xtsr

Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t remember being in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

Bonus:

my old therapist derek, from across the reception area, seeing me for the first time after the summer of 2015: HEY DID YOU SEE AGE OF ULTRON?? IT SUCKED, RIGHT???

“You’re bassicly a glorified sad lizard.” (It makes sense with context)

“Damn girl you need to get your shit together.”

“Go home and cry. Stop drinking in bathtubs. Eat something that isn’t bleach or memes.”

“This happened hundreds of years ago, get over it”.

Sure, it started centuries ago. But it didn’t end hundreds of years ago, or one hundred, or even 50. 

When we talk about these issues, we don’t just mean small pox-infected blankets, or forced migration. We don’t just mean settlements, bounties on our heads, the physical attacks on our villages. We don’t just mean the residential schools, or the laws that banned our traditional languages and practices. 

We mean: 

- The Sixties Scoop, when Indigenous children were ripped from their communities to be placed with white families.

- Residential schools, the last of which only closed in 1996, where children were forced to give up their languages, culture, identity, and were abused horribly.

- The Millennium Scoop. The child welfare system in Canada is still ripping children from Indigenous communities. Despite only making up about 8% of the age demographic, Indigenous youths under 14 account for more than half of the foster system. (x)

- 80% of reserves in Canada have median incomes that fall below the poverty line (x)

- A vast number of reserves in Canada do not have clean drinking water (x)

- Indigenous rights and land titles are routinely ignored in order to create pipelines and sell off resources. (x)

- According to Indigenous women’s groups, there are approximately 4,000 cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The RCMP only acknowledge about 1200 of these. (x)

-  “Between 1997 and 2000, the homicide rate for Indigenous women was nearly seven times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.” (x)

- A man literally confessed to the murder of Tina Fontaine, a 15 year old Indigenous girl, and he was acquitted. (x)

- Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was shot multiple times by a Saskatchewan farmer. A jury featuring no Indigenous people declared his murderer not guilty. (x)

- The Starlight Tours. Saskatoon Police routinely took intoxicated Indigenous men outside of the city in sub-zero temperatures and left them to find their way back. Several froze to death. The Saskatoon Police were caught deleting the article about this from Wikipedia. (x)

- Suicide and self injury are the leading cause of death for Indigenous men under 44. In addition, the rate of suicide in Indigenous women is seven times higher than that of non-Indigenous women, and the rate of suicide among Indigenous men is 5.25 times higher than that of non-Indigenous men. Suicide rates for Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. (x) In certain communities, like Attawapiskat, suicides reach epidemic levels. (x)

These are just a few of the many legacies of colonization that impact us today. 

This is colonialism. This is genocide. 

It never stopped.

- The Canadian government and RCMP carried out a heavily militarized attack on Wet’suwet’en people defending their unceded territory from an illegal pipeline this week.

This is land that does not belong to the goverment. It is land that according to the government’s own laws, and more importantly Wet’suwet’en laws, can’t be taken by Canada.

aka why tf am i procrastinating on The Thing (more like a flowchart, actually)

lots of people who have executive function difficulties worry about whether they’re procrastinating on a task out of laziness/simply wanting to be a jerk or mental struggles. this checklist might help you figure out which it is at any given time! (hint: it’s almost never laziness or being a jerk.) (obligatory disclaimer: this is just what works for me! something different might work better for you.)

1) do I honestly intend to start the task despite my lack of success?

yes: it’s a Brain Problem. next question

no: it’s shitty to say one thing & do another. better be honest with myself & anyone expecting me to do the task.

2) am I fed, watered, well-rested, medicated properly, etc?

yes: next question

no: guess what? this is the real next task

3) does the idea of starting the task make me feel scared or anxious?

yes: Anxiety Brain. identify what’s scaring me first.

no: next question

4) do I know how to start the task?

yes: next question

no: ADHD Brain. time to make an order of operations list.

5) do I have everything I need to start the task?

yes: next question

no: ADHD Brain lying to me about the steps again, dangit. first task is ‘gather the materials’.

6) why am i having a hard time switching from my current task to this new task?

i’m having fun doing what i’m doing: it’s okay to have fun doing a thing! if task is time-sensitive, go to next question.

i have to finish doing what i’m doing: might be ADHD brain. can I actually finish the current task or will I get trapped in a cycle? does this task really need to be finished?

the next task will be boring/boring-er than the current task: ADHD brain. re-think the next task. what would make it exciting? what am I looking forward to?

