platonicassploughing

[platonicassploughing]

i got rejected by my crush! and my self esteem is not doing so well today. i am sad and disappointed and embarrassed. i thought i would be a different person than i am now. and i am embarrassed that i have let the world shape me in such a way.

i was hoping that i would be someone who isn't be disturbed or troubled by rejection. that i would be unfazed, and not feel so bothered. that person isn't here yet.

embarrassment is an interesting emotion to respond to that with. it implies that i find it unacceptable in some way: that respectable, appropriate people don't get sad about being rejected. well of course they do! everyone does, at least a little i think. and there's no shame in it, whether you feel entirely or not even remotely moved by the fact.

perhaps i am embarrassed that my interpersonal wants and interests aren't met. it doesn't feel very dignified to be lonely and to want company. yes, i think im not so ready to come to my defence for this. i suppose put explicitly, i believe:

"respectable people do not struggle to meet their needs! they find who they want, and they are not disturbed by the trial and error of finding them! respectable people are not shaken, nor do they find themselves needing!"

that sounds very ungenerous, doesn't it. i wonder if by this measure, how many people really *are* respectable in our world then. i think i could wager that there are not many. what do i think is a real model for respectabality? for what an approrpriate person acts and thinks like?

i would not be embarrassed or lose respect for my friend, if they said they were sad about being rejected. that is natural, it's human. i think i would find active respect for them in that situation, if they showed resilience. if they were able to feel sad, disappointed, even embarrassed and ashamed over that situation, and have the grace to accept that and the resolve to move forward. that is much more respectable, more than someone who never felt sad about it in the first place. more than respect, i would esteem someone who could admit that they have been knocked down, outmatched, and still commit to getting back up and moving forward. somebody who is able to be kind and brave in the face of adversity.

i must thank my embarrassment. i didn't realise i held such an incompassionate view of what makes a person dignified or embarrassing: and it allowed me to give myself a view that better fit my values—better fits the kind of person i really want to be.

i hope this puts me on the way to being the sort of person who can one day be well equipped to deal with such a thing. and thankfully, it seems that my embarrassment and a fair portion of my sadness are satisfied with my direction. i feel better.

[platonicassploughing]

overnight oat experiment

lately i have been on an overnight oats craze!!! in my household, the main staple was rice. i have been looking for meals that are quick and easy to prepare, as well as nutritious. i am at school often, and it is difficult satisfy either the former or the latter (and so i end up spending a lot of money eating meals out of home...). but perhaps it will be a different story this monday!

i have mostly been eating sweet overnight oats. i often mix drinking chocolate into my oats, and in the morning i put some jam, peanut butter, and nuts and seeds on top. it is good. but i am starting to get a little tired of it... and it is difficult to add more protein to such a meal (in an appetising way at least).

so i will experiment! today's meal prep will be as follows: oats, milk, sesame oil, moroccan seasoning, herbs, pepper, and lao gan ma. in the morning i will put in some boiled eggs, or maybe canned tuna if i don't feel like eggs, and nuts and seeds for some crunch. maybe i will even take some potato chips to have alongside it!

if all goes well, i will have a wonderful, nutritious, savoury and filling lunch of porridge at school. i worry it may not be so palatable though... perhaps it will be too cloying and dense of a meal. we will have to see: i will make a smaller portion just in case. wish me luck!

[platonicassploughing]

i have been doing better

i am happy to say that i have begun to grow more resilient, and more capable to handle my struggles! it is a great accomplishment. i have not felt so much emotional agency and self sufficiency in, well, perhaps ever. im on the cutting edge of my development.

part of it is my emotional experience. my day to day life is more emotionally even, and a growing count of friends are helping to shape it into something happier.

but more importantly, i have been getting better at handling very destabilising emotions, like fear, anxiety, paranoia, and others yet more extreme. i have been practicing a sort of mix of acceptance commitment therapy and good old cbt principles, and the former i find especially resonates with me.

there is no emphasis on challenging emotions, or thoughts. the main point is to acknowledge them, and to recognise how such circumstances and struggles would make anybody feel these ways. and then you focus on goals you think immediately promote your well being.

it is difficult: it requires maturity and self compassion to accept your feelings and truly act in your interests. i certainly failed to embody them many times. but it is very liberating, as you no longer need to contest yourself, your thoughts and feelings. therefore you do not need to wrestle with the enormous and invisible strength that they may be pushing back with. that is particularly difficult for me, as my past has many long, repeating, and severe pains, which give the thoughts that attend them formidable and looming figures.

not to say that other techniques wouldn't be effective. but i worry i am predisposed against them, and their adoption is less efficient. with cbt, while helpful in some areas, some of my deepest problems already had my sharp and accurate judgement. i understood situations well, with measured and constructive perspectives. however, i was very often overrun by my emotions, which took well worn, automatic paths. with this other framework, they are free to run, and i can still act as they move. i find that they are starting to lose their energy, as they are finding fewer and fewer situations where their presence makes much of a difference. finally thank fuck lmao

i am not full of confidence, however. i fear that when i enter a situation that really tests my emotions again, my resolve will not last. the idea of being shaken off course makes me nervous, and worried for the future. may failure only show me how to move even further forward.

