greenfirefly7

[greenfirefly7]

Before COVID shut the library down, I was helping a little boy and his mom find books.

“What do you like to read about?” I asked. “Dinosaurs!” This is common request, but can mean different things, “Okay. Do you want a story about dinosaurs, or facts about dinosaurs?” “Facts.” I took him to the dinosaur section (567.9) of the juvenile nonfiction. He picked out a couple books, and I asked him if there was anything else he was looking for. “Do you have anything on DNA?” I had to think about that for a second. “I think so…but I’ll have to look it up.” The boy beamed, “I want to find out how DNA works, so I can bring them back!” “We just saw Jurassic Park,” his mom explained with a smile that did not waver when she added, “We didn’t learn anything.”

[greenfirefly7]

Ways I Show a Character is In Love But Doesn't Know It Yet...

This one’s for the emotional masochists writing the slowest of burns, where your readers are screaming “just kiss already!” by chapter twenty... I Love and Hate you... ♥

They compare everyone else to the person… and everyone else comes up short. Even when they’re not consciously doing it. No one’s laugh is as warm. No one’s eyes crinkle that way.

They remember the weirdest little things about them. Birthdays? Whatever. But that time they snorted laughing at a dumb joke? Locked and loaded.

They feel weirdly guilty when flirting with someone else. Like they’re cheating… except they’re not even dating. Or are they? Or—ugh, feelings are the worst.

They notice every damn detail when the other person isn’t around. "They’d like this song." "This smells like their shampoo." "I wonder what they'd say about this weird squirrel."

They use weird, overly specific compliments. Not “You look good,” but “That color makes your eyes look like a storm in a novel I’d cry over.”

They get weirdly intense about that person being hurt or in danger. Like, irrationally intense. "He’s just a friend," they say while planning to murder anyone who makes them cry.

They feel safer around them than anyone else, and it freaks them out. Like: “I’m always on guard. Except with you. That’s... suspicious.”

[greenfirefly7]

Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

[greenfirefly7]

[greenfirefly7]

This is how terrified they are of people in government telling the truth to the American people about what they are doing behind the scenes. Cockroaches hate sunlight.

[greenfirefly7]

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

[greenfirefly7]

Severance and Trauma

What does it mean to be severed when severance isn’t real?

Dear reader, welcome to my journey. Please enjoy your stay, and don’t be afraid to like all posts equally.

I’ve been through a lot in terms of trauma – realistically, my entire being has been shaped by traumatic experiences. This is not said in terms of pity, but rather, in terms of how I chose to survive it and grow from it. I recently finished the show Severance and I was struck by how easily it explained trauma – spoilers for the show ahead, if that wasn’t obvious haha. This is more of an introduction to Severance, and what this blog means. So without further ado, let's talk about my favorite TV show, and my unique brain.

Severance is a procedure done by Lumon Industries with the premise of: What if someone else could work for you, and you could just not do that? And like, that sounds super appealing in terms of work life balance, forgetting things you want to forget, and move on with your life. This idea was extremely appealing to me – I live with PTSD and sometimes, dammit, I just want to turn off.

And frankly, I did. For a long time, I didn’t experience emotions while I was working. I’m not sure if it’s because some of my deeper traumas occurred at my work place, or if my brain was so done with it at that it just gave the reigns to my rational brain and fucked off for a bit. When I started therapy, I learned that this was severe dissociation and it was fairly normal with trauma, actually.

In our brains, we have a “rational brain” and an “emotional brain”, I have since learned. The rational brain is your functional controls – things that make logical sense, things that you fundamentally believe, etc. The emotional brain is…well, not rational. In my own PTSD brain, it’s chaos – organized chaos, but really it’s just constantly a flow of anxiety and fear. It’s replaying all your deepest fears over and over, trying to rewrite a history you don’t fully understand or remember sometimes. If the rational brain taking control is called dissociation, we can reasonably assume that if the emotional brain were to take over, that would induce psychosis.

If you’ve never experienced psychosis, it may just sound like “that girl went crazy”. And in a way, it is – but in a way, it feels like normalcy. It feels like finally, I am facing my trauma and all that it is, but I had no choice in the matter. It was the most terrifying time in my life, and honestly, I wouldn't have survived it without a strong support system, treatment, and love. And I'm happy to say I'm better than ever, at least for now.

