“I don’t want to be a burden” you’re more like a relief, a gift, a blessing actually
“i dont want to be a burden” dude i found the point of it all thanks to you. i realised the joy of existing is doing so with you bro
“i don’t want to be a burden” you’re worth carrying. i don’t care if you’d be worth it to you; you’re worth it to me. i smile every time i think of you. and buddy you’re just gonna have to figure out how to cope w that <3
“I don’t want to be a burden” human hands and arms and hearts are made for carrying.
also I got a tattoo partially re-coloured today and they bandaged me in veterinary wrap like I’m a sick horse
Not gonna lie, that made me do a double take.
Not because of the vet wrap, it’s great stuff and I keep some at home myself for first aid purposes.
But because that colour is considered euthanasia green in a lot of vet clinics here including mine and we ONLY use it for animals we are euthanising. We will literally continue restraining a squirming dog or cat while someone restocks the drawer if we open it to find only the euthanasia green vet wrap than use this because we consider using it for a healthy patient to be a bad omen…
they’re going to put me down? :(
Has anyone checked if op is still alive?….. for no particular reason
I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.
I Am Not Okay
You have to understand. I watched the movies maybe once as a kid when they came out twenty years ago. I’ve somehow avoided learning like anything about these books my entire life. Literally everything about these books was a complete unknown and surprise to me. Totally blank slate going on. I barely even knew how it ended.
Holy shit.
Frodo didn’t complete his task. Sam literally carried him up Mount Doom. And when he got to the end, he couldn’t throw the Ring away.
But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn’t have been destroyed.
So Frodo’s journey saved the world nonetheless.
And it broke him.
It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn’t of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.
He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.
But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.
And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.
But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.
It’s amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre’s core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.
But Frodo couldn’t resist the Ring completely. He wasn’t superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn’t either. He wasn’t so special that he was invulnerable.
I’m not okay. Holy fuck you guys.
It’s been a week and I’m still not over this, I’ll never get over this.
Something that I’ve been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.
The task was too much and it broke him and that’s okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn’t treat it as a bad thing.
This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It’s treated as good and necessary. They don’t heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they’re done.
And in Gondor’s march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he’s taking with him don’t have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that’s okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren’t shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren’t manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn’t do it.
I don’t know man. I’ve held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I’ve been going through it and it’s understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I’ve had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I’ve seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I’ve gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.
Fuck me, man, I’m currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.
And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.
And it says that you can’t endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.
How am I supposed to move on with my life after reading this?
For all that my experience of gender is mostly ‘No thanks, I’m good! Happy for you, though!’ there is one context in which I have always happily accepted a gendered term, and that’s when I worked customer service in stores and got to be The Lady. As in, a parent comes in with a small child and tells them to “give that to The Lady,” or “ask The Lady your question.”
I first got to be The Lady at 16 or 17 while working part-time at the local convenience store, and the novelty never wore off. Only ten years before, I was in stores with my mother being told to pass that to The Lady so we can pay for it, and now here I was, become The Lady myself! Part of a grand tradition!
I think the reason that The Lady sits easier than “girl” or “woman” for me is because, as The Lady, I’m not so much defined by my gender as my position within the interaction, which is “kindly adult figure who is here to help introduce the young human to the ways of Social Interaction.” The Lady is a sort of simplified archetype, generalized into a useful teaching tool to convey the lesson that folks working customer service are usually happy to help you when you approach them with respect.
When learning something new, and especially something complex, it’s often best to break it up into its component pieces and work one part at a time. The Lady’s gender doesn’t actually matter — “Lady” is just a basic stand-in for “respectful term used to address a stranger.” The actual focus of the interaction is How To Do A Shopping. It’s all a performance to capitalize on a teachable moment, anyway — the gender marker chosen is incidental, based on what seems simplest and most likely. So yeah, it feels weird to be referred to as “the woman,” but I’m always up for being The Lady for a kid learning social skills. I could happily be The Gentleman, too, or just The Nice Person — that’s all I want to be, in the end, anyway.
We’re doing drop-in sessions this term for the dissertation students across the department, just little informal tutorials on topics they request help/pointers on. Most of my colleagues have gone for things like “How to do a lit review” or some such, but I offered “How to focus and write a 10,000 word dissertation without procrastinating unduly”, given that I have ADHD tips.
Anyway, what I didn’t expect (but should have) was almost the entire damn lot of them wanting to sign up for my session specifically. Complete with one of the construction students asking me earnestly and intently when I’d be doing it. So!
I know what tips and tricks I use. What about you guys? What ADHD tricks do you use to avoid procrastination and get on with big projects, be it dissertations, work projects, or misc other?
Massive, huge thanks to everyone who chimed in for this!
It was an incredibly successful session - so much so, the Construction students all went back and apparently raved to their lecturers about it, and told their lecturers that it would have been really valuable at the start of their uni careers, and now the Construction guys have asked me to do it as a proper session for their first year students this term. And then one of them suggested I maybe do a session for the staff as well, so that they can see if there are any ways they could be supporting/teaching the students better.
Anyway, multiple people asked for the slides, so here you go. The focus of this one was very much on dissertations, but there’s a lot that could apply more generically to other projects, and indeed ADHD life in general (it starts general and becomes specific), so if that sounds helpful, have at it.
(One thing you’ll miss from the slides is the discussion stuff that goes with them, of course, so my suggestion is that you go through them with someone else and talk between you about whether you reckon each tip would apply to you and why/why not. This will give you a closer approximation of the Experience of my lecture hall.)
Stop making Hannibal furry headcanons unless it’s this bird
It’s apparently only ONE population of this species that does this. Everyone else hunts and caches normally. The other falcons probably talk shit about this fucked up torture family.
Ooooh that’s even more fascinating. That means it’s a learned behavior they TAUGHT one another.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
