#is it our anxiety?

[blu3bl00d3d]

Welcome once again to Pigeon Midnight Radio!!

On tonight's show: I waited till 12 am to actually start packing for our holiday!

I'm not even half done! I might not let us sleep tonight until I'm done!

-🟣

[reasonsforhope]

By the way, I would literally bet money that we're going to successfully keep global warming below 2 degrees celsius.

Would I bet my whole savings on it? No, not yet. But the way the data is trending, in two or three years, I very well might.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Normal Friend Behaviour.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[diamondzart]

I get why people may insist that Fear and Anxiety have sibling vibes and not romantic ones but in that case THERE WOULDN’T BE A LITERAL “I CAN FIX HER” JOKE right in the movie, come on guys 😆

Look at the faces this mf makes while mentioning her?

I mean would they expect people to NOT ship it? I am dead sure they saw this coming. Too many hints, too many. They had test screenings with teenage girls of all people. They are real experts in stuff like this!

[leftneb]

if I hear logan sargeant apologize on team radio ONE MORE TIME I WILL start crying. who did this to him. I need to kill them

"sorry, I didn't get t3 quite right" -man who just outqualified his teammate

[genderqueerdykes]

at this point i don't care how dumb a lot of people would think this is but we need to normalize adults carrying stuffed animals and comfort objects.

i have witnessed grown adults step out of their homes clutching adult cats to their chests just like a kid clutches a teddy bear, all while scolding it for trying to get away because it is uncomfortable and feels unsafe. i have watched people carry around puppies and miniature dog breeds while shopping and get upset at them when they don't sit perfectly still.

if you want something that brings you comfort by holding it, and can be taken anywhere and everywhere with you, but don't want it to move, make sounds, interrupt you, have bodily functions or needs, can be forgotten about easily if it gets inconvenient and can be put down without it running away: you want a stuffed animal, toy, blanket, or other comfort object.

you do not want a live animal. wanting an animal means accepting that it is alive. animals are not objects to be held and then berated when they have the audacity to be sentient. animals are not objects, period. they are living, breathing beings that have needs just like you. you. they are not here specifically to comfort you, there are here to be alive.

we need to normalize that it's okay for adults to carry objects that comfort them. i'm autistic and struggle with anxiety- i do this every time i leave the house when i'm able to. i carry very large stuffed animals with me and i don't receive negative comments, in fact, i only receive compliments if people say anything at all. i've been told that seeing an adult who carries stuffed animals and has lots of visible comfort objects (keychains, stim toys, etc.) is a welcoming sight to see, and that it brings others joy.

it's okay to want something that brings you comfort. but a live animal isn't always the answer. they are comforting, but they are not objects, and it's really irresponsible to use them as such. we need to acknowledge that adults need comfort, but we also have to be responsible in where we get it from.

[mieczyhale]

"A movement being righteous does not, and cannot be allowed to, make everything done in the name of that cause automatically righteous"

- C

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

-> people stealing, binding and selling fics on Etsy, risking everything that AO3 has built since the Anne Rice lawsuits

-> AI scraping being everywhere and Gen Z seeing nothing wrong with using AI to "help" fanfiction or outright "write it" for them, while older fanfic authors have struggled for years to perfect the style you love

-> comments being down across the board and consumption culture being at an all time high. a fic gets 800 notes practically overnight and doesn't get a single comment (and sometimes I literally have to beg for comments/feedback on my fics when I know that hundreds of people are reading them)

-> me, grinding my teeth while pouring my heart and soul into a 40k fic that I know will be forgotten by fandom in a month or could possibly be stolen to be sold as a "novel": I do this because I love this. I do this because I love this. I do this because it's my passion. I don't want to quit doing something that I love so much.

[furiousgoldfish]

Traumatized people are often advised to 'keep it under control' and 'find a way to contain it', and I always felt it was a fault of mine, if I freak out, or panic, or have an anxiety attack, or can't stop shaking or shivering. Now that I no longer have extreme bouts of panic, I'm starting to understand how much fear, panic and pain I contain within myself every day.

