"who're" = "who are"

i'm so deep in the Bat-sauce i've been using it as a coping mechanism for years now. it's a load-bearing support to my mental health in SEVERAL ways. idk there's something about Bruce Wayne that makes him a top tier comfort character for me

but i did something last night that tops it all and i'm both mad about it and also impressed with it

i was in the middle of an anxiety fit (not quite a full blown panic attack, but close enough) but since i was driving, i REALLY needed to focus on the road and not my wandering panicked thoughts that were trying to convince me every car following me was a fucking cop out to get me, that shits SUPER distracting!!

at some point, exhausted from the third or fourth bout of unnecessary adrenaline, my wonderfully predictable brain yanked on the hyperfixation bell and suddenly!! i had a brand new way of reframing the overwhelming sensations of panic into something i could distance myself from, at least in the moment, so i could focus.

basically:

anxiety/panic attack = fear toxin

it feels a little cringe but i'm telling you the change was instant!! i heard the words "fear toxin" in my head and immediately straightened up in my seat, ready to deal with the flooding anxiety.

the anxiety didn't up and leave of course, but now i had something to direct my mind to every time my heart rate kicked back up and the other cars on the road started looking like cop cars.

it's not a perfect comparison, since fear toxin leans more into artificially triggering psychosis and hallucinations, but i just pretended it was a "milder" strain.

the reason it helped, i think, is because it reminded me of something super important when dealing with severe anxiety/panic attacks

"this fear is a chemical going haywire, it is altering my perception of reality. while i cannot help feeling the fear, i must remember its purpose, and i must choose to keep at least one foot in rationality in spite of the fear."

this literally just occurred to me bc my roommate and i haven't had internet for the past few days (some AT&T outage, it affected a good portion of the neighborhood) and one thing became incredibly clear

the PS5 became mostly useless without wifi unless you had physical media. there's a setting to let you play games offline, but the problem is that you have to be online to enable that setting (which, huh???) we had ONE game installed that automatically let you play offline, God of War: Ragnarok, but none of the others we had.

so our TV entertainment was limited to the couple of games on the Switch (kudos to Nintendo for automatically being able to play (almost) any game offline) and also my DVD collection, which isn't much

and yes i realize this is a "first world problem" but goddamn like a decade or so ago this wouldn't have been a problem!! Xbox got SO much shit for requiring players to be online, but now it's the default?? and you're taking away the ability to DO ANYTHING offline by obsoleting disks???

spoiler alert, it's a new superbat fic!

Once More ch. 4 is also about halfway done but this new fic stole my attention for a bit. planning on keeping to three chapters (maybe four, at most), whereas Once More is definitely gonna be a longer fic. 10+ chapters at least

it honestly works in either direction, they both have angst

"You need to let go, now

Before you drown

I know that you won't understand, but you need to let go of this hand

'Cause I'm going down