to them and empathize with them. In general as a writer, the two most important things I try to come up with for a character is a) what do they have in their pockets (if any) and b) what do they think about before they go to sleep? This has not steered me wrong yet.

So you don’t have to watch the video every time you need one of these hacks immediately:

1. If you feel nauseated, smell rubbing alcohol.

2. If you feel like throwing up, start humming.

3. If you have a runny nose, put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and press your thumb to your forehead for about 20 seconds.

4. If you have a headache, pinch the webbing between your fingers and rub it back and forth for about 1 minute.

5. If you’re lightheaded from standing up too quickly, clench your butt cheeks.

6. If your arm’s dead/has the pins and needles feeling, rock your head back and forth.

7. If you need to pee badly, think of sex to trick your brain and relieve the pressure.

8. If you have a migraine, stick your hands in ice water.

The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it's about having a "hyperactive central nervous system" because it's a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.

But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.

So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told "hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking" rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn't safe.

Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic "busy" feeling isn't a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.

Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.

So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.

I broke out of this mindset, though after I started helping a working artist. She had been an artist for over 40 years and started at a young age, and her main source of income? Doing local craft and garden shows. She had owned a gallery, done gallery work, done charity work, and now mainly works in using upcycled materials to create all sorts of products.

I used to think that my only options as an artist were to become popular enough that people would commission me or just give me money via patreon, but that's not the case. You can sell at craft fairs and conventions, you can provide a specific service, you can create assets and asset packs people can pay for, and you can create all sorts of physical or digital products to sell... and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

If you are constantly turning art into a numbers game to see how you can make enough money by posting the right™ stuff online at the right time, you're only going to make yourself miserable.

The best way to make a living off your art has NOTHING to do with popularity, getting lots of engagement online, or besting an algorithm, it's all networking. It's all about finding the right people who want what you make. If all you focus on is your follower count and post engagement, you're just going to end up hating art.