#the most terrifying experience of my life was the time

[pissheartmybeloved]

I got to experience the terror of actually running to the bathroom in a train station the other day bc I genuinely couldn't hold it much longer and I thought I was gonna have an accident. like. I was using everything in me to keep holding on for like a minute more so I could make it to a toilet but GOD it was close.

I'd been on a rly busy train and I'd needed to go fairly badly when I got on, but I figured I'd just pee on the train bc I was too shy to excuse myself beforehand. but I got on and it was PACKED. like I genuinely couldn't get down the train so I had no choice but to hold it. and I thought I was gonna have to get off the train before my stop bc I was gonna have an accident if I waited. but I made it to the station and had to jog/speed walk to the barriers. and THEN I got lost in my rush and had to go up and down some stairs whilst whining under my breath and when I finally made it there was a queue. which NEVER happens in mena bathrooms so I was just shifting around, surrounded by the sounds of people relieving themselves whilst I thought I was gonna lose control right there.

it's the most desperate I've ever been in public and it was TERRIFYING. I'd kinda accepted that I might not make it and I'd have to change but I was filled with this deep fear of having an accident surrounded by all those people and them all seeing that I couldn't hold it long enough to get to a bathroom that I was on like. superhuman levels of holding. and my stomach was cramping from needing to pee so bad and my head was swimming and I was dancing around with my legs pressed together in this fucking queue, just completely humiliating myself and SO obvious that I was absolutely on the verge of going.

and finally FINALLY a stall opened up and I could run inside, literally barely managed to lock it before I started going, had to rip my trousers down and just hope that I'd made it without major leaks showing through. most relieving piss of my goddamn life. slumped over rubbing my poor overstretched bladder, assessing the damage I'd done leaking and in disbelief that I'd actually made it to a toilet in time. I just sat there for ages making sure my body was totally empty before I got up again.

yeah that was crazy! I really thought that would be the end for me and I'd lose control in the middle of a train station, minutes away from a bathroom, after actively holding for nearly an hour. I'm still blushing typing this out, remembering how squirmy and obvious I was about being desperate around all those strangers.

[drbased]

We think of mental illnesses (and anything seen as adjacent to that, development disorders included) as an add-on to one's 'true personality'. We say 'I have depression/anxiety/OCD etc'. What was revolutionary for me was recognising that depression isn't some aberrant tumour on my psyche that needs to be removed, but rather it's a reflection of my psyche. There's this pseudospiritual idea that the 'self' is pure - I remember as a teen pondering over how the concept of life-after-death can even exist, because so much of my personality has been formed from my life experiences; the 'me' that would go to heaven now would be entirely different from the 'me' as a baby. Atheistic people and society want to reject this idea of the soul existing separate from the body, but the idea of the 'self' being pure, untouched and eternal, and therefore essentially being a soul, still persists. It exists without the need for religious justification because people changing is always existentially terrifying. And so, too, are mental illnesses.

I spoke to the same woman a few times at some free mental health drop-in thing. I don't know if she was a mental health professional, or just someone whose job it was to listen. The first time I spoke to her, I agreed with everything she said. The next time I spoke to her, I came in with an entirely different attitude, and now disagreed with much of what she said. She commented on this, the implication being that when I agreed with her - when I was cheery, motivated, upbeat, agreeable - that was when I was 'mentally healthy', but when I disagreed with her - when I was holding back, unhappy, pensieve - that was the mental illness talking. The thing is, by the time in my life where I'd come to have this series of conversations with her, I already had come to recognise the fullness and value of myself, depression included: I am always, entirely, me. It interests me her black-and-white assessment of the situation: I agree with her and am happy = I am well/I disagree with her and am not happy = I am not well. I don't blame her for this in the slightest, but rather by analysing the situation it allowed me to understand something about how society percieves, and therefore I once percieved, mental illness. I now understand that I went into that room for the first time, a full and conscious being, emboldened by recent actions, and made a choice to listen to a point of view I knew I wouldn't always like. I've written on this blog quite a a bit about my relationship with wisdom - that I once saw it as vapid, and now I have learned about myself I see the value in it. So now I have a deeper appreciation for 'normie speak' [if this makes you cringe please understand that I am using it for brevity] and thus I made a choice to, instead of dismissing her point of view outright, seek the value in it. I found her to be incredibly insightful and was honest about that. But the next time I had spoken, I had had time to reflect and was less pumped-up and more realistic about who I am, especially with regards to my Pathological Demand Avoidance (at this point I consider it a mental illness in and of itself, and have to treat it with delicate care). I did try to communicate this to her, and throughout my explanation she irritably flicked at a ringbinder - something incredibly rude for someone in her position to do. But she heavily implied that she was more mature than me because she has kids, so, y'know. It was during this exchange that I was reminded of why I rejected 'normie speak' for so long - and why I dismissed its wisdom as inherently vapid. Most people percieve the world in such a way that there are 'mentally ill' people who are Dumb and Bad and Wrong and Need Help, and 'mentally well' people who, by nature of their being well-adjusted, are just Naturally Correct and therefore anything they say, especially if they are put in a position of power as authorised by the system, as she was, is just Better than anything I have to say. Anything I explain under that context is Just An Excuse, an Overcomplication of The Issue, hence why she was visibly irritated with me - my attempt to communicate the wider picture was just Me Being Mentally Ill and Trying To Justify That. I wasn't pulling myself up by my bootstraps; she said I should do a mood board, and I rejected that, knowing that engaging with things purely because they're the 'right' thing to do is exactly what triggers those depressive feelings (something I had already explained to her), and she accused me of not accepting help.

