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A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.

Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.

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CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON - part 5, the end of this particular adventure. (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)

content warning for blood, injury, and drug use.

(This is part of the Watsons sketchbook series)

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star trek: deep space nine, 4x20: bar association

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I've received asks on the topic a few times so I think I'd like to address the subject as clearly as I can

Okay, so like. You're on vacation, right? And you decide you want to go swimming. And you could go to a pool, or a lake, or the ocean, or the river. Wherever you want. And you see on the map that there's this one place called The Alligator Hole.

So you go there, and there's a sign on the shore that says "WARNING: ALLIGATORS", right? And you decide to go in. And when you get there, there's alligators. So you get out!

But then you go back in, with a stick, and you start hitting the alligators.

Because you don't want alligators where you're swimming!

And the impulse is understandable, because lots of people don't like swimming with alligators. Alligators are scary. Being in the water with alligators can be very stressful and damaging for people who aren't prepared to deal with alligators.

But at the same time, you must understand- there will probably always *be* alligators. Hitting a few with a stick probably won't eradicate them from the planet. There are SO MANY alligators! All over the world! And the vast majority of them will never ever hurt any swimmers!

And at the end of the day, nobody pushed you into The Alligator Hole, right? You saw a place literally called The Alligator Hole and decided that you wanted to go in there, and then you made life miserable for all the alligators.

Sure, there are places you like to swim where alligators probably shouldn't be- like suddenly, in your bathtub, uninvited and unwelcome, in the middle of the night- but alligators have to go *somewhere*, you know?

So if there are going to be alligators, no matter what, and we don't want to be surprised by them, then isn't it nice that we have places like The Alligator Hole

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when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

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William Hays, Cirrus Sky, Woodblock print

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concussion does not negate bitchiness…..this must be known

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last night my partner held a somber little passover seder to show me what it’s about and when they got to the part where they were supposed to open the door for elijah they paused, frowned, and said “oh. huh. there is a clown.” and I looked out. and sure enough. there was a clown.

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it's funny, I was talking to someone last night who didn't really know what an illustrator was. so when I introduced myself as one, he gave a speech that would've probably gone over well with a gallery artist, but which was precision-tailored to make any illustrator within a 50 mile radius go into eyes-glowing-red kill mode.

his speech was about how there is a difference between craft and art, and how people can practice craft (as in, skillfully execute a painting) without it having any artistic merit.

so I'm someone who gets paid to paint waffles for restaurant menus and dinosaurs for museums exhibits, and AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! you can't make art without it being something something you've made. does that make sense? like every illustrator I know has an individual way of approaching any given imagery that is informed by a lifetime of inspiration, and of passive intake of culture, and of the specific mistakes they make because of whatever their particular mass of grey matter deems as important thing to render or unimportant, just fuck it up.

I can make something that is informed by both a century of Canadian print-making and by my own particular neurosis, and it can also be commissioned commercial imagery that I regurgitate without care because I want to pay my mortgage. everything is art, nothing isn't art, art is something sticky and impossible to shake off of you.

anyway he got very wide-eyed and said "I'm sorry if I offended you," so today I feel a bit bad for having gotten so, uh.... excited.

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“When I first asked my grandma if I could write and publish about her, she gave me an instruction that has stuck with me over the years and I try to always keep it in mind when I write about family. She said, roughly translated from Korean: “you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time.” I took this as permission with a condition that I would fictionalize where necessary, to protect them and myself. The women I write about are both us and not us. Maintaining that fictionalized barrier is important to me.”

— Jihyun Yun, from “you can write what you want, but let us live a little more beautifully the second time": Jihyun Yun in conversation with Nicole Lachat, published Prairie Schooner, March 9, 2023

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"OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING ON-"

because I am tired. I am exhausted. I have cared and fretted and cried beyond what sane people should, and if I do not rest my heart, the compassion and empathy I have left will become small and calcified and never grow again. because in a world of infinite injustice, I cannot cry infinitely. the abyss can gaze forever, I cannot win a staring contest, so I must close my eyes. the horrors won't stop, so I need to be able to dream of peace for a little while.

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To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of Cassette Beasts' release, Jay Baylis of Bytten Studio has made a Twitter thread to share some behind-the-scenes stuff about Archangels:

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First attempt at cross stitch

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gegyjiji on Instagram

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Being as Dracula Daily is starting up again in about three days, I think this is a perfect opportunity, as we follow along this year, to play the PG-13 game.

For the unfamiliar, the PG-13 game is as follows: you are allowed to insert one and only one instance of the word "fuck" into the text as written. For maximum impact, where do you put it?

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