#social support

I was born with the emotional state of a cheetah.

That is to say, I was born a nervous wreck.

I had more phobias then I could count. I wasn't able to ride a bike until I was 9, couldn't ride a two wheeled kick scooter, wasn't able to climb a tree without a panic attack, etc.

I had a phenomenon I call "spooking" where if I hear an odd noise at night, I spook, and it effects my sleep for hours. It's nowhere near as common as it used to be

it was my natural state, to be a nervous wreak. I thought I was just careful.

then, about a year ago, I decided to go on antidepressants.

My anxiety was pilling up, and I had actually tried to commit a couple times the summer prior.

about 4 months ago, we got the dose right.

and now?

I'm finally free.

I climbed the tree I always wished to climb in front of my childhood home, and read in it (another thing my anxiety used to stop me from doing, terrified for the characters)

I discovered the pure joy of kick scooters, and roller skates too.

I'm going to try to go ice skating this winter, another thing I couldn't do

I spook maybe thrice a year. I've never slept better

Before, it felt like I permanently had a brick duct taped to my chest. whenever I get anxious enough for the brick to return, I always wonder how I felt like I could breathe.

Falling was one of my greatest fears, more specifically, jumping off a raised platform. Still is, to a level, but now?

I can conquer it.

I went on the one meter board countless times when I went to the waterpark in my hometown with my best friend, and the 3 meter twice.

Those always felt terrifying. They aren't anymore.

Freedom is the best thing I've ever felt.

Make sure your patients get it too.

There are a lot of things that can help people who are struggling with mental health. Medication is one of them. And it’s one that some people have a hard time with, so I’ve got a story:

I was a senior at ASU and a newly-minted tgirl. I felt better than I had in a long time, but I was also so goddamn tired I could feel it in my bones. I knew I needed a break. More than that, I needed a break and a LOT of distance from people and lights and traffic. So I decided to go camping! I was raised by cowboys, I was in the Boy Scouts, I have gun autism, I LOVE camping. So I call my dad and ask if I can go camping in our little cabin up by Flagstaff. He said yes! But! He said to be careful! Because it had been raining for a long time and it could be muddy!

And I, being equal parts overconfident and impulsive, thought, “it’s Arizona, how muddy can it be? It’s a goddamn desert.” So I didn’t take his truck, I grabbed my puppy and my guns, a sleeping bag and some food, and I rolled out to camp in my little mini cooper. And I got stuck in mud. Because duh, I mentioned it WAY too much for that to not be relevant. That was Chekov’s mud.

So there I am - a three hour drive away from home stuck in a puddle of freezing mud. But I was RAISED BY COWBOYS and also a GODDAMN BOY SCOUT and also NOT DUMB so I had stuff for this! I tried digging my car’s tires out! But no luck - it was just too deep. So I tried putting boards under my tires to get extra traction! But no luck, the mud was so pervasive, so invasive, my tires could find no purchase. I tried filling the puddle with dry dirt, but everything was so damn muddy I just did nothing. I was stuck. Truly, deeply, profoundly stuck. Not only was I stuck, I was stuck in a tiny car that had gradually sunken so deep into the mud I could barely open the doors. I was stuck in the middle of the road, about 3 miles from the cabin. It was cold, I didn’t have more than a sleeping bag with me, and it was getting dark. So I did my last-ditch maneuver and called my papa.

I felt like the world’s biggest burden asking my dad to drive three hours in the dark and the cold to come rescue me from something he had already offered to rescue me from by lending me his truck. I felt like I deserved to be stuck. I felt so guilty asking for help it felt like I had swallowed a fist full of nails and they were only now starting to bore little holes in my stomach. I felt *miserable.* But my dad, self-sacrificing and kind as ever, came to rescue me from my stupidity. He shows up with my littlest brother and grabs some shovels and says “Ok, we’re gonna try digging the tires out a bit,” and I said “I already tried that!” so he didn’t waste his time and he paused for a second and then said:

“Yeah, but you didn’t try it with me.”