If I'm in a place that makes me anxious, I stay still, I do nothing. If I'm panicking, I will modify my behavior to the point where nobody around me will be able to see and realize that I'm panicking, I will seem happy, and pleasing. If I'm experiencing intense rage or frustration, I will shut down and won't respond or interact with anyone until I figure out what is a reasonable and logical thing to do. I am containing everything, constantly. And it's only a part of what I've been containing and keeping under control, I used to contain terror every day. I am used to circumstances where I had to act normal under threat of violence, threat to my life, every single day. I had to walk around like nothing is wrong while I was dissociating so heavily I couldn't tell if the world was even real. I was blaming myself if there was a momentary lapse of control, if the panic I was containing for months leaked out of me a little. The thought of not being able to keep it down terrified me.

I blamed myself for not being able to keep mountains of fear, grief, anger and panic under a guise, which a human being is not supposed to do. Our reactions of fear, panic and rage are there in order to point out that something is deeply wrong, that we're unsafe, that our circumstances need to change and we need safety, now. Keeping that shit contained and controlled is trying to bypass human instincts, fighting against human nature, and I did that, we all did that, because it was the only thing we were ever told to do with it. We'd be punished for anything else, threatened for any other kind of response that isn't containing and keeping it down.

And now when keeping it down is no longer humanely possible, because we did it for so long we wore our entire spirits down, now we get told we need to do more of it? More of pretense that things are fine, more of guilt and shame for not managing to be a closed human container of panic and pain? We were never supposed to keep that much in. Keeping all that inside and learning to control myself taught me to be what I am right now, keeping any inconvenient emotion down only so I could break down in private, or try to keep it down indefinitely, because I don't know any other way to live anymore. Fighting against my own instincts and fawning at others is just who I am now, and it's not who I'm supposed to be. Panic is supposed to be loud and alarming, pain is supposed to be heard, people are supposed to react with offering safety and change of circumstances that led to this. Not telling the scared, pained and panicked people to 'keep it down'.

[shiftythrifting]

This is the best time to place an order for one of our actually knit custom sweaters! They're incredibly comfy and durable, I've been wearing and washing two of them for a year now and I can't live without em. They take a few weeks to mail and ship, so if you want one before the holidays hit, order soon!

Shifty Knitwear!

[ao3-crack]

(x)

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[avalordream]

Prompt: Imagine you get isekaied in Our Life. Only thing is that you wake up as a child and remember everything. You can only save at this point but you can still access the save and load menu and see your previous runs.

Meanwhile your precious neighbor is slowly becoming self aware, getting deja vu with every passing second- as if this has all happened before...

A/N: A few days after I posted this- a few other thoughts came to mind- SO HERE IS MY ATTEMPT AT VOCALIZING THEM

You’re keenly aware of how small and tiny you are the moment you wake up. 

For the first few days, you started to acclimate to…the family home. 

It wasn’t YOUR family though. It never was. It was MC’s. Not your’s.

You could project all you wanted onto MC but it was never your family or your life to experience. It was theirs.

Even so, you quickly found yourself missing the life you were used to. More specifically:

The cuisine.

It was hard not to draw suspicion to the fact that you were craving different food genres aside from Mom’s Pamela’s mac and cheese and cheeseburgers. 

Ma’s Noelani’s Hawaiian food helped quite a bit to hold you over as you started to ponder over how to approach it.

Kind of hard to bring it up to your MC’s parents that you wanted Asian/Middle eastern/Indian/Pakistani/Mexican/etc food when there was none of that for miles around

For the time being, you had to quietly hint and nudge their thoughts into that direction but not enough to make them suspicious. Noelani obviously had her suspicions about Cove getting into the house from Step 2-3 but never brought it up once. From what you could tell, she was scary observant

Another issue was how clumsy your new body was.

Your mind might be able to remember how to do everyday tasks like writing and such but this tiny body didn’t have the muscle memory to match it

Much to Liz’s dismay, you spent quite a bit of your time forcing your hands and legs to train to do things your adult body could do in a snap

Time wise- technology was a huge sucker punch. It made you feel bad for taking your own devices for granted. 

That being said, self learning everything was going to be hard without a phone or computer on hand, especially knowing that you’d have to go through the cursed education system all over again- but most likely much harder

There had to be a reason older folk complained about it, right?...

