People may have a lot of things. You may even look at them and think, ‘Oh, they have so many things I don’t. They have so many things I wish I had. I would be so much happier if I had the things they have.’ And by ‘things’, I mean all things. Like family, friends, money, careers, houses and homes, hobbies, plans, places to be and people to talk to. All the things. But the problem is that no matter how many things people have, it doesn’t mean that they have the one thing they need to keep living.
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I’m usually too afraid to waste it to use it often, but:
The ultimate medicinal combination for a Sunday when you were hurting and feeling like shit:
curtains that shut out all the light from outside
softest clothes you can find
iced sweet late
sweets
painkillers
aroma oil in a diffuser
and the extended editions of Lord of the Rings
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Sometimes you take a nap. Sometimes a nap takes you.
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The ever-growing number of wrong steps and panicked lunges in inappropriate directions can hardly come as any kind of surprise when the ground is constantly crumbling beneath your feet, biting on your heels.
And there’s nothing else.
No stop, no rest, no safe haven, no place to step back and breathe before taking a step.
Year, after year, after year.
And the point comes when making mistakes and wrongs is not the worst thing anymore, it’s not being able to stop caring about making them that is the absolute worst.
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When you’re someone who (or in a stage) reads 20-30 books monthly (and also has trouble finding books that your sick and tired psyche can handle atm, so ends up discarding half as much as ‘read later when I have the right mood’, thus creating 80-90 book TBR piles on the top of your bookshelf), while also living in a small Tokyo apartment and not in an ancient castle with 2-floor library, opting for doing it through an ebook reader should be a no-brainer. The most logical, easiest option. The only acceptable option, some even would insist… Not only it would save you from struggling to find a space to store all your books, but also, kindle versions are very often come 5-15 dollars cheaper than buying paper books (not to mention sometimes having to pay for shipping to Japan, though having Prime helps). Why, sometimes, they are even free on kindle. So, really, a no-brainrer. Or it should be. …Unless you are also an aspie to whom the sensory experience of reading a book (holding it, touching the paper, smelling the paper, feeling exactly how much you’ve progressed) is as important as reading the words on a page and without it reading is not reading, and your brain actually misses chunks of content when you’re reading from an e-reader (tried and confirmed multiple times). Then all bets are off and you can only improve your ‘finding places to put bookshelves’ game and hope he floor doesn’t give up during the next earthquake. Or in general.
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because while I’m reading I’m not screwing up.
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I don’t need my therapist to tell me (I can tell it her myself) that I’ve been reading so many silly, and not so silly, fantasy romance-ish books, which I would previously consider kind of uncharacteristic, because I use them to fight my deepening depression and anxiety on the very chemical level.
It also would be why I get so uncontrollably angry and disappointed when a book that I desperately needed to pull me up, has so much angst (because apparently too many people believe angst is fashionable, cool, and deep) it actually managed to bring me down.
Which is not really fair to the books I read, because having angst doesn’t make books bad objectively, but right now in my eyes, it kind of does.
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one day at work and I feel like a wrung out stale towel.
and dry-heave trying to drink water
oh fun
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It took me ridiculously long time to realize that I always have unexplainable bruises not because I’m clumsy and bump into things, but because I’m scratching myself to bruises.
I only wish I could stop doing it in front of people and at work.
Though if I wasn’t going to work I probably wouldn’t be scratching.
Excessively angsty, and so deeply unsatisfying it hurts
I honestly hoped to be able to give this book a higher review. I even thought I could dedicate a full star just for the letters from Simus… but that’s just it. Those letters are literally the only enjoyable thing about this book, and there are very few of them… This book deals with sickness and death for its entirety. It heavy, it’s full of angst, and negative emotions I didn’t need to experience. There is too much faceless death, and also death that hit too close to home. I can’t really say anything negative about the writing or world/character building. It’s just that the decisions that were made regarding the events and directions of this book are so very deeply unsatisfying, unreasonable, and hateful. And the negativity goes on and on. Just as you think that it’s about to let up, something bad happens again. And then again, but worse. And it continues in that manner all the way to the end. And even when you think something good is finally about to happen, someone prevents it. The characters that used to bring joy are mostly gone in one way or another. And there were many frustrating moments where much reasonable things could be done and said to stop more bad from happening, but they for some reason’t weren’t. It feels as if the author was in a very dark place of mind, and then took it all out on this book and us, unsuspecting readers who thought we were reading a fantasy romance. Which is understandable, but not appreciated. While I had already read the first book twice, and am likely to read it again sometime, I really don’t think I will ever want to put myself through torture of reading this volume ever again. (Maybe only Simus’s letters…)
Sometimes it takes me a really long time to realize something.
Recently I’ve finally really understood the mechanism behind the everyone’s notion to tell people that ‘it’s all in your head’, ‘you’re the one who has to save yourself’, ‘you just need to change your mind set’, ‘you’re the key to your own happiness’, and so on and so forth, I can’t even remember or the major examples…
It’s quite obvious, really. We tell this to people so that there can be no notion that there’s a responsibility on us to help them. If we make sure that everyone believes that they must be able to save themselves from the inside, and not expect help from anyone else, no one is going to blame us from doing nothing. And we don’t need to feel guilty when people who needed our help lose their fights, we then can only say that they didn’t ‘want to try enough’.
And when we <i>do</i> decide to help someone, we then can be praised as heroes who went beyond anything that could be expected from us.
Fact is, sometimes some of us really fall into situations, in context of mental health or otherwise, where there’s nothing more we can do ourselves to help ourselves. Sometimes people drown and they can’t be the ones to pull themselves up. And while other people are not actually required by anyone to help them, it would be great if they at least stopped blaming it on those who are in trouble. Telling a person with serious metal health problems that ‘they must be more positive’ or ‘stop being depressed or autistic by changing their way of thinking about things’ is like standing on the ground above a drowning person and shouting ‘it’s your problem that you don’t even know how to swim properly, just do better’. Yes, some percentage of people will still have strength to float or swim ashore, and it may even work for them. But it’s <b>not</b> for the spectators to decide who can or cannot do it.
This pattern of behavior that equals to saying ‘I’m not going to help you, but I’m going to save you by telling you that you just have to save yourself’ really disgusts me. If you can’t/don’t want to help – no one forces you, be on your way. Just stop using people who are suffering to boost your self-esteem by pretending you’re saying something wise and helpful by telling them to stop hurting.
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Sometimes wanting to bitch/rant means wanting to go into some long-winded and complex logical explanation monologue of why you feel like that, why something sucks so much, and why everyone should agree with you that it sucks and shouldn’t exist. And pretend like you’re all logical and rational about your ranting, und thus completely justified.
And sometimes you just wish you could look someone in the face and say something like “My fucking eye hurts so fucking much.” (… and also expect that someone to understand that it means that most of your head, brain, and face, and all, are actually hurting, and it hurts even more just because while it is all hurting it means you can’t write or read because of it … and that maybe perhaps you could also go on to list a dozen with a tail other things that also hurt in this exact moment, but kinda hurting too much to be able to.)
Keina Daria 