#hypervigilantness

[sunlit-mess]

The answer to questions I get every time. It's ironic, actually.

"Bakit ka lagi mag-isa? Bakit di ka nag-sosocialize? May problema ka ba? "

[the-ghost-bird]

Hypervigilance and Paranoia; I wish I could blink.

Not Even This by Ocean Vuong | Skinny Dipping by Ocean Vuong | Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher | Courtney Love Prays To Oregon by Clementine Von Radics | Francis Bacon's Last Interview by Francis Giacobetti | Angry Chair by Alice in Chains | Waiting by Marya Hornbacher | The Truth About Grief by Fortesa Latifi | Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey | If My Body Could Speak by Blythe Baird | Every Day I Am Trying New Techniques To Make Myself Disappear by E. E. Scott | via @yellowplumfruit | Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo | Intimacy by Marge Piercy | The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood | Letter to Violet Dickinson by Virginia Woolf | It’s Sunday Morning in Early November by Philip Schultz | Kait Rokowski

[thedragonflycluster]

I want to learn how to watch media again. I've tried a good few times but always end back at square one: I lose mental energy a couple episodes/hours in and can never sit down again to get back to it.

I'm not sure how to get past this because it's such a mental block for me. I used to be able to sit down and watch or look at something just fine as a teen but it feels like pulling teeth in my adult years. Between executive dysfunction, masking too hard, and not knowing how to lower my hyper-vigilance from things like anxiety and PTSD my brain doesn't now how to relax in an environment enough to enjoy much of anything anymore.

But I also have no clue how to improve on this or reverse it. If anyone(&) has dealt with this, honestly I'd love to hear what might have helped you or if you've gone through something similar. I'd like to feel a little less like an anomaly. ☘️

[sage-hazeline]

cw: cptsd | dv | trauma response | anxiety | hyper vigilance

tired of being hypervigilant as a result of my violent childhood

always worrying about what other people are thinking, seeing - reading into every action, seeing every action other people do, watching people, noticing more.

everyone else just do what they’re doing without keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing, without fretting about what’s going on. not picturing what others must be seeing and thinking. they’re just present.

[lucidloving]

Brianna Albers, "The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself" // Anne Carson, Glass and God // Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood // @iasoup-deactivated20190921 // @puppy__problems on Instagram // p.d., "Rest Achilles, the world will wait" // Lyra Wren // @pencap // Latin phrase translations // Emily Berry, Dear Boy

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...

[theremina]

[cemeterything]

New road sign just dropped (courtesy of my unconscious mind)

this is a road sign that i would extend my commute to drive by

[bunnighost]

[furiousgoldfish]

Parents will go 'I did the best I could', 'I'm not perfect', 'You can't blame me, I've been through worse', 'I didn't mean it that way', 'You're too sensitive', 'I did it out of love' and 'Sometimes people make mistakes', and pretend like they're too dumb to understand that they hurt you, like they just didn't realize you were in extreme amounts of pain, neglected, feeling despised, condemned, irredeemable and suicidal, but for you there was never a moment of your life when you were allowed to 'simply not realize what you were doing.'

You have been punished every single time your intentions were right and you didn't notice you were annoying someone or testing someone's patience. You were held responsible not only for what you did but for how it affected everyone else, until you learned to be hyper vigilant of the effect of your every action, to the point where you'd get paralyzed because any action could end up in someone taking offense. You were never allowed to be dumb about your actions, you were not even allowed to learn! Even just not knowing everyone's reactions in advance could get you hurt.

You learned that they are allowed to be dumb, ignorant, walk over everyone else's feelings, demand attention, demand sympathy, consideration, leeway, compassion, understanding, and space to learn (even when they outright refused to learn), but you were not allowed any of these things. Even as they were the adults, they could play dumb and cause havoc, while you, a child, were responsible for being, in every situation, absolutely perfect, or condemned to hell for imperfection.

Why was this necessary? Why is the world still fighting for everyone to take it easy on the parents, but condemn the children? Do we need children to emotionally and psychologically serve their parent's needs, to the point where they grow up neglected and traumatized? Do parents have children in order to have easily broken and controlled servants? Someone they could burden with all of their emotional baggage and then demand compassion and love from? While neglecting that same child, and pretending the child doesn't need any attention or help growing up? Punishing them for showing pain?

We don't need that kind of world, and we don't need that kind of parents.

[greelin]

there’s a guy on the bottom floor of our complex we just call “business man” because he’s literally always on the phone discussing shit whenever he’s outside walking or taking his dogs out. saying jargon. almost feels like a performance. the dude is in like his 40s or 50s maybe. drives a prius. anyway i awkwardly waved to him when i went to go grab something from my car because he was coming out of his apartment and he paused being on the phone (because of course he was on the phone) and was like Oh i love your hair😊 thanks man. i hope business is going well

[spiralsublime]

imelda was from the get go supposed to be the femme fatale but that makes her quick marriage to lance even more important to me

the femme fatale is often characterized as a someone that draws the detective into a mess of shit that usually gives “self destructive”, and originally this is set up to be hunch as her connecting detective but LANCE MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE

hunch has his own arc, the detective taking himself more seriously, a detective who makes himself known and finally gets proper recognition. meeting imelda didn’t ruin his life, nor does he revolve around her storywise.

so imelda hits all other femme fatale beats and doesnt Need a male counterpart but we also get TROPES!! she, a wanted woman who is known to the police as a mad-woman who turned from an honest life to crime, meets a police captain (basically stand in chief of police currently) and immediately smooth talks circles around him. lance questions his boss, his job, and his life to chase after this sudden Excitement that he hadn’t allowed himself. literally, brennan says that lance has never felt so Alive.

imelda, the true version of femme fatale, finds her cynical and disillusioned “right side of the law” man, lance, and immediately they run together. then we learn that lance’s concerns is the reason that copper is so easily found in mentopolis doubling down on the “morally ambiguous” trope. she doesnt look at lance and go, actually dont be so wary of everyone, she (because she is impulse and because of how aware she is of the situation they are in) connects to him on his need to just Act.

imelda pulse is such a good femme fatale character and her moment with lance has lived in my head all this week. i cant wait to see how fast this marriage falls out once elias is no longer in that all or nothing space, though trauma, maybe they will stick together for a little longer than any of us are ready for.

[sentientsky]

“how much more can you withstand?” @inkskinned

on hyper-vigilance and burying grief under the gravestone of your tongue (part 2)

(part 1)

[mayasaura]

So... about Kiriona and why she's Like That, and what's been happening these past six months.

She hasn't just been living her worst monkey's paw life as Ianthe's chew toy and bored prince, acting as emotional support for her new dad in his dismyriad crisis. Which would all be bad enough on its own. At least half that time she's also been actively deployed. Like, in the military, in a combat zone. Probably in a command position with very little experience and exactly zero training.

From the scattered mentions we've seen of Antioch, Kiriona was most likely deployed there to quell a rebellion. No doubt a terrible experience that would have expected her to do horrible things. Then these things—the devils—turned up.

Anyone who was infected by the devils, she had to dismember them and burn the corpses. Edenites, House, and civilians. That means regular old people who had nothing to do with the fighting, and people under her command. Either they became shambling zombies with mouths for eyes, or they were mercy-killed and burned before they could be taken.

How many people did she see die? How many people did she kill, and how many of them did she consider herself responsible for?

So if we're counting the reasons Gideon might seem a little off, we might want to take into account how she took a detour though a fucking zombie apocalypse while we weren't looking. Shit.

[sysboxes]

[Text: This system is easily scared.]

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[honeypleasejustkillme]

my whole existence is a trauma response :/