But what if within this psychosis, someone didn’t remember anything? Not their name, not where they are, nothing. Just a blank slate, a hard table, and an ominous, "Who are you?" from a speaker near your ear.

If Severance is a metaphor for trauma, I think becoming Severed is a metaphor for the most extreme form of psychosis, but it’s just. Perfect. You don’t need to think, feel, or understand anything. Just push the buttons, do the tasks, praise Kier and repeat. Who are you? Who cares? Imagine just being a blank slate with no memories of pain, of humiliation, of loss…just a conscious You. (The You You Are, according to Dr. Ricken Lazio Hale, PhD of course)

And Severance I think, explores that well in terms of how the Innies are both different and the same as their Outie. I had the idea in my own trauma recovery to start a dialogue ala Mark in the cabin in season 2.

I acted as though I had never met my “innie” before. I introduced myself to my Innie, or emotional brain, and asked what it needed from me. I explained that I wanted to try and reboot my emotional brain, and if we could work on it together.

My Innie, for simplicity sake, agreed to the idea and mentioned that in order to truly reboot, it would need me, the Outie, to live impulsively but intentionally. And to me, that means never saying no to a reasonable request, while assuming the intention is for overall health and wellness. Innie wants my nails to be blue? Okay, nails are blue. Innie wants a salad? Alright cool.

This primitive approach to my trauma has been strangely freeing. I’m doing what I want to, when I want to do it, and I’m not letting my PTSD dictate my life. If it does creep up on Outie Me, I allow myself a moment to feel it. It’s almost always irrational and it’s become slightly more bearable to move forward after. That’s pretty huge for me, and I’m interested to see where this approach takes me.

I expressed this idea to my therapist, who has been working with me for about three years now. He also loves Severance, and seemed to really dig the idea of having a visualization dialogue with your "selves", and suggested I write about it. I decided Wordpress is going to be my way of analyzing this, and I created a partner Tumblr for my Innie to truly explore reintegration. I want to allow myself to express myself in all forms of life, and frankly, I was a Tumblr kid and I miss it.

Feel free to follow me on Tumblr as well!

Source: Severance and Trauma

[greenfirefly7]

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

[greenfirefly7]

[greenfirefly7]

“I’ll just rest my eyes” is the biggest lie you’re going straight to snorkmimimi land

[greenfirefly7]

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

[greenfirefly7]

legally changing my name to Tad Cooper just to feel like someone believes in me

[greenfirefly7]

I worked at a McDonald's as a cashier in high school and it was during a time when they changed their POS system (point of sale, not piece of shit) so everything was now in a slightly different, less logical place, but I was working 20ish hours a week so I picked it up really quickly

Anyway I was out with my friend in the next town over and we went to a McDonald's because she really wanted an ice tea and we go through the drive through. The man greets us out of the little speaker and asks for our order and she says "Hi! Could I get a large sweet ice tea please?"

Silence.

Longer silence.

And I knew in my heart what was happening.

So I leaned over and said, "It's on page two of drinks, under juice, then the third one down."

Another much shorter silence.

Then:

"What the - how the hell did... Uh. I mean. Thank you?"

And it's been literally ten years but I'm still riding the high from that.

[greenfirefly7]

I wish people paid more attention to the rhetorical work that the word "healthy" so often does. health is seen both as an objective good and a moral good, and it can be tricky to notice when it slips from "health is a good thing to have" to "healthy is a [morally] good thing to be". the "so long as you're happy and healthy" caveat that's added to any "alternative lifestyle" is one such example of things becoming grey. what does 'healthy' mean here? why do some ways of existing require extra scrutiny along 'health' lines? what are you implying about people who aren't healthy and possibly never will be?

[greenfirefly7]

why did they make oreo flavored oreos. where’s brennan lee mulligan

[greenfirefly7]

Who wants to see my cat totally brave and not at all scared at the vet

[greenfirefly7]

Hey friends: if you have ever published anything anywhere (including abstracts in minor academic conference proceedings apparently), check the LibGen database here to see if Mark Zuckerberg was trying to profit off your labor for free like the loser-ass schmuck he is:

I am an extremely minor scholar and I have multiple titles in this database. I preferentially publish in open access journals because I want human people to be able to read my work for free, not for some rich asshole to feed into his for-profit AI slop generator.