[platonicassploughing]

yesterday (and still a little today), i was really upset. it was one of those days where you get so sad, the only thing you have the energy for is to go to bed. and eat a dinner of leftover overnight oats and fruit loops.

a couple days beforehand, my friend from my home town said he was gonna fly down to where i was next week. i was so excited to see him! apparently his job needed him there for a day. my friends from home almost never have an opportunity to visit here, so it was special to me.

but yesterday, he said that his work had found someone else for the job, and they were the ones paying for the flight. i didnt know how to react at the time, but i remember feeling a little short of breath. i was in class, so i had to compartmentalise that for a couple of hours. when i left, i started to feel very sad, very quickly.

for one, i felt disappointed. it was a very unpleasant surprise to learn that i had placed my hopes on something that would never be. i quite like him too. he is witty and kind, and i was really looking forward to spending time with him.

i also felt embarrassed, or maybe ashamed. a part of me felt stupid for hoping given that it blew up in my face. that part of me didn't have very compelling arguments, though. "you should have seen it coming. a smarter person wouldn't be in this position, a smarter person would not depend on someone such that they could make them feel this bad!" but those are the kinds of arguments that people make when being hurt is sincerely the only thing on their mind. i am not that kind of person anymore, so i eased my embarrassment, and kept going.

i felt one final thing. as he was talking about his cancelled plans with the friend group, he mentioned that he was disappointed, and was looking forward to the trip as well. i began to doubt that he was looking forward to see me, though. maybe he has some other friend here, or he just wanted to see the city. i did not want to consider that he wanted to see me. i'm not sure why, looking back. my guess is that it's some attempt at internal severance following a negative experience to resolve the discomfort of being attached to something capable of hurting me. i think this doubt is a deeper, older part of me, quietly accompanying my other feelings in an unpleasant chorus.

normally, i wouldn't be so shaken by an outcome like this, but it had been a long while of similar things in a hard year, so i didn't have much in me to withstand even small troubles. i am doing better now, though, and i have the resources and means to bring myself back to a composed state. but i hope i get easier times than these, soon.

[platonicassploughing]

my mid-semester break

i flew to my home town for this break. even though it wasn't even two weeks, a lot has happened! i celebrated my sister's birthday by buying her a kilogram of peanut butter, had a depressive episode, finally got my first adhd prescription (hooray!!!), bought a second hand accordion, engaged in emotional regulation, and hung out with my friends. i leave again for uni tomorrow.

whenever i make the trip between cities, i always feel sad and nervous. i think, have i been gone too long? maybe my friends will not be so interested to know i am here again. what if i'm old news now? these ideas hurt very much.

this defined my first week here. i felt scared that i wasn't on anyone's mind, and nothing felt good or important under all that stress. i felt every second as i ached like that, and i thought: i regret booking the flight here. how much longer will this holiday be? i should have never come here, and never have hurt so bad.

i know this might sound like a silly thing to be so sad about. i definitely agree with you that it's not reasonable. but i haven't grown into a very reasonable adult, i think. my life has made me obsessed with doing everything i can to be hurt as little as possible. the type of hurt that that i'm preoccupied with are social ones. when people love you, they should be good. they should be points of safety, happiness, and connection in your life. they help you strive to be who you want to be, and they understand when you fumble and miss the mark. i hope you'll never have to experience loving people who are the opposite of all these things.

i felt very uncertain and scared when i found myself loving people again. and so i feel uncertain and scared whenever i go back to my home town, where my friends are. for as much as i love them, i am always aware that in each of them is a potential to really hurt me. our closeness is steadily enabling a growing depth and severity of such a pain. and because nobody's a mind reader, i will never fully know for sure if that's what they have planned.

but that risk's part of the deal. it's the other side to having anybody ever be meaningful to you. you sign that deal every time you spend time with somebody you like, or hug or hold hands or get presents for them. you are also free to dissolve that agreement, every time you turn down an outing, or don't bother to reach out to someone, or never talk about what you're going through or how you feel.

it took me a long time, but i finally decided that i was willing to sign that deal. i'm still very scared, of course. and i've had a lot of moments where i run away and hide and chip away at those bonds. but that's okay. i understand that feeling scared is part of who i am. i hope not forever, but it would still be okay if i was. i am getting better at living alongside my fear every day, every time i take that deal. it helps that my friends understood, and were still there to help me, even after i missed my mark.