When my depression says 'I want to die', I now say, 'I agree, and I truly feel your pain - but realistically, I'm not going to kill myself right now, and I want to find a way to enjoy my life in the meantime. So what can I do?' I once used to simply count the amount of times I found that voice saying 'I want to die'. But, shockingly, it turns out that the person saying 'I want to die' is me: the thought comes from my psyche. When I first sat in that room and hotboxed it, I asked myself the questions that some part of me always knew the answer to, and thus I was able to answer those questions with staggering ease. Every confusion I've had, every fear I've had about myself has gradually come to light since, with further questioning, more honesty with myself. Now, when I walk in a room, I have a much clearer picture of exactly who I am and what I want from the situation. My 'mental illness' is reflective of an attitude that I have, and I have that attitude for a reason. My depression is still very much here, in that the attitude that it represents still lives inside me. Instead of dismissing that attitude as 'my depression talking', I took the much scarier approach of 'but what if that's actually me talking?' and instead asked it the hard questions. I understand its logic entirely, I sympathise and empathise with that logic and could explain it to you in full. What do you do when you want to convince someone? You engage with their point of view.

Years ago, before I started this journey, I made a deal with myself that I was only ever going to kill myself if life got untennable - say I ran out of money, or gained an illness that made existence unbearable. That was an early example of me taking my desire to kill myself seriously, and therefore it's been one of the most robust decisions I ever made. Ever since I made that decision, I had that urge to kill myself a lot less - because it turns out that my psyche isn't just a set of random impulses but rather a whole, complete person with a whole, complete worldview. I became much less fearful of myself when I realised that I can always accept myself, take myself seriously, and then negotiate with myself. But I have to take myself seriously: dismissing my depression is dismissing part of me, it's telling me that part of me is Just Stupid and incapable of making decisions, and any decisions it does make are inherently irrational, always tarnished with the brush of Mentally Ill. Acknowledging and accepting the logic of my depression means that I don't really have it anymore. I'm currently going through the shittiest thing that's ever happened to me - the reason why I sought those mental health services - and I have not had those classic depression symptoms that were once so expected, so comfortable to me. Instead I am more honest with my emotions, seeing how depressive symptoms once filled in the gap of that kind of honesty. Depression was a response to my lack of engagement with my own psyche. Instead of authentic sadness, depression allowed me the space to be sad with a more dramatic justification. Instead of authentically not desiring to do an activity, depression forced me to not do it. Depression was both the cause and solution: depression said that my emotions and beliefs are not enough - they are too small, too embarrassing. It's too embarrassing to just be me - if I'm sad over something some part of me has decided is Objectively Too Small To Be Sad over, the depression swoops in and says

Lo! But the sadness of existence is tragedy itself. To feel such great, deep feelings, is a beautiful curse. I feel such deep woe, not just for this one tiny instance but what it represents! I could never be sad at only something so small, for I am most definitely a much deeper being than that, capable of great intellectual musing and emotional depth! My ease at being turned to tears is actually a strength of mine, a sign of how at ease I am with my own emotionality, and I should defend to the heavens my inalienable right to be in such a state!

