#unable to move or function

[itspileofgoodthings]

my life is a very slow process of everyone around me telling me not to be anxious and me fighting them all tooth and nail while inching towards more stable mental health.

[sam-montembeault]

tfw your crazy roommate is trying to gaslight u, literally, but u got her muted 💀

[salsa-ishida]

you're back!! it's been so long!! I missed you <3 <3

ahhhh I missed you too!! Life has been insistent on grinding me to a paste but we perservere

[sublux]

what an absolutely exhausting couple of years i’ve had. i hope 2025 has something good in it for me

[i-may-be-an-emu]

having adhd sucks.

[daz4i]

how is it. that for a whole week. the house smelled fine, and other than some dust and cat hair it was really clean too, and everything was organized and easy to find with no towers of dishes in the sink about to topple over. even tho i didn't clean that much or do anything out of the ordinary to keep the house this way. but now my parents have been home for like 3 days and already every room except for mine is inhospitable from how bad they all smell, and there's mess all over, and the table is constantly sticky, and the sink is somehow full yet barely has any dishes in it bc the way they're organized is so ineffective, and i hate it here i wanna leave so bad

[pepprs]

on my p*riod. suffering level = unbearable

[watermelinoe]

i wish i didn't need so much external validation that i'm not worthless but my desire to perform well has been ingrained in me since early childhood

[feelingtheaster99]

Does Izuku Midoriya have like zero pain receptors??? Asking for a friend

[pinklemonadewithsugar]

sorry for everyone in my dms I never got over my autism.

[northgazaupdates]

Meet Mohammed

Mohammed @mohammedalhabil2000 lives with his mother Ibtisam, his sisters Noha, Abeer, and Nour. They are a loving family, but have had more than their fair share of struggles. Mohammed’s father was martyred by the occupation in its 2014 aggression. Ibtisam and Omar, Mohammed’s older brother, supported the family themselves for many years. Then, in December 2023, Omar was martyred by the occupation while he and Mohammed were out gathering firewood. Mohammed was severely injured in the same attack.

This was not the last time Mohammed was injured by IOF violence. Mohammed has been injured on four separate occasions, resulting in his left leg being critically wounded. He had to have a full cast put on, rendering him unable to move any part of his leg.

He undergoes regular physiotherapy when it is safe enough to travel to the clinic, but unfortunately this is not enough to heal his wound. Mohammed is going to require intense, specialized treatment in order to fully heal his leg and regain as full of function as possible. Due to the occupation’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, this cannot be done in Gaza.

Mohammed will need to travel abroad to treat his leg, which will be a complex and expensive proposition. Just passing from Gaza into Egypt costs thousands of dollars, not to mention the costs of lodging, food, medication, and medical appointments. He is trying to raise funds so that when the border reopens, he will be able to arrange passage into Egypt, and begin his journey to fully healing.

His family is already struggling to survive, relying on mutual aid for food and other basic necessities. They lost their home due to IOF attack, and none of them are able to work. This means Mohammed has no way to pay for his travel and treatment costs without your support.

Please help Mohammed be able to afford the treatment he needs

Thank you❤️❤️

[yamnekosewing]

I finally had a chance to work more on this commission for a friend and SO EXCITED to be done with it! I have to take extra precautions due to allergies (which she accepted) and couldn't just work on it here and there.

But I have 4 more things to sew onto it, and then it's done!

I'll need to find a box for it, but that should be easier to handle.

[patchwork-crow-writes]

Ralsei has known what's been going on with Kris the ENTIRE time, and once you realise that, EVERYTHING he says and does around them makes a thousand times more sense. And you realise that, far from dismissing Kris's "true" self in favour of a copy, he has been working tirelessly to prop them up, to validate their most basic and fundamental choices, to keep them from the brink of despair, and perhaps even death.

We always thought it was strange, how Ralsei seems to baby Kris at times - how he offers heaps of praise upon them for performing the simplest of tasks, how he lets them express themself through violence while chastising Susie for the same thing, how at every turn he puts so much emphasis on Kris's choices, their talents, their intrinsic personhood, almost above the very prophecy he serves. We thought him mollycoddling and completely out-of-touch at best, and downright malicious at worst. We presumed he was encouraging the player to keep playing, and was in fact speaking over Kris's head directly at us. We presumed that the prophecy was all he cared about, and him encouraging Kris was simply a means to that end.

And we were wrong about all of it. Because we didn't know what Kris was truly going through until now. We thought that our possession was the worst thing that was happening to them, and that he was complicit in their suffering by trying to downplay it.

