reminder to all lgbt people out there for this month of june: the Sacred Heart of Jesus beats for you too.
people should start using picrews on linkedin
It just hit me.
I have been home from school for one year.
I remember sitting at my desk in my dorm room and thinking to myself, on a scale of one to ten, how would I rate this pain?
Ten, I thought to myself. I remember that I wrestled with this answer, trying to revise it into making sense even though it was my automatic, thoughtless, and sincere judgment.
How could psychological distress, a subjective experience, be measured? How did I know that a feeling of distress was "this bad" or "that bad?" And anyway, I couldn't be feeling a ten because nothing was happening. I wasn't even feeling anything that I could identify. It was just...a sense of everything screaming. The closest I could come to naming it was "upset."
I spent so much of last year in the most excruciating psychological agony I had ever felt and I had no idea even what emotion it was. I remember, at times, being so stressed that my entire body felt physically frozen, like I couldn't will myself to move. I stopped feeling tired from waking up early, stopped feeling sleepy at night. I slept lightly; it felt like some part of me was still awake somehow, conscious of how many hours and minutes it was until class. I felt like I was going crazy.
My health was starting to collapse: I wasn't menstruating at all, my lymph nodes were constantly swollen, I was having dizzy spells, my blood pressure was higher than it should have been, I had constant nightmares and would wake up sore from how tense I was. I was failing a tai chi class because my body refused to cooperate with me. My instructor would be whispering "soften, just let your body relax" and I would be literally shaking with tension, in pain from how rigid my muscles were. My back constantly hurt.
By the end of the semester, I weighed roughly what I did at 13 years old—since beginning college, I had lost thirty pounds.
My school had mental health services; I had an RA; I had an advisor that cared about my success; I couldn't and didn't seek any of these resources for help, because I didn't have even the beginnings of a word to describe what was happening inside me. I was barely aware that there was anything wrong. I was thriving. I was coping. Nothing was wrong. I was always thoughtfully applying coping skills, always reaching for another tool in my toolbox. I redirected negative thoughts. When I paused for a second, sometimes I could hear my entire soul screaming in agony. Does that make sense?
Last year I learned a lesson I will never forget, and it is this:
You can become so resilient and adept at coping that you will step unflinchingly into a bath of boiling water and die.
The couple months after returning home were a black hole. I barely remember them. I did nothing but lie in bed. I was overwhelmed by a simple conversation with my family; I didn't have the energy to reply to a text message half the time.
I continued having nightmares about my roommate for weeks. I had nightmares about being raped, too. There is no clear reason for the latter; I feel certain it must have been my subconscious attempting to communicate, in the strongest language it could, just how fucking bad my situation was.
I wish I had been told "You are not obligated to endure everything you are able to survive." Of course, it wasn't a simple matter of realizing earlier that I was having a colossal mental health crisis with something trauma-adjacent that I needed immediate help with, that I was in an abusive relationship, and that losing my freshman friend group and having my closest friend on campus involuntarily committed to a mental hospital was MAYBE bad for my mental state, on top of the stress of having unaccommodated disabilities forcing me to spend hours on "10-15 minute" assignments. Instead, I would have to go farther back, undo the years of cognitive behavioral therapy and psychiatric labeling of my anxiety disorders that taught me to cope and push through and cope and push through, to label my fears and discomforts as "irrational," to take upon myself the responsibility of ignoring my feelings. I would have to undo the trauma of being autistic, of learning that it is a basic expectation to endure agony.
I kept being haunted by how I had just kept going like a zombie, even when every step forward felt like burning knives, doing self-care and applying coping skills, never letting it get bad enough for total collapse. I couldn't be self-destructive or suicidal, I knew how to talk myself down from all of that, I could barely fully think a self-loathing thought before I had censored it from my head.
Meanwhile the inside of my brain felt like burning grease. It literally felt like I physically had no choice but to deal with my emotions in a healthy way using CBT techniques, like my brain literally wouldn't let me near the "bad" options, and I'm glad I didn't self-harm or anything like that, but it was also fucking horrible to be unable to behave like a person going totally unhinged with distress. I could do well in my classes, stay hydrated, shower, and contradict negative thoughts like I was some kind of mental health mech suit over which I had no control, designed to torture the person inside it.
I physically could not have a panic attack. I had learned how to make the symptoms stop a long time ago and now my body had forgotten how, and just vibrated with awfulness nonstop. There was no peak and then relief after; it never stopped and there was no way to release it. As awful as panic attacks are, it is so much worse to feel like you are on the cusp for days on end without any release.
I felt so unsure about dropping out. I came close to not taking time off at all. Two weeks after returning I still wasn't fully aware of how bad it was; I decided to withdraw on an instinct, something screaming within me like an air raid siren.
If I hadn't taken that uptight professor that took letter grades off for forgetting page numbers and that shitty math class, god knows what would have happened to me, because if my grades had not faltered significantly, I might not have been able to come up with a reason to withdraw.
No more resilience. No more coping. Not for me. If it sucks, hit the bricks.
How do I summarize? I did literally nothing for several months, and then I started digging giant holes in my backyard, I found bryozoans, I made 50 wikipedia pages about bryozoans, I chatted with one of the world's top bryozoologists, I started paying attention to moss, I noticed baby trees, I learned to transplant baby trees using a solid two months of trial and error, I got angry about lawns, I got curious, I cried about baby trees, I had so many epiphanies about baby trees that I expanded as a person until my previous self was just a pale and shallow fool, I gave away 70 baby trees at volunteer events, I started an organization...oops??
