#i am not feeling well

[maevelin]

THE BALLOON!

YES the carriage takes it all and so did Colin's confession but GUYS...did you see the way Colin looked when he realized Penelope was standing BEHIND THE BALLOON?

Like...HE SAVED HER AND IT WAS FOR HER. His first instinct was to make sure SHE was safe. THAT WAS SAVAGE and it had no dialogue only action and it relied on the way Colin's gaze worked and the camera shots and angles and SOMEONE SEND ME HELP!

Penelope is ALWAYS at the periphery of his vision and he CAUGHT IT AT ONCE!

He ran as if his life depended on it and took charge and ...I NEED TO GO WATCH THE SCENE AGAIN!

[cyberxsun]

I am finally able to start posting these…[thank you sm for commissioning me + for your patience]

[chompchi]

Lady's and gentlemen we are back with the overloading trauma our baby's have to suffer

[sisterofthecroaker]

i am extremely concerned for milton’s safety. is this wrong?? am i betraying mother by feeling this way????

[briarpatch-kids]

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.

[lestatartt]

thinking about brotzly and i, carrion by hozier….

[devotioncrater]

[painandfalafels]

BAD BATCH EVE😍😍😍I MAY CRY😜😜😜😜😜I MAY SCREAM😨😨😨😨I MAY BE SICK😁😁😁😁anyways how are yall on this fine evening

[emptymanuscript]

No Nazis After 5pm

My friend who is a historian told me once about, when she was in grad school, her advisor was a WWII military historian who had a fairly soul destroying specialization. Something like humanitarian atrocities committed in war or that kind of thing. So one of her earliest pieces of advice to my friend, essentially right at the point of moving from MA to PhD student, was that, if you are looking at terrible things all the time, which you probably will be with the sort of things we're studying, you will burn out. It's not a matter of if. It is only a matter of when.

The advisor had made a specific rule for herself which she encouraged my friend to develop an equivalent of that met her own needs: "No Nazis after 5pm." Because this is work. And it is going to be for the rest of your life. So you need to compartmentalize work from the other parts of your life so it doesn't eat you alive. To a degree, this is true of all work. But it is especially true of looking at humanity at its worst because if you don't compartmentalize it then it will become all you see of humanity very quickly. You will learn to think of humanity in general as its worst possibilities. And as you get ever more enraged, disgusted, and frightened of the worst of humanity, you are going to start reacting to people in that vein, which will cause them to become uncomfortable with you, causing them to behave in ways that will exacerbate the disconnect and isolation because it will excite your alarm system even more. It's a vicious circle. Until you crash. And you don't get back up.

So if you want to do this work, if you want to look at and study how bad people can get, part of that work is being firm and organized in that way. After 5pm, or whatever your safe cut off point is, you have to let it go and immerse yourself in the immediacy of your own real life, ideally in a way that will nurture your soul as opposed to suck it out of you.

Occasionally, when I start on a tear, my friend will look at the time and say, 'ok, it's after 5.'

I absolutely get the wisdom of that. It's smart. It's wise. It's good self care.

AND

I think 5pm rolled around in my own personal time zone somewhere around late 2013, early 2014, while I still simply haven't learned the skill of integrating the elements of:

It is after 5

There need to be no Nazis after 5 because that sucks your soul

After 5 means your energies need to shift toward self care and soul nourishment

because the Nazis don't care about the time. They will ALWAYS be there. The work will not suddenly vanish after you go home. Neither will Nazis suddenly resurrect, expand to full strength, and break out of the pages overnight without you watching them like a hawk. Whether you take a break or not will not have any meaningful effect on them. Because their existence is independent of your lived time. Working on them is LONG term work

contrariwise, your timing will matter in the extreme to you. Not taking the time you need to do what you need for yourself can cause you to crash in a matter of hours. You can suddenly lose all strength, find yourself unable to work anymore, and become unable to get out of bed simply because you weren't watching your own needs closely enough

at least drink water. You need to consume enough water. Or it will get capital B BAD.