But Ralsei knew. Because Ralsei knows Kris better than anyone else - better than Susie, better than Noelle, and certainly far better than us.

Kris is hopelessly trapped, at all times. There is no hope for them, they cannot see a way to escape their bonds... not alive, in any case. Their suffering is so great, the pressures upon them so immense, that they have been hollowed out into a catatonic shell of their former self - unable to move except through great effort, unable to speak except through stilted phrases. They don't sleep or eat well at all. They don't try at school. They cannot tell anyone about what's happening, and they cannot make friends because of it. For all intents and purposes, they have given up.

But it's worse than that, because they KNOW that what they're being made to do is wrong. They don't want to do any of it, and yet they feel they cannot refuse. That knowledge eats away at them, to the point where they feel like they are inherently Bad, because only Bad people do Bad things, and they're doing Bad things all the time. They don't feel like they deserve the good things in their life because of it. They feel like they're living a lie. And no-one else knows - no-one else can possibly know.

But Ralsei knows.

Why does Ralsei go to the trouble of arranging a tutorial battle for Kris, when they've already demonstrated their capabilities fighting against Lancer? Because Kris doesn't know what they're doing during that fight. They're issuing commands, fighting alongside Susie, and they don't know how or why. They're scared, they don't know where they are, and the one other person they knew from school just ditched them. Through the tutorial, Ralsei breaks down each combat function step-by-step, walking Kris through each one with patience and restraint. And he lets them go off-piste up to a point - he'll let them attack his mannequin and say it's alright if they want to hit him too, he'll let them hug him several times throughout the tutorial, and he will show remarkable restraint throughout the entire endeavour, despite his obvious frustration at their uncooperativeness.

Seen this way, the Tutorial becomes less about the GAME teaching the PLAYER how to battle, and more about RALSEI providing to KRIS some semblance of structure and context to a new and frightening world. Both of them are literally starting at Zero, and have to establish the basics before anything further can happen.

This in turn establishes the framework for their relationship - not an annoying tutorial fairy lecturing an experienced player on things they already know, but a kindly tutor gently guiding a broken teen, one tiny step at a time. Not lashing out at mistakes, not admonishing when they try to assert themself against the established framework - he will let them fight, and let them command him to fight as well, because his desire to help Kris find themself again means he has to provide leeway for if they "misbehave". There have to be bounds, but they must feel like the choices they make matter - even if they actually don't.

When you're drowning in a world that has seemingly conspired to take your agency from you, and break you down into nothing more than a pawn that does what it's told and nothing else... even the illusion of choice is a life-preserver that you'll cling onto for dear life. The support Ralsei provides Kris in this capacity is what gives them the drive to protect Susie from King's attack - to make a choice to protect their friend, even if it wouldn't have meaningfully changed anything.

It explains his secret conversations with Kris too - while we are busy watching Susie, Ralsei is free to let Kris know that despite being literally controlled, the one controlling them is on their side, and that we will help them break free from the more insidious influence of the Knight. He has to tell them to trust in us, trust that we will do right by them to the best of our abilities. And indeed, by Chapter 2, they have become more willing to express themself through their tone of voice, through how they choose to interpret the instructions given to us, either to play pranks or to show their appreciation for the people who, despite everything, still care for them.

And even Ralsei's apparent dismissive attitude to Spamton NEO's effect on Kris can be explained through this prism. Kris is very very slowly starting to recover from the trauma of their situation, and literally EVERYTHING about Spamton is a huge trigger for them. It's not farfetched to say that Kris sees in Spamton a cautionary tale of how they will end up - used up, cast aside, wretched and desperate and bitter and broken. All of Ralsei's work building Kris back up could be undone in an instant, and so he has to tread extremely carefully - downplay its significance, offer nonthreatening proximity (he will hug Kris, but only if they hugged him on the boat ride prior to this), distract them from the immediate trauma with very basic "nice" thinks like cake, and warm/soft things. It seems dismissive at the time because we don't yet know what Spamton truly represents to Kris - not just the fear of being controlled against your will, but of being used up and broken down, and then tossed away like an unloved toy. It's only when we have that additional context that all of Ralsei's actions towards them start to make sense - not only make sense, but also show a level of care and tact that we did not previously assume him capable of.

And I suppose the last question is: why does Ralsei do any of this in the first place? Why go to this trouble when he knows he'll just be left behind, when he knows that if he succeeds, Kris will go back to the light world and live a full life without him? Well... look at the colour of his horns. If Ralsei is the horned headband, and Kris wore him for months, he would have borne witness to Kris's deepest, darkest fears about themself. It's possible that he might have seen the inciting incident that led Kris down this unfortunate path. Either way, he would have been so close to them that he'd almost be like an extension of them.