Your MC’s birthday was the same as your own, just that the birth year is 1997. That being said, the current year was 2006… Funny. You were only two in 2006…

…

Back to self learning, you tried to practice what you considered basic math long after everyone had fallen asleep

Usually, your day was filled with entertaining Shiloh and Liz, playing in the park or going along with whatever Liz said. Judging by the giant for sale sign across the street and the date, you figured out that you got isekaied roughly at least a month or two before Cove and Mr. Holden would move in. 

Who knew how that would go now that you weren’t subjected to just three choices?

Even after playing around, your body was exhausted and your baby mind was just as pooped out.

The first few days you would wake up early as children do and tried doing your math and remembering as much as you could at that time

Yeah, Liz nearly gave you a heart attack after she barged in and you had to play it off as you scribbling absolute nonsense cause you were bored

After that near collision, you changed your prep time to being at night. Sure, you woke up to Liz shaking you and not getting enough sleep in the morning, but you needed to refresh your memory the best you could

You couldn’t do it every night though and did your best to keep some sort of schedule so you wouldn’t forget - and worry your MC’s moms

They noticed the first few times of how sleepy you’d be when you’d wake up later than usual - granted if Liz didn’t wake you up - and a few nights after, you nearly got caught right in the middle of your review.

Pam was more sneaky than Noelani, so you should’ve seen this coming- but even so, you had everything spread out on your rug when you just barely heard her footsteps come to your MC’s door

You had enough time to shove everything underneath your bed - your room was messy enough but better safe than sorry - and quickly dive under the covers before you heard your door open with the softest of clicks

She was around for a good while before you heard the door close again but you didn’t relax until you were sure her footsteps went back to the master bedroom

After that, you were much more careful about how long you spent studying and when. You haven’t been caught since.

Occasionally, you’d have to sneak in your MC’s parent’s room to grab any books that you needed. Good thing Noelani was a book nerd.

You did have to be careful about your self learning- you didn’t want them getting any suspicions that their kid was suddenly…different out of nowhere.

You had no idea what MC was like as a kid before the events of Our Life so you tried your best to piece together what you could 

Speaking of, there were a bunch of things you quickly realized about Our Life, one of which is that game didn’t go over nearly everything that MC went through, let alone before Cove came or others that it only touched on briefly

For example, the tourists that came and went every year happened to be close friends of Pamela’s from her time in university, hence why they were so friendly to you and Liz in particular. 

It was also why they knew how to… handle your ever changing moods. At least-

That’s what it looked like to them.

To you- it was because you had to battle MC’s initial responses to these scenarios.

Go figure, this body still had its fair share of emotions inside of it, leaving you to figure out if this sharp pang of fear or worry was your own or not.

It left you second guessing everything you did, especially when you’d be up at night, studying and practicing your writing

It seriously irked you, knowing your writing was sloppy even though you knew this body couldn’t help it. It didn’t make seeing your scrappy writing less frustrating though

Despite how much you tried to hide how YOU felt, not MC, Noelani still picked up on the small shifts in your behavior. 

One of these being the irritation you harbored for your writing. 

Speaking of emotions, you found your body easily overwhelmed by any stronger ones- your own irritation making you cry- an alien feeling and one that took even you by surprise.

Worse part? The first time happened was in front of Noelani when she tried to help you practice your penmanship

Naturally, she tried to comfort you MC by trying to console you, saying it’d be better with practice and wiping away your tears but no matter how YOU tried, the tears wouldn’t stop flowing

It wasn’t until much later that you realized that MC’s tiny self had their own limits and by pushing those adult feelings and expectations that YOU had onto it sent it into a messy overdrive.

After that, you had learned to slow down- the world wasn’t ending…even if it felt like it.

…

The nail in the coffin for you that made YOU cry. Not MC’s body: Your dreams started to resemble parts of your life. 

You’d dream that you were back at your desk job or filling out mundane paperwork but no matter how boring it’d be, it was YOUR life.

The one YOU were used to and familiar with

You’d always feel so relieved to be back where you were supposed to, whether you were happy with that life or not

It was that feeling of having all your choices in your hand and being in control of where you wanted to go, if that made sense.

