I was an obnoxious weirdo, because that is who I am in my heart and soul. I’m not cool. I’m not coordinated. I’m not athletic. I’m not confident. I’m none of the things that make it easier to exist in the fucking crucible of a school. And I was bullied for it at all levels, from peers to teachers to my own father, all the way through my entire life until I was old enough to disengage from my bullies. It didn’t help me, it didn’t teach me anything. All it taught me was that the person I was, the weird, awkward, obnoxious little weirdo who loved everyone and everything and just wanted to have friends, and to be good at *anything* my peers cared about, was worthless and worthy of contempt. I was physically and emotionally abused by too many people to count, including people who *absolutely* knew better.
I didn’t learn anything from this except how to most effectively hate myself.
I am *incredibly* lucky that I took a lifetime of bullying and abuse and channeled it into my art, because I had that positive outlet available to me (and I had the support and encouragement of my 7th grade teacher, who knew I wanted to be a writer and supported that). Most people who are bullied and abused for being who they are don’t have the privilege and opportunity that I had, and they don’t deserve to suffer or feel unworthy, simply for being weird and nonconformist.
Bullying is cruel and hurtful and has no place in a family, a school, or anyplace else.
(This was posted in response to a post that claims bullying is “the only way obnoxious weirdos learn how to not be obnoxious weirdos.” I don’t know why the original post disappeared).
I want a Hawkeyes movie where Hawkeyes is deaf like in the comics, and in the first five minutes he loses his hearing aids, and the rest of the movie is silent except for a constant running commentary of what Hawkeyes is thinking until the very end when he gets his hearing aids back.
And there would be closed captions or something for when people use sign language.
And when people don’t sign and he has to read lips, they should get genuinely hard of hearing people to translate so that they know what words or phrases are hard to catch by lip reading.
Also, lots of explosions with no sound. I feel like that would just be cool.
I PHYSICALLY CAN’T NOT REBLOG THIS WHEN IT COMES UP ON MY DASH
IT’S TOO COOL
It’s called Winterguard. It’s a sport. Those girls are marching band color-guard girls during the summer touring season, and during the winter they compete against other color-guard teams to music. Costumes, props, mats, everything has to be carried onto the gym floor and then taken back away and counts as part of your performance time.
So when Family Guy or other popular media makes fun of color-guard girls, it pisses me off. We are not rejected cheerleaders. We are what you see above. We kick ass. We spin rifles and flags and sabers.
Gods, women are just…. *flexes hands” SO amazing!
HELLA COOL
Speaking as someone who lived and breathed cheerleading for five years of her life, color guard girls are fucking cool as hell and I WISH I could pull off the shit they do.
Swap those rifle blanks for spears and these are the shoulders you want on the front line of battle.
So one of the most frequent questions I get, is how do I work at a computer all day and avoid eyestrain, which is something people with chronic fatigue can be especially susceptible to, especially given our sensitivity to bright lights. And the answer is: I don’t. Working at my desk all day every day absolutely hurts my eyes, and makes me more prone to migraines and profound exhaustion which if I’m not careful can put me out of action for several days.
I do manage to limit how often this happens though by making sure I take care of myself, and this includes things like taking regular breaks from the screen to rest my eyes, using a screen dimmer like “night mode” constantly (comes as standard with Windows 10, might also be in other versions but I don’t remember) or a program like Flux which
adapts to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day, so that looking at your screen isn’t like staring into the sun at 3 in the morning. I also make sure my prescription for my glasses is up to date, and also wear glasses that have a special UV filter that gives everything a bit of a yellow tint to soften the light. Some people say they work, some people don’t. I’m someone who is particularly sensitive to light, and I have found the slight yellow tint to be beneficial to my eye health.*
But even doing all these things, opening Word can absolutely feel like you’re searing your retinas off when you open up the document and the white expanse of doom takes over your entire screen, like this:
This right here? Makes my myopia extremely pronounced in my right eye, and makes the visual floaters that I get extremely hard to work with. There are days when it feels like all I can see are those little black squiggles over my vision, and the white screen is absolutely to blame, even with all those other measures in place. (I have absolutely worn sunglasses indoors to get around using software that only lets me use a white screen.)