[platonicassploughing]

ai makes me a little sad and uncomfortable. specifically when its used to replicate what humans say on the internet.

i saw a cooking recipe on here that was ai-generated. i was so unhappy!!! i know that the recipe was probably fine, it's a composed statistical average of probably thousands of chicken carbonaras. but i didn't like that. i know that anecdotal sets of data aren't statistically representative. but you know that when somebody writes down their own recipe for something you can be confident that at least they enjoyed it. this recipe had never made a single person full or happy before it was put on the internet.

and now it'll probably be there forever, this horrible (literal) macaroni art of human experience. gathering dust in tumblr's servers, and all over its fugly ai-generated lemon slices that animorphed into the cilantro a little too much.

[platonicassploughing]

life hack! for whatever fat you use in the kitchen be it olive oil, butter, margarine, fuck it maybe even shortening. you can put herbs in there. fresh or out of the shaker. now you have delicious herby thyme butter or rosemary oil on demand. just like that! i dont know why i never did this before in my life.

oh my gosh you could even toast some of the herbs before mixing them up... i must try this. i will report back with my findings

[platonicassploughing]

when i used to tutor, one of my students had a very comfortable middle-class background (or maybe a very shoddy upper-middle class one), and the difference in wealth was stark to mine, in a way that caught me off guard.

obviously the house was fancy. that i knew immediately when i saw the address, student lived in a very wealthy area. it wasn't the cars, or heirlooms, or bougey home appliances; it was the smell of steak. almost every time i went in to teach, i could smell the aftermath of butter and beef and herbs. not that the smell of steak is like alien or anything, but the way it was always there felt so strange.

it was odd to see that i found that strange (i remember saying like, damn it always smells like steak in here, huh? and student just kinda looked at me funny lol). the smell was nice. i wonder about my life, and how many odd things i must be doing from my life's wealth.

[platonicassploughing]

my least favourite thing about adhd is sleeping. every night i have to grapple with this urge to do something, watch something, but everything is either too dull or too exciting for the evening. hours go by, and it feels like trying to hit a nail with a hammer operated by a claw machine over and over again. eventually i do get a wave of sleepiness and contentment to lie in bed, but only at some embarrassingly A.M. time.

the worst part is that ADHD medication, which would probably ease that issue, keeps you awake! ugh!!! 🛌🤸‍♀️🪦

[platonicassploughing]

housework

lately i read that one of the ways to help care for people with alz is to get them to regularly engage with household chores and mundane tasks. cooking meals, cleaning the house, washing dishes, looking after plants, doing laundry, et cetera. apparently there's something about these things that can support their cognitive health.

i've been thinking about this idea that mundane, domestic labour has a kind of healing or protective property to it. that's apparent physically, since we do it to keep our spaces clean and to keep ourselves fed and well. i didn't consider that to also be psychological, but it makes sense. we describe these sorts of tasks as chores, but sometimes when engaging with them you can feel a sort of calming and stabilising effect. i think to sitting on my floor in my warm apartment and folding freshly dried laundry with nice music. they're grounding, i should say, and therefore are healing and protective in a holistic manner.

it made me reflect on mundane aspects of my life, and consider a new perspective. what if daily living was not a collection of tedious sisyphean burdens, but rather full of practices and tasks that keep me together, my mind whole and calm.

there's this talk given by marie kondo where she talks about folding laundry, and emphasises that it's a special event, not a menial job. she described the act of sorting laundry as very intentional and conscious: you review the gratitude you have for your clothes from their impact on your life. stuff like how they keep you warm, or cool, or that they look nice, or the memories and associations you have with them. she also emphasised that you should put love through your hands and into every motion of folding your clothes, which is really sweet, though i'm not quite sure if i have the sincerity in me to do that just yet.

her core ideas of consciously reflecting on and being very explicitly grateful for these mundane things in life speak to me. daily tasks i think have the power to bring a lot of calm and stability in a really overwhelming and stressful world. mitski's a burning hill speaks to that same idea, how mundane routines and luxuries like sleeping and being clean offer some shelter even when your life has a lot of suffering and destruction. even when you yourself perpetrate some of that suffering and destroying!

housework is like glue, or a bandage, or stitches, it helps bind and connect us to our own lives when we are threatening to come apart. more than housework, probably. i can feel a similar thing when i go on my walk to school, or buy groceries, or thrifting a new windbreaker because i need to use my raincoat to cover my backpack. (and i'm very grateful for those things to keep me dry and my school books easy to carry!) i hope that looking at my life this way might help me feel a little more whole, and a little more happy.