the big rat who makes all the rules

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

As I get older, my periods of depression grow easier to deal with. It's because of the emotional, social, behavioral, and physical infrastructure I built and maintain to help me deal with it. But it's also because I have dealt with it for the majority of my life that I know I am going to pass through it. Well, here we are again, it sucks, let's do our strats to help and wait for it to pass.

When I was a teenager I felt as if those periods felt like they would stretch on forever, and dominate my life. They didn't last, and my burdened life moved forwards.

I've heard that adage about grief - that it's a wave that hits you, and the wave always feels the same. Sometimes the grief feels like the first time you felt that loss. But it just becomes less and less frequent. You go weeks without feeling that pain, then months, then years. What triggers that pain now doesn't trigger it in the future. Things change. Depression's a lot like that.

Hope this isn't condescending. I am boarding a plane and it is 5am so I'm just doing whatever very quickly.

pls this is the last thing from condescending and i rlly appreciate and resonate w ur words meg!!! anon, i hope you see this ask too because it adds on a very important layer on top of the "this will happen forever":

it will indeed happen again and again but you can prepare yourself better for it each after each instance. you must not fall into the trap of just letting it happen, because things can change, and you can change. a saying i always love to remember is: things dont get easier, but you get stronger

with my own struggle with bipolar, it still frigging feels like the end of the world every time i have an episode. but i learned from each episode how to handle those periods better. im definitely not like, PERFECTLY ADEPT at handling my depressive episodes (my personal post archive will show that i relapse a lot into bad coping mechanisms SOBS) but. i learn from it. try to figure out things that will help me the next time it'll happen. my most concrete example is that when i realized i have the tendency to abuse my clonazepam when im down, i asked my older sister to hide them from me and i have to ask her when i need one. when i feel like shit i try to take a walk because historically Walks Have Helped Me. i stay off twitter and read a comfort fic. i try my best to still eat Something even when it feels like i dont wanna eat ever again.

the waves keep coming but you get stronger. and smarter. and it still sucks that it'll keep on happening but youre not helpless in this. you can do something.

and eventually it'll stop feeling like the end of the world every time. it'll just feel like a shitty thursday. which. still shitty! but less.

As I get older, my periods of depression grow easier to deal with. It's because of the emotional, social, behavioral, and physical infrastructure I built and maintain to help me deal with it. But it's also because I have dealt with it for the majority of my life that I know I am going to pass through it. Well, here we are again, it sucks, let's do our strats to help and wait for it to pass.

When I was a teenager I felt as if those periods felt like they would stretch on forever, and dominate my life. They didn't last, and my burdened life moved forwards.

I've heard that adage about grief - that it's a wave that hits you, and the wave always feels the same. Sometimes the grief feels like the first time you felt that loss. But it just becomes less and less frequent. You go weeks without feeling that pain, then months, then years. What triggers that pain now doesn't trigger it in the future. Things change. Depression's a lot like that.

Hope this isn't condescending. I am boarding a plane and it is 5am so I'm just doing whatever very quickly.

pls this is the last thing from condescending and i rlly appreciate and resonate w ur words meg!!! anon, i hope you see this ask too because it adds on a very important layer on top of the "this will happen forever":

it will indeed happen again and again but you can prepare yourself better for it each after each instance. you must not fall into the trap of just letting it happen, because things can change, and you can change. a saying i always love to remember is: things dont get easier, but you get stronger

with my own struggle with bipolar, it still frigging feels like the end of the world every time i have an episode. but i learned from each episode how to handle those periods better. im definitely not like, PERFECTLY ADEPT at handling my depressive episodes (my personal post archive will show that i relapse a lot into bad coping mechanisms SOBS) but. i learn from it. try to figure out things that will help me the next time it'll happen. my most concrete example is that when i realized i have the tendency to abuse my clonazepam when im down, i asked my older sister to hide them from me and i have to ask her when i need one. when i feel like shit i try to take a walk because historically Walks Have Helped Me. i stay off twitter and read a comfort fic. i try my best to still eat Something even when it feels like i dont wanna eat ever again.

the waves keep coming but you get stronger. and smarter. and it still sucks that it'll keep on happening but youre not helpless in this. you can do something.

and eventually it'll stop feeling like the end of the world every time. it'll just feel like a shitty thursday. which. still shitty! but less.

Batman #263 - "Riddler on the Move!" (1975)

w. what

Yeah my mom has a modest twitter following and she makes a lot of political commentary tweets. They're usually very funny and extremely acerbic. And they go viral more often then I'd like. And then I go on reddit, and see my mom's tweet on r/LateStageCapitalism and r/AntiWork, and it's terrible. So I go on tumblr to escape it. And it's on tumblr too. And then I go HOME, and -

Other fun facts about my mom: she wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic on her Buffy forums in the year of our lord 2000 with her internet friends. She was ALSO a popular political blogger on LiveJournal back in the day, and apparently knew all the other bigwigs. She's an avid thrifter who refuses to spend more than $5 on any given item and has collected many items worth $500 dollars. She owns this teapot (the whole set, actually) and insists that it's the best teapot to ever exist, although it haunts my every nightmare and I think its eyes follow me around the house.

She's working on a "Fantastic Four movie screenplay" for fun, and she's having fun telling me about it. The other day she excitedly told me about how she needed a lawyer character for the screenplay, and the perfect character for the story was She-Hulk! Did you know there's a TV show coming out? I loved Ms. Marvel it was so precious.

w. what

Yeah my mom has a modest twitter following and she makes a lot of political commentary tweets. They're usually very funny and extremely acerbic. And they go viral more often then I'd like. And then I go on reddit, and see my mom's tweet on r/LateStageCapitalism and r/AntiWork, and it's terrible. So I go on tumblr to escape it. And it's on tumblr too. And then I go HOME, and -

Other fun facts about my mom: she wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic on her Buffy forums in the year of our lord 2000 with her internet friends. She was ALSO a popular political blogger on LiveJournal back in the day, and apparently knew all the other bigwigs. She's an avid thrifter who refuses to spend more than $5 on any given item and has collected many items worth $500 dollars. She owns this teapot (the whole set, actually) and insists that it's the best teapot to ever exist, although it haunts my every nightmare and I think its eyes follow me around the house.

She's working on a "Fantastic Four movie screenplay" for fun, and she's having fun telling me about it. The other day she excitedly told me about how she needed a lawyer character for the screenplay, and the perfect character for the story was She-Hulk! Did you know there's a TV show coming out? I loved Ms. Marvel it was so precious.