And it’s been brought to my attention in answering lots of questions about eye health and managing my symptoms, that some of you are not aware that Word doesn’t have to be like this, when it can in fact be like this:
And it is so much better for you. I mean it doesn’t have to be this specific color setting, you can play around with it and find the color setting that doesn’t hurt your eyes or trigger migraines/makes it easier for you to read and follow text, but I have found dark grey and blues to be what works best for me, and the way you change these settings is to first of all go into File > Options > General and then changing the Word theme from “Colorful” to “Dark Grey”
Which will give you this look:
And for some people that will be enough of a reduction in white screen to help with eyestrain and other problems, but if you are like me and the bright white is just playing havoc with your vision/processing, you can go up to the Design tab (it’s between Insert and Layout usually) and change the color of the text file page:
Like so:
Like I said, dark greys and blues work best for me, and this is what manuscripts look like when I am reading them for work, but you can totally play around with it and find what works for you, and hopefully help yourself avoid some of that “oh god my eyes feeling” that happens from staring at the blank white page for hours on end before you alt out the tab and pull up tumblr instead.
Anyway, hope that helps some of you? Good luck? Don’t hurt yourselves unnecessarily? Go take a break from your screen right now and get something to drink? idk, just take care. You deserve to.
Finding adequate pain management is difficult, especially with so many doctors becoming reluctant to help chronic pain patients thanks to the scare mongering over opioids at the moment, so in every literal sense, I feel your pain and I sympathize.
For me pain management is tricky as I react so negatively to medications, but if you do not have a pain specialist already, try and find one and see if there’s anything else they can do for you, or if there’s a med tweak that might help.
My biggest pin relief comes from weekly massage and physical therapy, without it I get acid build up in my muscles and it starts to feel like I have shards of glass under my skin. Not all insurances cover it (mine doesn’t) but it can be extremely beneficial for those of us with chronic pain. It can hurt a lot at first, particularly things like deep tissue massage, but if you start out gentle and work your way up it can really help with things like circulation and muscle spasms or breaking up painful adhesions that might be the cause of some pain. Plus it can just feel good to take a time out and stop carrying extra tension in your body all the time.
Acupressure, reflexology and basic therapeutic massage are all great ways at lowering inflammation and stress levels, and that can go a long way toward helping your pain.
Another thing I started doing this year was cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain management. The therapy itself doesn’t lessen the pain, but it does give me a better mentality for coping with it, which in turn helps with my stress levels and how well I’m able to manage it. People have noticed more and more recently that I’m enforcing stricter boundaries online with how far I’m willing to go in order to help or explain something, and this is a huge part of it. I’m also doing it in real life, and have cut out a lot of toxic and draining people who made demands on my time and energy that I simply don’t have to give. I’m always telling folk never to set themselves on fire to keep other people warm, and by golly gosh it’s high time I took my own advice cause if my mental health is shot to pieces, I can’t cope and I’ll just lay in bed and cry and cry and cry because everything hurts so much all the time. If I’m in a better place mentally, I’ve got more energy reserves to cope. It doesn’t make the pain any less, but it does help me not to fall into a pit of despair every time I have a flare up.
I also always try to take the time to do something nice for myself, whether it’s making sure I get my haircut every six weeks to keep down on maintenance, enjoying a nice bath or letting myself go to bed early to read a book, I make active time to treat myself with kindness and to do something out of enjoyment and not obligation. So much of my energy is rationed in terms of trying to have a functional life, it can feel like such a waste of energy to just do something that you’ll enjoy, and that’s just not true. Tonight was our anniversary and I wanted to feel fancy so I used a wine glass to drink my water with. Sounds ridiculous, but it made me feel special and normal for a split second out of a thousand moments of feeling like crap. Be kind to yourself and allow yourself small joys. They add up.
I appreciate you answering! I’ll try CBT out because I have noticed that when my mental health is bad it gets a lot harder to endure and they add on to eachother making the mental problems and the physical pain worse. I’ve been trying to figure stuff out with my doctor but he is a bit unsympathetic so I’m in the process of trying to get a new doctor. I might try acupressure as well thanks for the suggestion! I appreciate it a lot, I’ve been dealing with various issues for a while and reading your blog posts about getting better and healing helps give me hope.
