yikes biych

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

how you program your mind when you’re at a low point is so impactful. resorting back to toxic patterns when you’re low is only strengthening those neural pathways and programming your mind to make those unhealthy choices or think those unhealthy thoughts every time you’re not feeling well. alternatively, trying your hardest to cope in a healthier way every time you’re feeling bad will strengthen those positive neural pathways, and as time goes on, it will become easier to make healthy choices and say no to toxic patterns. this of course isn’t to say that you should feel guilty if you relapse, it is not by any means easy to reprogram your brain and sometimes we relapse and that’s okay, so long as we’re trying our best to treat ourselves better.

The first “positive neural pathway” I developed was learning the importance of ‘be patient with yourself’. Within that concept I include being kind to yourself as part of that patience, as well to have something, some task/goal/aim, to be patient about. It is pretty much the foundation of how I am much less of a mess than I could be.

i don’t know who needs to hear this, but here it goes: you don’t have to repeatedly and harshly punish yourself for every little thing you think you do wrong. you don’t have to diminish or eliminate your worth and dignity in order to become a better person and acknowledge your mistakes. please forgive yourself, please keep going and please, be flawed! perfection is unattainable.

Distance yourself from people that bring out a version of you who you’re not trying to be anymore.

You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.

This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.

Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.

one of the key points of trauma recovery is learning to let go the idea of getting back to “who i was before”. your trauma has shaped you and that’s okay. recovery is learning how to live with what happened rather than getting rid of it, even if that feels impossible at the moment

here’s a reminder for anyone who needs it: that small embarrassing thing you did earlier? no one remembers it. they have their own day to day lives they’re focusing on, they aren’t focusing on whatever it was that happened. you’re human, you’re awkward sometimes, and that’s okay. people aren’t judging you as harshly as you worry they are

I did the being edgy and self-deprecating thing, it gets old. I wanna be soft and lovely and easily impressed. I wanna appreciate all the little things that make me happy the same way I’ve dwelled on every single thing that upsets me.

i know you might be in a really rough place right now, so i will do my best to be gentle with you in this moment to remind you that this too shall pass. i want to tell you it will get so much better, but i understand if it’s hard to believe it and it’s okay if you don’t feel very “positive” right now! i’m not asking you to be positive, okay? but from one stranger to another: life takes really funny, unpredictable and different twists and turns. all i ask is that you hold onto anything that makes you glad to be here. because i’m glad you are here. i am.

One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.

Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.

And I’m so fucking lucky, and I don’t always say it or even think it. Because I have friends who send me letters and who told me when the cafeteria at work had chopped tomatoes and who want to watch Scream with me and it just hits me sometimes that this world can do the ugliest things to people, but as long as I still have a friend who will point out dogs on the sidewalks to me then I have something amazing to live for. And as long as I have pals who I want to make peppermint bark for, then I have a reason to keep pushing this world to be better.