If you have depression or any other mental illness/condition that affects your daily life and can make it hard to function, please try to at least brush your teeth. Bare minimum. When even that’s too much I sometimes will just swish around some mouthwash when I piss or something. Anything.

Depression really fucked up my mouth and now it hurts to eat/drink most things and my dental bills are high because of how neglectful I got during particularly bad episodes when I was younger. Teeth can’t repair or replace themselves, so take care of them as best you can. If not just for the health aspect of it, keeping up your dental hygiene could save you from a lot of financial stress in the future.

very obvious special interests in things like animals or hair were ignored as normal girl interests

noise sensitivity was me being an uptight bitch

meltdowns extending into teenage years were seen as typical for dramatic teenage girls

love of colorful, sparkly, visually-stimulating things?? GIRL

vestibular stimming only landed me in cheerleading and gymnastics

severe social anxiety = shy girl!!!

always saying “what”? can’t be her ears bc she has great hearing, must just be another ditzy blonde girl

only eats specific foods/plain food? girls are sooo picky

self-harming? red flag but still typical of girls who are “looking for attention”

awkward laughing at everything because I don’t know what to FUCKING SAY?? giggly girl, very normal and cute (not)

doesn’t go out a lot? the perfect daughter!

not to mention all of the symptoms that WEREN’T obvious because I worked so hard to hide them.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Sunday signed an executive order to protect transgender students enrolled in schools across the state, declaring on the final day of Pride Month that “ignorance was no longer an excuse for bigotry.”

The order establishes a task force of 25 people who will craft policies to better support transgender and nonbinary students and mandates that schools have safe spaces for LGBTQ youth.

Pritzker, who signed the order the same day as Chicago’s Pride Parade, said the changes were meant to “disrupt the patterns of discrimination in our classrooms and ensure our school[s] across the state are affirming and inclusive for transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming students.”

“While the LGBTQ community has so much to celebrate, we must also recognize that the trans community that ignited this movement has been left out of many of its victories,” the governor wrote on Twitter. “Visibility and acceptance for non-cisgender people are on the rise, but so are attacks of hate, particularly against black trans women.”

He continued: “We’re taking one more step toward securing Illinois’ place as a leader in equality and hope. Under this executive order, ignorance is no longer an excuse for bigotry.” 👏

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.