“We will be together for all of your lifetimes. And we will never give up.”

[holdin hands]

me: bb ur hands r so cold

Hufflepuff:

Before anybody eats they all pass around the food

Everybody has a full plate before anybody starts

Most likely to try and feed animals under the table

Most memorable incident of this was when the teachers found three generations of rabbits hiding under the table (the Niffler was a close second)

Ravenclaw:

There are some kids reading while they eat but there’s just as many talking with each other

Once a week they make a point of having a meal from a different part of the world (ex Chinese food one week, lobster the next, bison the week after)

Ravenclaws pop in and out of the kitchen all week making suggestions to the house elves (who enjoy the challenge and always come up with a feast)

A few items have even been added to the regular menu this way (there was almost a riot over the beignets from the other houses trying to snatch them)

Gryffindor:

By far the loudest house in the hall, with everybody shouting over one another and grabbing food

Whenever anybody has a birthday in their house they make sure to sing “Happy Birthday” for them (at the top of their lungs, of course)

Birthday kid has to walk down the centre of the table (and try to avoid getting tripped)

Everybody learns that not all Gryffindors are good at singing, but not for lack of effort

Slytherin:

Polite table manners, but heaven help you if you take food off somebody’s plate, they see that as a grave insult

Slytherin spends all year preparing for one day to change their routine and confuse everybody (they keep changing it every year, to keep people on their toes)

Sometimes they all speak a different language for the meal, sometimes they communicate with hand signals without words, sometimes they all levitate everything and eat their meal while slowly floating in the air

One year this got so out of hand that an over enthusiastic student set the Great Hall on fire (to this day nobody knows which one it was as Slytherins never snitch on a fellow snake, so the entire house got detention)

and it’s fucking killing me because ???  the idea of being annoyed by people telling you that stuff is because those people honestly think that doing yoga and “looking on the bright side” will magically cure your depression, because they can’t imagine happiness not coming as easily to someone else as it does to them.  the idea isn’t that getting exercise and practicing positive thinking are useless ways to treat depression.  but that’s what i’m seeing a lot of now and i just want to say…. i got some fucking bad news, cause that is the treatment for depression.

therapists telling you to get good nutrition and exercise are not the same as your yoga-instructor aunt on facebook posting pictures of the sunrise and wondering how anyone can be depressed when the world is so wonderful!!! thats not just an anti-recovery attitude, it’s an anti-treatment attitude, and it’s unbelievably ignorant.

there’s sort of this interesting circular form to dealing with mental illness, where you start in a place of “i just need to think positively and push myself out of this ditch” and then you move to step 2, which is “depression is a real and very serious illness and it’s not my fault that i’m tired all the time, stop telling me to just “think positive” all the time.”

But then there’s step three, which is where you size up your situation and say “look, i understand how serious my illness is, and i’m no longer blaming myself for it.  And it sucks, and I don’t “deserve” this, and I didn’t bring it on myself.  But regardless of how unfair it is, the truth is that I’m the only one who can actually do anything about it.”  And so in a lot of ways, you end up with parallel ways of thinking as before, but this time you’re coming from a completely different source of understanding.  People who don’t know anything about mental illness say “depression is a choice.”  People who are fed up with being depressed and realize that wallowing in the comforting embrace of self-pity is useful to erase guilt, but ultimately won’t help them lead a better life say, “recovery is a choice.”

The first group means that if you’re depressed, you can just magically decide not to be depressed.  The second group means that depression is a crushing weight on your back determined to make your life as miserable (and as short) as possible, and that you didn’t do anything to cause it, but that ultimately you have the choice of giving up and accepting being depressed for the rest of your life, or you have the option of making an effort to improve your quality of life.  Similar statements, totally different meanings.

But I think a lot of people are sort of seduced by the comfort of giving up, and with the good intention of creating communities of understanding and non-judgement between mentally ill people, social media has unwittingly created communities of mentally ill people encouraging each other to give up.  To just accept that this is the way their lives are, and there’s no possibility of getting better.  And that’s how it’s gotten to the point of people dismissing actual mental health professionals as being no different than some ignorant person who doesn’t know the first thing about psychology and thinks an avocado smoothie will solve all your problems.

Avocado smoothie people are coming from the first perspective, that being depressed is a free choice that you can easily opt out of.  Therapists are coming from the second perspective, where mental illness is a horrible reality, but given that you’re seeing them, a provider of mental health treatment, of fucking course they’re going to give you advice on how to treat your mental illness!  Your therapist isn’t going to sit around and say “yeah man that sucks, haha look at this funny meme about how much you want to kill yourself.”  Your therapist is going to give you recommendations of activities and habits that will help you recover.  And they understand that these activities are not easy!!!  They get that!!!  The reason they’re there is to help you introduce these activities and ways of thinking into your life!!!  Otherwise they’d just hand you a pamphlet and walk out!!!

But you can’t access that kind of help - the kind where you say “getting out of the house is a real problem for me, I never have the energy to get out of bed” and your therapist says “okay let’s figure out how to break this down into small steps, we’ll set a small goal for this week, and next time we meet you can tell me if it worked out, and if it did then we can figure out what the next goal will be, and if not then we can figure out why it didn’t work and try a different approach” - if you immediately dismiss any mention of recovery as “neurotypical bullshit.”

Anyways please please please take your healthcare seriously, get treatment, and realize that giving up and normalizing your depression/anxiety/etc as something that will never ever get better (yes, even if it’s a chronic condition that you’ll never fully cure, you still need to treat it) is not okay.  Try to get good nutrition. Try to get sunshine and exercise.  Try to be social.  Making an effort to do things that will help you is not the same as thinking mental illness is a switch you can easily flip.  Getting treatment is not the same thing as pretending your mental illness doesn’t exist or isn’t serious.  On the contrary, getting treatment is taking your mental illness seriously.  I’m not saying you should never make a joke or reblog a fucking meme or anything, I’m saying don’t use social media as your mental health care provider.  Social media can be a way to vent, but venting is not the same thing as recovering.

I’ve got my boyfriend calling me at 8am every weekday morning to get me out of bed so that I *get out of bed*. I then tell him when I’ve gotten to the gym.

We have worked this out between us, consensually, because I can’t fucking make myself do it. Because depression. But when I get up and go to the gym, suddenly my days get way, way more functional. I eat real food, I run errands, I cook- instead of laying on the couch feeling like my diaphragm got nailed to the floor. (They don’t all necessarily happen every day, but they become at least theoretically feasible.) This isn’t part 1, it’s part 3. Because dammit, I am fucking sick of this shit. I don’t deserve it and it’s a real issue- and for me, having someone to basically hotwire me because my starter is broken is how we’re gonna get a routine that takes minimal spoons to run.

Sometimes depression is cureable. Sometimes it’s just treatable. But dissing treatment because “gah neurotypicals” is shooting yourself in the foot.