#tumblr ate the quality but not much i can do about that sob

[natasha-in-space]

A late happy birthday gift to @brighteststar707!!!╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

I hope I'm not too late with this but alas!! I managed to finish in time (at least in my timezone hehe) Happy birthday Faye, I hope you spent your day enjoying some delicious food and wonderful company that made you smile! And, it seems that there is a certain someone from the outer space sending you a very important message... filled with stardust and love! Let's check it out, shall we? ⋆｡°✩

I hope you like my little treat! I am very grateful to have met you, and I wish for this next year of your life to be filled with many new and exciting experiences for you to look back on. And a ton of delicious bread, of course! ⋆⭒˚｡⋆ :)

Ref. by @DAHAN_illust on Twitter!

[bloompompom]

BLOOMY!! HI :3

i did end up reading Puzzles on ao3 AND IT WAS AMAZING!! I don’t even know how to put it into words - i finished it and i came straight here to tell you

Honestly bloomy the way you write is so engaging and beautiful! haha i am blanking so hard on what the word is but ya got me hooked from the first chapter - and the way you characterise Eren is so perfect!! It’s like.. its a completely different Eren because its not canon obviously but its also not your typical college au BUT ITS EREN DOWN TO HIS CORE.

i LOVED how you don’t just focus on Eren ; there’s so much quality in your writing of the friendships with the rest of the gang too!! Sasha, Mikasa and Armin especially

Typically the love triangle (sort of) trope doesn’t itch my brain right.. but the way you incorporated it was so smoothly done imo. It wasn’t to stir drama as much as it was to showcase how deep Eren and Jean’s friendship is no matter how much they fight (it felt very true to canon) . It also worked to show character development and growth for all of them and GOD i ate those 24 chapters up so fuckin fast.

And Eren (can you tell i love him so much bloomy?) UGH HE IS JUST SO… SBISBSKDNF BLOOMY I WANT HIM SO BAD

He is so disgustingly and effortlessly charming and it works so well with him and FUCK i would also jumble up my words and become a mess in front of him…ohmtgosh I got sidetracked - what i meant to say was — you showcase Eren’s internal struggles and issues with vulnerability so so so so well.

Like i know that you had to twist it to fit the context but i think the homage to canon Eren is done very nicely and THE LITTLE GLIMPSES TO S4 EREN WHERE HE SHUTS HIMSELF OFF TO EVERYONE AND PUSHES HIS THOUGHTS DOWN DEEP AND HIDES BECAUSE HE WANTS TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE HE LOVES AND SAVE THEM FROM GETTING HURT IM - SOBS

i wrote a whole essay for you and analysed your Eren but i promise i only do that when something is very dear to me (Eren Jaeger..)

i reblog a lot of your work and i know you dont know who i am but bloomy you are honestly so so so fucking talented and (all writers do but) you deserve so much recognition for the effort you put in

ill probably reblog Puzzles with this ask copied and expose myself…HAHAHA

NEWAYS BLOOMY THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS <33

seriously thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to tell me this!! i actually teared up (i’m sensitive okay) but really this is so incredibly kind, thank you

i started writing puzzles around this time two years ago so i sort of forget it exists tbh but it’s the first fanfic i wrote since maybe middle school and it’ll always hold a place in my heart for getting me back into writing. i was actually thinking about going through and breathing some life into it—which is why i admittedly have been so bad about uploading the rest to tumblr lol

all that’s to say, thank you so much for the kind words but also making me remember it! 🤍🤍🤍

[sage-nebula]

just some personal stuff, do not reblog.

re: my tags on that quiz post --- My tendency to catastrophize is something I’ve dealt with pretty much my entire life, with some periods of it being worse than others, but I do have strategies and aids that I use to deal with it.

For one, my medication absolutely helps. While I take the medication primarily to deal with the physiological symptoms of my mental illness, the medicine taking care of the physiological symptoms (for the most part) means that I can devote more time and energy to dealing with the mental ones. Like, I’m not struggling to get my breathing or heart rate under control because the medicine mostly takes care of that for me, and since I don’t have to struggle with that, I can focus on the cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that help deescalate my catastrophizing. So it’s yet another reason why my decision to start medication two years ago was an excellent one; it helps me out a lot and I’m 100% down for taking it every day for the rest of my life. (And if my doctor at any point is like, “maybe you should stop” I’ll just be like oh, should I stop wearing my glasses, too? Not use any vision correction on the way home? We’re just getting rid of the disability aids we need to function willy-nilly now?? I see---or rather, I don’t, because you told me to toss my prescription glasses out the window, but hey!)