I might not have enough time to complete the task: ADHD brain wants to finish everything it starts. (if task is time-sensitive, go to next question)

i just want to make the person who asked me to do it angry: sounds like anxiety brain trying to punish itself, because I know I’ll be miserable if someone is angry at me. why do i think I deserve punishment?

no, I seriously want to piss them off: okay, i’m being a shithead

7) have I already procrastinated so badly that I now cannot finish the task in time?

yes: ADHD brain is probably caught in a guilt-perfection cycle. since I can’t have the task done on time, i don’t even want to start.

reality check: having part of a thing done is almost always better than none of a thing done. if I can get an extension, having part of it done will help me keep from stalling out until the extension deadline. i’ll feel better if I at least try to finish it.

no, there’s still a chance to finish on time: ADHD brain thinks that I have all the time in the world, but the truth is I don’t. 

reality check: if i’m having fun doing what I’m doing, I can keep doing it, but I should probably set a timer & ask someone to check on me to make sure I start doing the task later today.

8) I’ve completed the checklist and still don’t know what’s wrong!

probably wasn’t honest enough with myself. take one more look.

if I’m still mystified, ask a friend to help me talk it out.

you’re not the only person who’s expressed trouble with the first step, so I’m gonna elaborate just a little on the concept of intent.

‘Intending to act’ can be rephrased as ‘expecting yourself to do the thing’. 

It’s the difference between your teacher giving you homework (your teacher expects you to do the homework) and you deciding to do the homework (you expect yourself to do the homework).

I don’t think you can lie to yourself about whether or not you intend to do something. even as a person who often doesn’t have a real concept of how much I can actually get done*, I can always tell when I don’t really expect myself to do a thing vs when I do expect myself to do it but I’m struggling to start.

below is a list of things that might help you tell if you really intend to do a thing. if even ONE of these is true, I believe you honestly intend to do the task you’re struggling to start.

do you want to do it? or alternatively: do you want the benefits from doing it enough to do it?

even if you don’t want to do it, do you expect yourself to do it?

can you imagine yourself starting the thing? (even if you don’t have a plan for how to get there.)

do you have even a nebulous plan for doing the thing? (my ‘plans’ often start out: ‘1. go to wherever I have to be to do the thing 2. do the thing 3. ???? 4. profit’, which isn’t much of a plan but at least there’s a sense of starting and ending.)

are you trying to force yourself to do the thing by not allowing yourself to start any other things first (and thus continuously scrolling through twitter/tumblr, or staring at your ceiling, or whatever)?

are you trying to make yourself do the thing by offering yourself rewards for doing the thing?

again: 

if even ONE of these is true, I believe you honestly intend to do the task you’re struggling to start.

and this isn’t an exhaustive list of ways to tell you’re planning to do it! you know yourself best, and you can develop ways to tell the difference between your good intent and your wishful thinking.

procrastination is a hell of a monster, especially if you don’t have normal executive function. be nice to yourself! you are a decent person and want to do good things.

*the real problem ADHD people seem to have (or at least, the problem I, an adhd person, often have) is intending to do too much. my to-do list for any given day usually overestimates both how much time I have & how much energy I have. as a result, I can honestly intend to clean my room, do the dishes, and do my budget in one day, but I’ll probably only end up doing 2 out 3 things b/c I’ll run out of time or energy before I get to the last one. 

When the last Harry Potter book came out, I was a bookseller. But the actual night of the release I was alone in Paris. I couldn’t pass up the trip, but I also couldn’t go unless it was at that time, so I was missing out on working arguably one of the biggest nights in bookselling with my team that I loved. I was both thrilled and feeling very lonely.

The night the book came out, I went to a bookstore near where I’d spent most of my day, relatively far from my hotel. The crowds were HUGE and it was clear the store didn’t have enough staff fluent in English to manage well, so I found someone and volunteered to help out. It was an absolute blast, I got to enjoy doing work I loved on a huge night, and a place where’d I been feeling alone was suddenly full of friendly faces.

I left once they got down to the last pallet of boxes being handed out - I was happy to help, but I was volunteering and I’d done plenty of work already. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the metro would be closed. It was late, the book came out at 1AM in Paris because it was released at midnight London time. The city was quiet. But at every single taxi stand I passed, there was a line of people sitting on the curb, reading the book. Every one of them tearing through pages, faces lit up. I kept walking, because the taxi lines were so long, thinking it was just the crowd from the store I’d been at. Soon I realized it was all over the city. People sitting on curbs, outside of buildings, on benches in parks, walking slowly - all of them reading the same book. It was quiet but the energy was palpable and joyous. I walked all the way home because I never found a taxi stand without a huge line. I walked well over an hour and never saw a break in it. I felt like it was the beginning of book one, but the Muggles were asleep and we were out in the streets, hardly believing the thing we’d been waiting for was finally here.