So, again - why does he do this? Because his purpose was always to guide them back to themself - first as a pair of horns to better fit in with their family, and then as a physical manifestation of those same horns to help them overcome the terrible harm that has been wrought upon them.

But more than this, I think it's because he loves them - the same way that they would have loved him when they wore him all those years ago. And isn't that what you do for the people you love - help them when they're struggling, comfort them when they're sad, gently challenge them to expand their window of tolerance, give them the tools they need to return to the light, to heal and grow back into themselves?

Ralsei knows Kris better than anyone else. And maybe we should start listening to him.

[lunellum]

Let me give you, the internet, and mostly myself, some executive function advice.

Sometimes, when you find yourself somehow unable to do a thing you need or want to do, one issue might be that your brain has subconsciously tacked on extra tasks, and those tasks are making the whole thing too overwhelming!

Tl;dr: don't do that!

For example, I like to track the books I read and I've been meaning to add a few books I've recently finished. But my brain has added that I should also write a review, and the exact dates I read them (which I can't even remember) and oh by the way I should finish moving my stuff over to storygraph and before I know it that 1 task has turned into 4! And my executive functioning says no.

In fact, while I was getting the idea to write this post, my brain went "wouldn't it be nice to also write a post about y and tag them all properly and go back through my posts and find all mental health posts and tag those too" and wouldn't you know it. 4 tasks.

Discard those extra tasks. Don't even write them down. They don't matter. Strip it down to the 1 task you started with and only do that.

Sure, you won't have achieved some theoretical better end result but that end result was never gonna happen anyway. It was paralysing you from getting the initial task done. And maybe once that initial task is done, you can get to one (1! not 4!) additional task. Later. Not now.

Half-assing is better than no-assing.

[so-long-soldier-writes]

to anybody who's sent me asks or anything, i promise i'm not ignoring u, i'm just dead inside

[penny-anna]

if voyager was like 25% racier they could have had a plot where someone stumbles on a buried holodeck program about having sex with Tom Paris and now everyone is trying to figure out who wants to fuck Tom so badly they made a whole holodeck program about it.

no-one wants to bring it up with Tom himself for obvious reasons. naturally all eyes turn to B'Elanna but she strenuously denies it. initially no-one believes her but on investigation they break the encryption and discover that it looks like Harry made the program.

Harry gets very flustered and insists that someone must have fraudulently used his credentials to make the program. but if that's the case then it was either one of the ship's other senior officers (bcos they're the only people who'd be able to fake Harry's credentials) or someone with very advanced holodeck skills

Seven is briefly considered (she has the technical skills) but is fully exonerated when they realise the program predates her time on the crew.

Seven points out that it could have been the Doctor who also has the relevant skills but the Doctor argues that he wouldn't bcos he has better taste and also if he wanted to make a secret holodeck program he'd cover his tracks better and he's right on all counts. Neelix protests his innocence and everyone's like yeah honestly we never thought it was you Neelix.

the Doctor suggests that maybe they should let the matter rest on the grounds that masturbation is perfectly natural and healthy and whoever's responsible it's their own private business but B'Elanna and Harry are like nooo this is a threat to the harmony of the crew we have to know. also we're nosy. don't you want to help us on this. and the Doctor's like yeah. alright.

B'Elanna and Harry and the Doctor can't find any evidence of fakery which makes it more and more likely that it was a senior officer. they're all eying Janeway and Chakotay and Tuvok trying to guess which one of them secretly wants to fuck Tom Paris.

Janeway seems the most likely prospect as she has technically fucked him before when they were salamanders and also like as far as anyone knows she's been functionally celibate since they got stranded so she's gotta be pretty pent up by now.

but then Tom and Chakotay have some history from their time in the Maquis so there could be something going on there??

Tuvok is the least likely by a mile bcos like he's Tuvok but then it's always the people you least suspect isn't it and last time they found a weird holodeck program it turned out to be Tuvok's so maybe?? maybe??

obviously they aren't about to bring this up with Janeway & co so they're just sitting in command meetings with their 3 most plausible suspects and Tom himself. collectively fucking sweating. unable to concentrate.

after several repetitions of this Janeway's like OK something's distracting you all. fess up so we sort out whatever it is and move on with business. and after a lot of squirming one of them breaks.

& then Tom is like ohh yeah that's my program. and they're like. say what?? and he's like that's my holodeck program I made it. for personal use.

so B'Elanna is like 'why would you make a holosex program about yourself' and he's like because I wanted to know what it was like to fuck me?? is that so wrong. get off my case.