But I also do have cognitive techniques that I use to try to combat it, some of which I developed on my own before I even realized what I was doing. Like for instance, in my fourth year of university I had about a dozen things due for finals week. I don’t remember the exact count, but it was something like six papers, three presentations, five exams, something ridiculous like that. I made a post here on tumblr panicking about it, at which point one of my dearest friends in the world whom I love dearly told me I was screwed (which filled me with spite to prove her wrong, which actually helped in the long run because spite is a powerful motivator), but what’s actually important here is that, in the midst of feeling screwed (and also spiteful), I realized something. And that something I realized was: No matter what, finals week would be over in five days. If I got everything done, it would be over. If I got nothing done, it would be over. If I got some things done, it would be over. Finals week was going to end no matter what I did, and upon it ending, I would no longer have to worry about any of the assignments because, after that date, they would no longer matter or be relevant or hold any weight at all. Once that Friday hit, everything---including my stress---would be over, and there was nothing I could do about that.

But what I could do was get as much of it done as I could. So I made a To Do List (and really I should use those more often, because they help me so much when I feel overwhelmed), and I got to work, working on the things that were do sooner first. I think there might have been one or two things I couldn’t get done, but if I recall correctly, I finished almost everything. Sure, some of it was of questionable quality (I remember one presentation I gave in particular was too short and so I ended it kind of like “. . . okay I’m done now” djsklfds), but it was nonetheless done, I didn’t get a zero for it. And I was able to do it because instead of wasting time catastrophizing about how I was going to fail everything, I was instead able to focus on the fact that finals week was going to end one way or the other, so before that point I could make my To Do List and just do what I can. I couldn’t control finals week ending, but I could control my actions and behavior during finals week, which I did, and ended up successful because of it. (I also regularly updated the To Do List on tumblr, crossing items off as I did them, and looking at the increasing number of crossed off things was a form of self-encouragement and motivation. It worked really well.)

Of course, things like this don’t always work. There were periods in my life, including at least one after that, where my mental health was so incredibly bad that I catastrophized no matter what I told myself or what others told me. I literally had sobbing breakdowns over imagined bad scenarios occurring that were just . . . ludicrous, tbh, and had absolutely no basis in reality, but my panic disorder made me Absolutely Positive that they Would Come To Pass and no matter what I said or did, or what others said or did, it was like I couldn’t combat the ridiculousness that my brain was putting out. Those were dark times I don’t want to live again, absolutely (hence the medication and the CBT), but they did happen because my anxiety/panic disorder does come with a heavy dose of catastrophizing and always has. (And to that end I’ve always been something of a hypochondriac as well. I’ve forbidden myself to look at WebMD for YEARS because I absolutely WILL be convinced I have some horrible disease if I look up my symptoms on there. But even without that, I’m 100% that bitch who requests to have blood work done because I might have something even though I’m not even sure what it is I might have. Please test my blood Just To Be Sure, because I might be dying. I’m not dying, but I could be. You never know. I’m not, but what if. That said, when I got very sick in 2009 I was sure I had swine flu because there’d been an outbreak on my campus, and when I went to health services to turn myself in, this happened:

Nurse: “You do not have swine flu.”

Me: “Oh!” :)

Nurse: “You have bronchitis.” 

Me: “. . . oh.” :(

So I mean, it’s not as if I was wrong thinking I was very ill, I was just wrong about what the illness was. I didn’t need quarantine, but I did need those antibiotics. And they were so big I couldn’t swallow them, so I put them into Oreos and ate them . . . which was gross, but not as gross as chewing them plain, and anyway, I had to take the antibiotics SOMEhow, so I did the right thing even if it was nasty.)

Anyway, there was no real point to this post. I just felt like musing on it, I guess. If nothing else, it’s good that I know this about myself, because it’s another check I have against my anxiety/panic disorder making my life way more difficult than it needs to be. And as anyone with mental illness can tell you, having as many checks against it as you can get is nothing but a good thing. :P