Lazy

“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.  

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind. 

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture. 

Therefore, I present to you: 

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift 

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see. 

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in. 

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.) 

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety. 

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel. 

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless. 

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors. 

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.  

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself.  I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too. 

We want justice for the murder victim too, and we're definitely not trying to protect the murderer. The thing is, the murder happened in Taiwan, outside of Hong Kong, and HK currently doesn't have any extradition agreement with Taiwan, so we can't give the man to Taiwan for legal proceedings right now.

Now, HK can certainly work out some sort of special agreements with Taiwan to make it happen for this murder case, and that's what a reasonable top HK leader should do. But no, the current Chief Executive (i.e. the top political leader), who's actually elected by mainland China but not democratically elected by the people of HK and thus doesn't really care about our opinion, decided not to work out a special arrangement for the murder case. You know what she did?

She decided to make a blanket change to the current HK extradition law, so that it allows everyone who lives or even just passing through HK to be handed over to places we currently don't have extradition deals with. Sounds good, right?

Wrong! Taiwan doesn't want to go down this route and it has explicitly stated that if that's the route HK takes, Taiwan will not request for the murderer to be handed over to Taiwan. For one, it's not the most time efficient way for HK to hand over the man to Taiwan and get justice for the murdered girlfriend.

The most important and underlying reason is: the proposed changes cover handing over people to mainland China, which we all don't trust bc of its "legal" system that frequently forces people to "confess" their "crime" without real proof of crime and the main victims are human rights activists. The proposed new extradition bill can't guarantee people turned over will be assumed innocent until proven guilty in the legal systems they're sent to, which is the foundation to protect people wrongfully charged of crime. And the HK court doesn't have enough power to overrule sending anyone to mainland China for any "crime".

Tl;dr:

HongKongers want justice for the murder victim, but not through the proposed changes to the law currently put forward by the HK government. If the proposed changes are passed, mainland China can bully the top HK political leader into handing over anyone who disagrees with mainland China to be sentenced in mainland China under any "crime" it can make up.

"You're protecting the murderer if you don't support the proposed new extradition bill" is exactly the kind of rhetoric the mainland China-appointed top HK political leader uses to try to make protestors fighting for freedom look bad.

Is that what you want for Hong Kong? To be turned into the express line for punishment in mainland China for fabricated crimes?

PLEASE SHARE THIS!

Five Demands of the Hong Kong people:

Full withdrawal of the Extradition Bill (a.k.a. the Evil Law)

Retraction of the characterisation of the protest as a “riot”

Release of all the arrested protesters (especially the students and the wounded)

Accountability for police brutality