I was nervous. I thought he meant I’d fucked it up somehow, I thought it wouldn’t work and I’d just be making my poor patient papa tired for no reason, thought nothing would work. But we dig the tires out and somehow, some goddamn how, I got enough purchase on solid ground that he could then pull me out of the mud with his truck with minimal difficulty. And then, standing by the empty pit where my car used to be, a cavernous 3-foot hole filled with icy water and sticky mud, he says “Yeah, that was quite the pit you got yourself stuck into” and it only dawned on me a few hours later that his statement worked on multiple levels.

Sometimes our minds get us stuck - it’s not a moral failing, it’s a mechanical one. A mini cooper cannot haul itself out of 3 feet of sticky slushy mud. But once we’re stuck we’re stuck. So we can do what we do to make ourselves feel better, but damn it if some of these pits just won’t let go. It’s like they can’t. It’s like they won’t. So we dig and we dig and we pull and we pull and we try anything and everything imaginable and some crazy how it just doesn’t work. And when that happens, we have a shocking amount of options left besides surrendering to the power of the frozen hole we’re in.

The first option I want to point out is that sometimes we need help. When my dad said “you didn’t do it with me,” he didn’t mean I did it wrong, he meant a two-person job cannot be done by one person. It means we need help when we need help. It means we need support. It means sometimes we need someone else to do what we can’t, especially when we’re so stuck. I mentioned my brother came with, and that was a game changer because that was, in fact, a three-person job. The more support the better. In fact, the more support, the easier and the faster it can be.

Another thing I want to note is he did not lash out at me. There was no “you asshole, you made me drive up here in all this muck while it’s freezing outside because you got yourself stuck! You wouldn’t have even gotten stuck if you did this right!” That wad important because as someone who had called for help, I already felt bad, and I’m not sure if I ever would have called for help again if he had used that as an opportunity to lecture me. Even though it was by all measures true. I took a poorly-equipped car off-roading in mud up to my knees AFTER being warned not to AND after being given options to avoid such a fate. EVEN IF IT WAS ALL MY FAULT, he still wanted to help because he loves me and that is how he shows it.

Another thing, actually the last thing, I want to point out is that when he got to me, my dad didn’t say “lol you tried to dig yourself out with a shovel? You fucken pussy, you should have used your hands, shovels are for idiots and wimps.” He actually brought his own shovels, his own ~tools~, to dig my tires out of that trench I’d finagled myself into. After that, we used boards, just like I’d done before, to get even more purchase, and then used a big-ass truck to pull the car out of that massive fucking puddle.

When we’re stuck in our own mental health concerns, the last thing we wanna do is ask for help, but we need to ask. Not because it’s fun, or because it’s gonna feel good, but because when we are well-and-truly stuck we need help. When we’re stuck in our own mental health concerns, we also sometimes need tools, and that is what meds can be. That is what therapy can be. That is what socializing can be, or breathing exercises, or a hobby, or anything that helps, even if it feels like it “shouldn’t” help. If you’re stuck in the mud and someone tells you you’re weak for using a shovel to excavate yourself, that person is an idiot. 100%, guaranteed, that person is an idiot. If you’re in 3 feet of cognitive mud and slush from, say, depression, or mania, or OCD, or psychosis, or trauma, and someone says you’re stupid for using a shovel and some boards and a truck to get out of that pit THEY are being obstinate. That isn’t even a case for “everyone’s entitled to their opinions,” that opinion is just flat-out wrong. If you’re stuck, you’re stuck. And if there’s a little nagging voice or feeling saying “yeah but it’s all your fault” that still doesn’t change the fact that you’re stuck! And if you’re stuck sometimes you need tools to get unstuck!