In processing my depression, the word 'embarrassing' kept cropping up, speaking to my fear of there being some Great Power of Objectivity Watching Over Me. Instead, allowing myself to be authentic involved the recognition that I'm going to always have beliefs, feelings and actions that are going to be seen as weird, and that's entirely my prerogative as an individual. So, then, my depression isn't 'bad' because I'm showing 'bad symptoms' that mark me as 'mentally ill' - but rather, it's bad because of the much more terrifying reason that it hurts me to be like this. My PDA, the depression, and the symbolic states, are rejections of my psyche, of my selfhood, because I so desperately want to feel that there's some objective standard I can follow, so then I never have to engage with the existential terror of being responsible: responsible for others, responsible for my actions, responsible for my relationship towards myself. Having to weigh up a situation and decide for myself if I personally value the outcome is much less simple and much more terrifying, but in doing so I come to learn to value myself. I stopped having depression not because I 'fought it' or any other grandiose narratives, but rather because I learned to treat myself with genuine compassion - and whoops, there's Classic Wisdom #12956: Treat Yourself With Care, As You Would A Friend. By rejecting 'normie speak' I veered right back round into it. But I refuse to be vapid about this - yes, there is a major simplicity to what I've learned, but the process of getting there is not simple.

We as a society made a major leap in empathy by recognising mental illnesses as something other than a nuisance to the 'normies'. But unfortunately, there has been an over-correction in response to mental illnesses that, in liberal-politics fashion, doesn't really actually disagree with the classic narrative. Both viewpoints percieve mental illness as 'I Just Can't help it and Need To Eradicate it' - the classic view-point paints mental illness as an aberration of the soul, and that the only way to eradicate it is to either destroy the demon inside, or lock away the person. The more liberal view-point recognises that mental illness is part of a person's psyche and therefore can be engaged with, but it is still an aberration and the goal is still elimination.

It's at this point I'd like to appreciate just how much my engagement with (radical) feminism has been instrumental in my new attitude towards my own mental illnesses. Society already dismisses the Mentally Ill as Bad and Wrong, and so mentally ill women are dismissed as even Badder and Wrongerer. Being able to reclaim my selfhood and take my mental illnesses seriously, as a part of me just as human as the rest, and therefore be sympathised with, understood and engaged with, has been revolutionary for me in a way that only feminism can achieve. No matter how much we want to believe that we as a society are past the stage of dismissing women as inherently irrational, or dismissing mentally ill people as inherently irrational, that attitude is very much live and well and hides in plain sight, implicit in people's actions and inactions, in how they phrase their words, in what they don't say as much as what they say. Being able to walk into a room and not immediately feel terrible for every single choice I've ever made simply because one person in front of me might disapprove of it, has been such a tremendous burst of freedom for me. And it's still ongoing; I still feel the 'tug' where I fear I'm not being 'objective enough' - but since now I understand that my primary responsibility is to myself, the brain fog has dissipated and I have time to emotionally and mentally breathe and process. I'm still not free yet, but I have built myself a foundation of self-love.

[beannary]

My sister is learning how to drive and so I let her drive us to the grocery store and let me tell you that was the most terrifying experience of my life

[thedreadvampy]

sometimes I forget that my experience has been. um. not 'your experiences are not universal' vibes but more like 'your experiences are EXTREMELY atypical'

[suncaptor]

nothing will make you sympathise with conspiracy theorist ideology more than having a seemingly rare reaction to a vaccine lmao.

[sleepcults]

small shows dont work the same way as stadium shows do stop adding the stress and anxiety of going to a huge show to something that's supposed to be chill and fun. its an entirely different culture

[mickstart]

.

[haemosexuality]

it begins

[dazais-guardian-angel]

went to my first con in 4 years on Friday to meet Kaiji Tang and got a Dazai autograph + video recording of him reading to me. He was the sweetest person (as I knew he would be) and interacting with him was lovely, but also at the same time oh boy it sure was an extremely stressful, ugly wake-up call of what it feels like to live in a world now where everyone around you has blissfully moved on from covid and can enjoy things normally and happily, while you'll forever be trapped in a hellscape of perpetual fear 🫠🫠🫠

[robustcornhusk]

day 1 of flea pill: put some cat tube on it. immediately he ate it. good boy!

day 2 of flea pill: put some cat tube on it. he licked it, knocked the pill off the goop. put some more on. he ate it. good boy!

day 3 of flea pill: put some cat tube on it. he licked it off. put more on. he licked it off. put the cat goop on the plate, put the pill on it, covered it. he licked under it. pilled him normally. i'm impressed but come on, man

[fragmentedblade]

I haven't looked forwards to a character as much as I've looked forwards to Sunday. I hope he won't disappoint

[w1nterk1tty]

oh yeah i forgot to tell yall i dyed my hair pink

[weirdoaroundtheblock]

Sometimes I just live my life and have the sudden, horrifying and petrifying realization that I am actually alive and going to grow old probably living a life I do not want nor like but then I just distract myself again because I can not, for the life of me, handle that

[orcelito]

Ok it is officially a Bad Night haha

[luckyladylily]

So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

[nyan-bynary]

me 🤝🏽you

the horror of the mother

Fam we're so fucked gjdhffj we're gonna have to break this goddamn cycle dhdjfjdjd