Nobody made those choices for you except well…you.

Only to have that feeling of familiarity ripped away once you registered Liz waking you up to play while “Ma and Mom snooze the day away!”

…

You just want to go home…

To YOUR home…

-> Part 1.5 <- ⊹ ‧₊˚ Isekai Self Aware Taglist: @lilqi @annoying-mary ˚₊‧ ⊹

[foldingfittedsheets]

My beloved and I realllly need to move because our house is full of mold and carpets which house allergens that are eating my beloved up from the inside. I finally have the income to justify it. Moving is inherently stressful but I found a place that looks pretty legit to look at on Tuesday.

It has extra bedrooms, a yard, a garage. It’s only a few hundred more than we pay now but it’s kinda perfect. I’m dreading the actual move but trying to get psyched by nice new things like more light coming in, less horrible children standing in the parking lot where cars go. It would be closer to work for my beloved, and not too far from mine. The cats are gonna hate hardwood floors but you can’t please everyone.

[kedreeva]

#we spoke of this a LOT at work after that one tech was murdered and hidden in a wall

hi!👋 hello! kedreeva! i’m going to need to ask you to explain this!!!!

So back in 2009, a lab student named Annie Le was murdered at Yale university. Cameras saw her going on into a building, but not out again and it was like, the eve of her wedding (or close to? I don't remember) so clearly she had places to be and people waiting for her so they immediately started looking and the next day (or so? Anyway on the day of her wedding) they found her body in a recess in a wall, down in the areas where the research animals were kept. It turns out, a tech had killed her, but since there were cameras like EVERYWHERE, he just, I guess, left her there. Well, hid the body where it was. I don't remember how they caught him, but they did. It was a horrifying story. It still is.

And it was a huge news story among the folks at my workplace because, at the time, I was working at a different university, as an animal husbandry technician. As you can imagine this was a kind of intense time to be in that situation. They started offering, like, I'm not gonna say counseling but it was "if you need to talk we would prefer you talk to us about something wrong rather than kill anyone about it" and as techs (even if we were not even the same kind of tech, the killer was a lab tech and we were husbandry techs but I think a lot of people assumed it had been a husbandry tech since she was in an animal area), we were kind of getting the side eye from lab people for weeks afterwards. Like they thought we were gonna go "wow that's a fantastic idea, you're next!" or something, idk. And I mean like, people would freeze when you were alone in a hallway, or turn and walk the other way, or duck into the nearest room and watch you walk past, and they were all being super nice/civil to us when they did have to interact. It was very atypical behavior for lab people. Like not all of them, some of them had always been nice and weren't worried, but some of the people who had been unbelievable dicks previously were walking on eggshells. And the people who had friends in other universities reported this was happening at their jobs, too.

And instead of talking to The Man (because all the higher ups were garbage at the time), we just. talked among ourselves. It was a lot of "I may say I feel like strangling lab people sometimes when they do things that drive me up a wall but I don't MEAN it you know that right" and it also led to group discussions of what would be a theoretical *better* solution to hiding a body than what happened, with clear disdain for doing things like hiding bodies in walls, which is a terrible idea and one we would never do (looking at the people who think we might have decided this was a great idea actually).

Which consequently led to a lot of supervisors and/or managers that happened to overhear us bringing us donuts or arranging pizza for lunch in like, some kind of bid to help us feel appreciated, I guess, so that we wouldn't murder anyone, even though none of us were going to do that anyway. But also none of us were in a position to turn down free donuts or pizza or whatever.

And then after a few weeks, maybe a month or so, people just kind of forgot and moved on and things went back to normal like fifty people hadn't spent every lunch hour for weeks talking quietly among themselves about how human bodies would definitely fit into a carcass disposal barrel or that you'd have to crush hip bones and/or skulls before incineration. Hypothetically.

Like I said, it was a VERY weird time to be at my job, and every time I remember it happening feels like a fever dream. I can't even imagine what it was like at Yale.

[xiathiau-myshif]

Us: want to yip. Meow. Want to roar and screech. We are not human :]

Our brain: wow you're so cringe. You should be awkward and silent instead

Us: :(