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kaberettIncludes current politics + mental illness, HURRAH.
OKAY THAT WILL DO FOR NOW.
- Dear everybody goyisch, and especially everyone white and goyisch, who is reblogging Dear White People THIS IS US shit in re Charlottesville, without reblogging things about Jews' conditional access to Whiteness, given what was being chanted there, I see you. I am pretty sure you're just not thinking! Please think about it.
- I am really struggling with the posts currently doing the rounds about how ~~engaging in gratitude exercises is bullshit~~ (specifically prompted by Gratitude Lists Are B.S. — It Was an "Ingratitude" List That Saved Me). I have been Not Engaging but it seems to me that this criticism of engaging in gratitude practices is... fundamentally based on a massive misunderstanding, i.e., it's also incredibly valuable and necessary to get validation that the shit you're dealing with is hard. "and here are three things I can be pleased about" isn't about denying that bad shit is going on! It's about defiance and stubbornness and spite and taking joy anyway. Which is another place this article goes wrong:
I started making gratitude lists every day — following the directions carefully and making sure to be specific about the reasons I was grateful: I had a loving husband who laughed at the same obscure Saturday Night Live sketches as me. I had a dirt cheap apartment in the hippest neighborhood in Los Angeles. I had a commercial acting agent and got to go on big Hollywood auditions for high paying gigs.
... that's... not actually specific. It's generalities. It's not "I saw a ridiculously bright green caterpillar on my way home, I didn't even realise nature came in that colour". It isn't "this specific thing that happened specifically today". It's trying to convince yourself that your life is ~in general~ great, which is unequivocally not what those exercises are for! And I recognise that the problem here is the exercises being explained poorly, but also AUGH, the feelings of alienation and invalidation and isolation that are coming from reading this shit when I don't think it would be kind or helpful to go "actually have u considered". - on which topic: observe me here making a list of the things that are stressing me out. observe that that is literally some of my counselling homework at the moment. write a list of the things that are shit rather than sweeping them under the carpet and then wondering why you're miserable! and also take joy in... surprise free ice cream while a group of musicians plays light jazz on top of the book barge on the canal!
- Minor and petty (but nonetheless contributing to a sense of alienation): a post that is doing the rounds of tumblr that features an illustration of someone with incredibly expensive leg prosthetics using an incredibly cheap and nasty wheelchair.
- OH RIGHT AND, I say, coming back to edit this in because MORE PETTY SHIT I'M ANNOYED ABOUT: the pronunciation-of-scone "debate" is not a real argument! it serves the same social function as talking about the weather! few if any people ACTUALLY CARE. it's oKAY. IT'S JUST SMALLTALK.
OKAY THAT WILL DO FOR NOW.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 04:05 pm (UTC)bitches y'all tarred and feathered my ancestors, lit their home on fire, would've raped several of them except it turned out they hit harder and their horses liked them more, and chased them out of the country and that's just on the TOTALLY white side so fuck you I am not part of your 'us') and some of them NOT petty (these fuckers are explicitly neo-Nazis and KKK they're out there in that iconography directly the list of people they want to light on fire is REALLY BROAD THANKS so yeah could you add some fucking more qualifiers to your thing there, starting with Xtian and then even getting rather more fucking sectarian than that even? and then I'm not getting INTO queer and disabled shit) that it is in fact part of why I'm tumblr-vacationing.- I have much sympathy. I have this with CBT a lot, for the same reasons - like, not just the exercises being explained poorly but being understood poorly BY the health practitioners who shove them on everyone without any regard for detail or their own misunderstanding. And like, I'm someone who the "gratitude" mis-understanding was pushed on so hard that I literally have to do an INSANE amount of reframe ("list things that are pleasing to me in this moment") because the SECOND "gratitude" gets invoked all I hear is the shit that article is reacting to, you know?
Which feels like part of the larger problem of "a technique gets developed or elaborated in some very careful, 'bespoke' level work by a very intelligent practitioner, and it's good . . . and then it gets disseminated in the worst kind of mass-produced LAZY crap, and that's how you get Participation Trophies, and it just fucks everyone up in a new way."
And it's super frustrating.
- I discovered that I like a new kind of ice-cream! which is convenient as ice-cream is one of those things I have Autisms about. But I like butter-pecan icecream. Apparently.
- If I could draw I would draw you Yolanda's wheel-chairs they are all sexy. (She has more than one OBVIOUSLY, because the one that's for her office is not the one you use to go on unpaved paths or to the beach with your great-nephew or horrify your niece by pretending to do wheelchair parkour in.) (She does not actually do wheelchair parkour she is FIFTY-SEVEN THANK YOU she has no desire to break her shoulder and make her life INCONVENIENT. But her niece is way too much of a fussbudget about her mobility so it's fun to make her go AAAAAGH AUNTIE DON'T DO THAT! and it makes her niece readjust her fussbudgetting about the great-nephew as at least he does not pretend he's about to jump an entire flight of stairs.)
- . . . .wait are we having a Moral Argument about whether or not you are allowed to troll people about how they pronounce "scone" now. *knocks head on desk*
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:05 pm (UTC)- The thing I think is funniest about this (in a fairly bleak sense) is that of course the entire fucking gratitude-exercise thing is... a repackaging of "count your blessings" in a way that isn't pious and condescending and sour. We have known this works for a really long time. We know it's important. CAN WE PLEASE STOP FUCKING IT UP SO PEOPLE HAVE TO REINVENT IT FROM SCRATCH. i.e. YES QUITE re frustration. I am incredibly lucky in that the only exposure I've had to CBT involved the psychiatrist involved going "... ye-aaaaaaaaah let's send you to a senior consultant psychologist for twenty sessions, not a junior one for six" and said psychologist proceeded to react appropriately to me going "I need a talk-therapy component to this and I categorically refuse to take any therapeutic approach the goal of which is uninstalling my triggers without working out why they're there and which bits I can safely decommission". Which. Is not typical.
- Ruby Violet are next to the big supermarket that reliably sells my favourite fruit juice, near my counsellor's place of work and on the way to/from a lot of places. The list of flavours is quite well-hidden, but the thing I jumped on yesterday was the damson & sour cream. (Because it's small batch and they have so many things on the roster there is always a different selection and usually something I haven't seen before every time I go in. IT IS A PROBLEM.) Hurrah for identifiable Correct Options. <3
- :D :D :D :D yepppp. I am currently at 4 wheelchairs (2 on loan, of which one is to be reclaimed Once We've Moved), I covet another 2, ye-e-e-e-ep. I would love to know what all she has (or, you know, nerd with you over finding photos of plausible non-Stark-ified equivalents, because I ASSUME Tony has irritated the shit out of her with prototypes much as he does everyone else...?)
- ehhhhh it was mostly A Kid Of Whom I Am Fond (where by "kid" I mean "early rather than late 20s" obv) having a Vent about how BORED they are of the conversation, and how both pronunciations are linguistically valid, rather than particularly being a Moral Argument? but also it was a "... child, you are Missing The Point spectacularly" moment.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:35 pm (UTC)- XD I am not sure that he's harassed her with prototypes just because I'm not sure how much they actually interact when it isn't 100% boss-employee dynamics, which put him on better behaviour, and since she seems perfectly content with what she has it's less of a drive to LOOK I BE FRIEND MAKE YOU THING! You know, I should probably map out "who Tony thinks of as an employee and who Tony thinks of as a cooperative partner even if he SAYS they're an employee", if only for my own quick reference. XDXD
- oh silly kid. *gives them tea and a book and puts them in a window seat somewhere*