Mr Dylan

i DO have some advice for this, because despite my ~super chill vibe~ (lmao) this happens to me all the time. here is what i, personally do; it may not help you, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay. we all need different things.

go for a walk (or a run). i don’t mean like, walk around your office building a couple times, i mean put your headphones in and walk for a while. think whatever you want. don’t try not to think about the doomsday voice; let it have its moment while you’re walking. it’ll tire itself out.

if you don’t have time to do that, try to go to a quiet place. let yourself be anxious for a minute. ask yourself: okay. if X thing is true, what can i do about it? if the answer is, “nothing,” then maybe it’s the nihilist in me but often i’m able to be like, “ok then! guess i’ll die” and some of the anxiety fades. if there ARE steps i can take – send an email, make a spreadsheet, call my apartment building manager and ask them to check that i haven’t left the oven on – then i take those steps. it might not totally get rid of your anxiety but it does at least make me feel like i’ve done what i can do so i’m not just stewing in it.

write down every doomsday thought i’m having – maybe in an email to a friend, maybe just in a notebook if i don’t want to share. sometimes seeing them all written down is really helpful to me in the sense of like, reading them over and realizing that oh, those are real crazy thoughts i’m having. if they don’t immediately jump out as crazy, i take them one by one, with two columns. one column is “what evidence suggests this is true?” and the other is “what evidence suggests this is not true?” more often then not, by the end of the exercise my brain has calmed tf down.

this one FEELS really silly, and it only works for me if i’m having a kind of generalized anxiety that isn’t actually about anything in particular, but it DOES work. so i write something soothing (the phrase a therapist gave me once that i still use is “i am safe i am well i trust the process of life” but i’m pretty sure you could use any cheerful phrase you want) over and over and over again like jack nicholson in the shining. the key here is that i write it in cursive, without lifting my pen from the page. the repetitive and very soothing motions usually help a lot.

I WAS WRONG

hey guys, stuart semple just posted this

and all the proceeds from the shirts are being donated to the callen-lorde health center to promote health education and wellness in the community.

They aren’t allowed to get angry when people bully them because by reacting people believe they justify the abuse. They are forced to deal with adult situations often without support from any of the actual adults around them. When they look for leaders in their community they often find no one who is like them and are left with only scraps of representation in media to look to. And they don’t have the support system they deserve, the support system heterosexual/romantic cisgender kids are given without question. They are forced to hide parts of themselves from their family members and we pretend that it is normal. And if they decide to discuss that particular part of their identity it is picked apart and examined often before the kid even knows how to process it themselves. Their own identities is branded as “too adult” for them when it is not their identities that is too adult, but how we treat them once we are informed of these parts of their identities.