The last point I want to make is one that comes from the privilege of having a good dad, @optimisticdad-blog. It’s one that comes from knowing that I can ask for help no matter how bad it is and no matter how much of my own fault it feels like. That is a privilege not everyone has, but I want to use it as a teaching moment: for those or you without that privilege, those people do not have to be removed from your life but they’re not likely to change for you quickly enough to help you out in this moment. Find other people, therapists, psychiatrists, academic advisors, mentors, peers, friends, professors, anyone who can show you the kindness and understanding you need to get unstuck. You can work with the people who can’t meet your needs later but you have to be unstuck first.

And for those of you who have received the dubious honor of being someone’s lifeline when they’re stuck, try to come at it the way my dad did: no blame, no anger or scandal, no lectures, even if they’re warranted, because even if there is a time and place for those thoughts or feelings it’s not right here and right now.

Obviously don’t put pressure on yourself to be available 24/7. Don’t pressure yourself to be someone you can’t be. If you’re stuck too you can’t help someone else get unstuck sometimes. If I had called my dad and he said “call a tow truck, I can’t go right now,” that would have been OK too, and this story would be largely similar. But if you can - if you have the space, the ability, the time, the ~tools~ to help, know that any and all help you give is changing the world. Not just for that one person, although it is doing that for them, but (and I’m gonna get a little “woo woo” here) it makes a ripple that effects more than just them. It affects their entire community.

Paywall-free version

On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr., it is home.

Mr. Tyler, 41, lives in Community First! Village, which aims to be a model of permanent affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless. In the fall of 2022, he joined nearly 400 residents of the village, moving into one of its typical digs: a 200-square-foot, one-room tiny house furnished with a kitchenette, a bed and a recliner.

The village is a self-contained, 51-acre community in a sparsely populated area just outside Austin. Stepping onto its grounds feels like entering another realm.

Eclectic tiny homes are clustered around shared outdoor kitchens, and neat rows of recreational vehicles and manufactured homes line looping cul-de-sacs.

There are chicken coops, two vegetable gardens, a convenience store, art and jewelry studios, a medical clinic and a chapel.

Roads run throughout, but residents mainly get around on foot or on an eight-passenger golf cart that makes regular stops around the property.

Mr. Tyler chose a home with a cobalt-blue door and a small patio in the oldest part of the village, where residents’ cactus and rock gardens created a “funky, hippie vibe” that appealed to him. He arrived in rough shape, struggling with alcoholism, his feet inflamed by gout, with severe back pain from nearly 10 years of sleeping in public parks, in vehicles and on street benches.

At first, he kept to himself. He locked his door and slept. He visited the clinic and started taking medication. After a month or so, he ventured out to meet his neighbors.

“For a while there, I just didn’t want to be seen and known,” he said. “Now I prefer it.”

Between communal meals and movie screenings, Mr. Tyler also works at the village, preparing homes for the dozen or more people who move there each month.

In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population.

Tiny-home villages for people who have been homeless have existed on a small scale for several decades, but have recently become a popular approach to addressing surging homelessness. Since 2019, the number of these villages across the country has nearly quadrupled, to 124 from 34, with dozens more coming, according to a census by Yetimoni Kpeebi, a researcher at Missouri State University.

Mandy Chapman Semple, a consultant who has helped cities like Houston transform their homelessness systems, said the growth of these villages reflects a need to replace inexpensive housing that was once widely available in the form of mobile home parks and single room occupancy units, and is rapidly being lost. But she said they are a highly imperfect solution.

“I think where we’re challenged is that ‘tiny home’ has taken on a spectrum of definitions,” said Chapman Semple. Many of those definitions fall short of housing standards, often lacking basic amenities like heat and indoor plumbing, which she said limits their ability to meet the needs of the population they intend to serve.

But Community First is pushing the tiny home model to a much larger scale. While most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens, its leaders see that as a necessary trade-off to be able to creatively and affordably house the growing number of people living on Austin’s streets. And unlike most other villages, many of which provide temporary emergency shelter in structures that can resemble tool sheds, Community First has been thoughtfully designed with homey spaces where people with some of the highest needs can stay for good. No other tiny home village has attempted to permanently house as many people.

