Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Something I realized was worth keeping in mind lately: your body doesn’t just keep the score on trauma, you know.
Like we’re starting to give some lipservice to the idea that trauma, that stress and harm and damage, live in our “bodies” even if we don’t consciously/cognitively acknowledge them, but there’s two small problems with this idea.
One is the idea that there is a brain-body split, because there isn’t. Your brain, the place where your cognition occurs, is just another part of your body. Your conscious memory is also part of your body keeping the score. I could go on about this for a while, but I’ll refrain for now.
Because almost more important to this issue is that your body also keeps all the other scores.
The smell that calms you down. The fact that you feel better after a big hug. The way your favourite kind of tea helps ground you. The sudden joy at a particular song.
All of these things also live in your body. Your comfort food being comfort food is a score your body is keeping. How to read. The comfort of a warm bed. All of that knowledge lives in your body, in its memory too.
oh my god. most of life really is about the little things. a good haircut, a nice playlist, trying a new recipe that turns out well, a poem that hits home, a comfortable spot in the sun, spontaneous messages, a pen you enjoy writing with, tea with the right temperature to drink, buying that thing you’ve been eyeing for a while, a warm bed. yeah. im so grateful for the little enjoyments
You know what I’m just learning, and I don’t know who else needs to hear this but
it’s not cheating to make things manageable for yourself
I’m very dyslexic but I love baking, and packet mixes have become my best friend, it’s less reading, and less measuring ingredients and I know the end result will taste good.
I know the instructions for my favourite from memory and it makes it so much less stressful for me to enjoy something I love to do!
It’s not cheating to wear slip on shoes if you can’t manage laces, it’s not cheating to try out a bus route before you have to go somewhere new for the first time, it’s not cheating to look up the menu for a restaurant before you go out to eat.
make things easier for yourself, you deserve to be able to live your life and do whatever you need to, to make it manageable
Caption: [So, I’m autistic and something really exciting happened today that I need to share with everyone that is very very pertinent to my special interest and my being very gay and trans. So Avanti West Coast trains ran a competition recently where they were like, “Hey do you know someone who’d like to get married on a train?”.
And I responded to this competition, being like, “Oh yeah sure. Why would I like to get married on a train? Well, I’m autistic and I really fucking love trains. Trains are my special interest. I absolutely love trains. Also I spent the last like year and a half trying to get my gender recognition certificate done so that I could marry my wife in a big gay wedding. And we can get married as wives. Please can I get married on your train?”.
And amazingly today I got an email from the train company. I’m getting an all-expenses paid wedding on a train. I love trains! I’ve been bouncing all day, I just ahhh!]
Picture of the WEDDING! (From Laura’s Twitter)
Also go check out Laura’s stuff such as
GENDER EUPHORIA, positive experiences with gender from non-cis people.
I use this with my hospice patients a lot. Because “is there anything I can do to help?” rarely gets a response. But, “I’ll be here till 6:30 and would like to do one thing to make your room more comfortable before I head out” frequently does get an answer. Often something they deem “too small to bug anyone with” like closing the blinds so there’s no reflection on the tv, or repositioning their socks because the heels have wandered into the front and are uncomfortable, or they want ice cream before dinner today, or getting an extra blanket.
What’s going to make you happy right now? Is it some cake? Is it a nap? Is it calling your mom? Is it going on a drive and blasting music? Is it taking a bath? Is it reading a book?
Check in with yourself because you deserve that happiness, whatever it is.
I also use this on myself. What’s one thing I could do to make my environment more comfortable right now? Does it cure my mental illness? Hell no! Does it make me feel more in control of my feelings and the world around me? You betcha!
I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day