You are so very welcome. When I first started blogging I could hardly ever find anyone who was dealing with my types of issues, and that feeling of isolation alone was unbearable. I never wanted anyone to feel like that, so I’m glad to know that me talking about these things helps. It makes living in the public eye somewhat more bearable lol.
If you wind up struggling with CBT or find it doesn’t help, another thing I’ve been using to great effect is EMDR. It was initially supposed to just be helping with my PTSD but we’ve actually found through trial and error that it’s very good with helping to deal with the stress of always being in pain, so that’s another option.
Good luck, and I wish you great progress on achieving a better quality of life💖
you’re going from one extreme environment to the polar opposite, and that is gonna throw you at first.
high school:
every minute of the day scheduled
immediate penalties for missing class
need permission to go to the bathroom WTF
your movements/behavior strictly enforced with punishment systems
you’re forced to interact with teachers and classmates
small assignments over short periods
basically bullied by the administration into obeying arbitrary rules
college:
you can show up late. it’s a jerkwad thing to make a habit of, but you can do it
YOU CAN FUCKING SKIP CLASSES WTF. most professors don’t take attendance. I missed soooooo many classes. use good judgement or your grades will suffer
DONT NEED PERMISSION TO GO TO THE BATHROOM. or leave class early. you can just, literally walk out? on bad mental health days I found it helpful to like, leave in the middle of class and spend 10-15 min resting. and then walking back in. (but be careful not to disrupt the class. I mostly did it when there was a back exit.
No Body Cares About Almost Anything. Dress code what’s that? u wanna wear a bikini to class, you can. a unicorn onesie? go ahead. randomly burst into parkour while walking to class? it’s whatever. you can literally (in the short term) get away with so much shit, and so many bad choices. no more demerits or detention or suspension
very little accountability/punishment, but the few rules they do enforce come at a huge cost if u get caught (these things are also arbitrary)
big part of your grade can be large end-of-term essays/assignments. you get to put it off andoff and no one holds you accountable…. until the grades come in. (I’ve failed more than one class this way)
you have to consistently self monitor or you’ll end up putting work off until way to late
No one’s stopping you from making bad choices. or even telling you not to. usually the opposite really. pay attention to your choices.
high school forces you (unsustainably) into study routines but without teaching you how to do it without external pressure. That framework collapses super quickly. you’re going from one ridiculous extreme to another, you’re gonna end up overindulging & being irresponsible bc
you couldn’t until now
your brain is trained to weigh consequences/rewards in the short term
you’re exhausted from high school
it feels like everyone else is doing it
my GPA bombed in college, I was not prepared. my advice comes from only my experiences, but check the notes, I’m sure my followers have loads to offer. off the top of my head:
look for stablizing influences
no seriously choose your friends wisely, their bad habits will become yours. college students tend to function in herds.
join study groups. for most classes. do it.
FREE TUTORING THERE’S FREE TUTORING TAKE ADVANTAGE
make friends with the TAs, go to them for homework help. you can like, ask them about a specific question and they’ll walk you through it.
as s freshman, maybe don’t sign up for classes with large term projects.
always check ratemyprofessor.com before enrolling in a class. it won’t always tell you much but it can give you huge red flags.
you can change your class schedule super easily for maybe 2 weeks. use that.
you can actually basically avoid talking to the professor the entire semester. DONT do this. be careful about self isolating
ASK FOR HELP ASK FOR HELP ASK FOR HELP. professors can actually be really accommodating if you explain you’re struggling with adjusting, mental health, deadlines.
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES. USE THE STUDENT HEALTH SERVICES.
just make a (free!) appt w/ any therapist. it’s amazing and you don’t need parent permission. do it at the start of of the semester, before you start struggling. this is s fantastic prevention tool
last thing: if you’re a white dude be careful not to talk too much in class it’s a Thing)
related note: don’t take philosophy
tell your mom I’m having a good day and I said hi!