Austin’s homelessness rate has been rapidly worsening, and the city’s response has whipped back and forth... In October [2023], the official estimate put the number of people living without shelter at 5,530, a 125 percent increase from two years earlier. Some of that rise is the result of better outreach, but officials acknowledged that more people have become homeless. City leaders vowed to build more housing, but that effort has been slowed by construction delays and resistance from residents.

Meanwhile, outside the city limits, Community First has been building fast. [Note from below the read more: It's outside city limits because the lack of zoning laws keeps more well-off Austin residents from blocking the project, as they did earlier attempts to build inside the city.] In a mere eight years, this once-modest project has grown into a sprawling community that the city is turning to as a desperately needed source of affordable housing. The village has now drawn hundreds of millions of dollars from public and private sources and given rise to similar initiatives across the country.

This rapid growth has come despite significant challenges. And some question whether a community on the outskirts of town with relaxed housing standards is a suitable way to meet the needs of people coming out of chronic homelessness. The next few years will be a test of whether these issues will be addressed or amplified as the village expands to five times its current size.

-via New York Times, January 8, 2024. Article continues below (at length!)

Social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: these are complex and hard-earned capacities.

Social Neutralism = Belief that the way to reach the neutral between the negative, the unmaintained, and the positive, the maintained, is to put more resources into the positive than the negative because the negative has a stronger pull than the positive due to it being the default of this world because more unmaintained things occur in this world. For example, if a school teacher puts more resources towards making the class they are teaching strict (maintained = positive) than making it non-strict (unmaintained = negative), that class is more likely to reach the neutral. Social Neutralist (neutralist for short): Someone who lives by Social Neutralism. A easy way to understand how the negative and the positive work together to reach the neutral is to imagine them in a spectrum with the negative on the left and the positive on the right. Since the negative is the default of this world, it has a stronger pull than the positive. If you put more resources into the positive, you can make both the negative pull and the positive pull the same strength and as a result, you will reach the neutral. If something is neutral, it can be seen as maintained, but not too maintained. The negative has the trait unmaintained and the neutral + positive both have the trait maintained, so you could say that the neutral is more similar to the positive than the negative. In the context of human feelings, a negative person pays more attention to negative feelings and a positive person pays more attention to positive feelings. A neutral person is in the middle of the spectrum of negativity and positivity, so they would pay no attention to both negative and positive feelings. If someone would want to be a person who pays attention to both negative and positive feelings, they must reach the neutral and use the negative as a force while the positive as a foundation. List of the social ideas I have posted

Hi love! I would say it's all about cultivating emotional resilience. Like any muscle, you need to train your mind to remain calmer under pressure or stressful situations. Here are some ways I think are helpful to build this skillset:

Step into difficult conversations as two people vs. a project/problem/situation. Depersonalize any criticism by objectifying the criticism of a certain behavior, action, etc. Think of it as its own entity – like an object that can float away in the wind.

Internalize that a lot of criticism/rudeness is a form of projection and says more about the other person's inner turmoil than your demeanor or character. Offering non-constructive criticism is self-destructive. Case closed.

Look inward and make it a priority to truly get to know yourself. What are your core values? Desires? Goals? How do you want to present yourself to the world? What are your likes? Dislikes? Fears? Self-knowledge gives you a blueprint of how to move forward.

Reverse your "what ifs." Instead of wondering what could go wrong by leaning into criticism and difficult situations, consider "what's the worst that can happen?" Once you ask yourself and answer this question honestly, you realize that most of the time your fear is disproportional to the likely outcome.

Consider learning to sit/be present in the discomfort to be an act of self-care. You're becoming emotionally stronger and proving to yourself that you can hold your own in any situation. Stick up for yourself but know when to silently bow out for your own sake vs run away due to perceived personal incompetence.