This is a principle that will need to be translated to fit an individual so that each part does what it needs to in order to make sure that the individual is able to keep doing what they're doing

This isn't the whole mystical secret of life or anything, this is the bare minimum to simply survive the work of dealing with Nazis before 5

You either do this or you can't do the work, this is part of the requirements of that work. If you can't do it, you need to quit or your body/mind/spirit/system/whatever will start failing you to the point where you will be unable to continue no matter what you want

this is also means that if this is work you love, you need to find self care that is very different 'work' that you also love so that you will keep to these limits. Otherwise you're just extending things into a boom-bust cycle because you aren't nourishing yourself as much as you are draining yourself, so you'll end up with lots of little failure points, that will still accumulate over the long run and will take even more to repair when you're finally forced to do so

This pretty much is life balance. Not work/life balance, just - hey, you can only do Z amount of anything, after that, it is beyond your capabilities. Much better to do some X amount that doesn't burn you out so you can pick up that activity again right away. It's just a more explicit version of the Tortoise v the Hare. You want to succeed in a LONG activity, you have to do what it takes to engage in that activity for that long. That isn't doable as a single chunk simply because our biology doesn't work that way.

So... it's a decade after 5 o'clock. More than ten years and ten days. It is time to learn the skill.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Somehow.

I'm working on it.

:/

I suspect the first step is working on my black out list. AGAIN.

And somehow convincing myself that I really, truly do NOT need to read the news. Nothing unmissable is going to happen when I'm not looking. I know the Nazis are there. The Nazis aren't going to go anywhere. They won't all die by tomorrow. They won't take over by tomorrow. If it was at that point, there is literally nothing I can do about it anyway. The work takes all of your life. If I went to sleep now and woke up the day I was going to die, there would still be work. If I worked non-stop until I dropped dead, there would just be more work to do after my death. You wanna do the work, then the bare minimum requirement is resting and revitalizing so you can. Going and seeking out the news and writing essays on politics and the middle east instead of r&r is making me less effective instead of more effective. I am in the boom-bust cycle.

And I think I heard from my life this week that the next bust is rolling in hard. Yes, I am much better than I was in 2014 and 2016 when I went into the mental hospital. I have much better meds, more skills, more tools, more experience, more capability AND that's not enough.

I gotta do the work.

I gotta figure out what work I need to do to make sure I can do the work.

Because it's that or die. Willingly, unwillingly, by my own hand, by a convenient accident, by my health deteriorating, fast, slow, a piece at a time, or all in one inglorious act of melodrama to appease my inner drama-club-poseur. Those are details that don't particularly matter for the sake of the principle because they won't alter the principle.

What I'm doing isn't cutting it.

I haven't figured out how to both realize when it is after 5 and how to treat myself the way I need to when it is after 5 so I can get up again in the morning. I don't know how and it is too late not to do it. Grrr.

I need it to be after 5.

[sleepless-crows]

what do you think are the chances that my parents would let me stay home not because i'm sick but because i cried for 20 minutes because i'm so anxious and stressed for school

[absentlyabbie]

no multi option, agonize and choose, no results option, pick one to find out or scroll onward

[bacchuschucklefuck]

couldnt draw my thang for mid-autumn so treated myself to a calne redesign instead

[aphel1on]

i have such a love for characters who descend into madness or villainy out of deep, deep empathy. characters who fundamentally cannot cope with the cruel realities they find themselves in and blow up about it in spectacular fashion. fallen angel type characters with tears of outrage in their eyes. characters who break before they bend, and break so badly they splatter blood all over their noble ideals. every variation on it gets me so good

[aueua]

people with siblings: how do you feel about them?

[sui-imi]

Funeral, right

---

been seeing some discussion about canon/fanon sans re: papyrus' death, and then i thought, unrelatedly, "hey i wonder what he did with the dust"

[pokimoko]

I can't keep being fundamentally changed as a person by animated movies, it's just not sustainable.