I learned to identify every common plant that grows here, (after months of raging over the similarity of leaves). I impulse bought milkweed plants online and then cried when monarchs came to them.
I have grown so much as a person this year that I feel sad for the version of me that did not know the wondrous things I know now. I can point to specific moments when I expanded as a being. I have this deep, broad body of knowledge and skill that so few people have, and all I had was the internet and a bunch of plants, and the internet taught me almost nothing. I can just stand in the woods and feel my understanding slowly increasing like dripping water.
I am reading Braiding Sweetgrass right now and Robin Wall Kimmerer and I share a brain cell. The amount of sentiments she's expressed that have been in my brain is scary. Just listen to the plants! If you listen to them, they WILL teach you.
I keep imagining my school friends finding out I've abruptly evolved into a plant-listening weirdo.
I didn't know before how healing nature is. I had to heal my brain, eaten by poetry journals full of ecofascist circlejerking. I feel so much anger and sadness at how cruel and flat their imagination of nature is. I have learned that nearly every way of being and feeling and living among the life forms of Earth is a divine mystery; why would anything felt need a frail human name to be real? I pressed my forehead to the trunk of a huge tulip poplar and felt more compassion than I had given the sad caged animal of my body.
I believed myself. I tasted pawpaws alone in a grove in the woods. I walk along the trails saying aloud, Hello puttyroot orchid! Hello pileated woodpecker! I am much more autistic than ever before.
I really cannot describe what a relief it was to leave the narrow world of literary magazines and mental health think-pieces where all of our traumas have to be numbered and color-coded and precisely attributed to the right kind of event and type of marginalization, and enter the world of forests and mycelium, where we don't understand anything and everything is as powerfully real as thunder that shakes your bones. There are 300 miles of mycelium carrying the thoughts of trees underneath the print of your shoe. Can any pen and paper list all the ways there are to be a creature, alive?
something im noticing is the redditors are just commenting on everything via reblogs with reckless abandon. and its so funny bc thats how youre MEANT to use this fucking website but we've trained ourselves out of it somehow.
I feel like a fucking chimp raised in a lab let out into the wild and just doing shit without understanding wtf is going on because I was raised to click the button to get cookie
we need to put all train autistics in office and any government positions possible so they can eviscerate the automobile industry
Family owned Italian firm invents solar panels that mimic terracotta tiles to restore heritage buildings
In a small workshop near Vicenza, Italy, artisans make traditional-looking roofing tiles with a hidden difference: Each module contains solar photovoltaic cells.
The Invisible Solar Rooftile is made by an unique indivisible piece, with a very high resistance, that hides and protects the photovoltaic cells that are incorporated inside
The family-owned company that makes the tiles, Dyaqua, started developing its “Invisible Solar” products more than a decade ago. Solar panels “were spreading much faster than before, and our first thought was about heritage cities like Vicenza,” says company spokesperson Elisa Quagliato. The city, a World Heritage Site, is covered in a sea of red terra-cotta roofs.
The tiles have been installed at Pompeii (where the director of the archaeological park says they look “exactly like the terra-cotta tiles used by the Romans”) and in the small Italian town of Vicoforte. A larger installation will soon begin in Evora, Portugal, as part of an EU-funded project that aims to help historic cities “become greener, smarter, and more livable while respecting their cultural heritage.”
The same approach can be used to hide solar in other materials that look like stone, concrete, or wood, and incorporated into walls or patios, not just roofs. And it’s a way to potentially add solar where it wouldn’t otherwise be used.
Sources
https://www.fastcompany.com/90836947/these-terracotta-tiles-blend-in-perfectly-with-italian-roofs-but-theyre-really-solar-panels
“Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter?”
— Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (via kxowledge)
Even though April had all the clinical signs of schizophrenia, the team believed that the underlying cause was lupus, a complex autoimmune disorder where the immune system turns on its own body, producing many antibodies that attack the skin, joints, kidneys or other organs. But April’s symptoms weren’t typical, and there were no obvious external signs of the disease; the lupus appeared to only be affecting her brain.
The autoimmune disease, it seemed, was a specific biological cause — and potential treatment target — for the neuropsychiatric problems April faced. (Whether her earlier trauma had triggered the disease or was unrelated to her condition wasn’t clear.)
The diagnosis made Markx wonder how many other patients like April had been missed and written off as untreatable.
“We don’t know how many of these people are out there,” Markx said. “But we have one person sitting in front of us, and we have to help her.”
The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus. Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide, a heavy-duty immunosuppressive drug typically used in chemotherapy and borrowed from the field of oncology. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.
The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvementalmost immediately.
As part of a standard cognitive test known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), she was asked to draw a clock — a common way to assess cognitive impairment. Before the treatment, she tested at the level of a dementia patient, drawing indecipherable scribbles.
But within the first two rounds of treatment, she was able to draw half a clock — as if one half of her brain was coming back online, Markx said.
Following the third round of treatment a month later, the clock looked almost perfect.
Drawing a clock is a common way to assess cognitive impairment. These clocks, drawn by April, show how significantly the treatment regimen was helping her. (Courtesy of Sander Markx) Despite this improvement, her psychosis remained. As a result, some members of the team wanted to transfer April back to Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, Markx said. At the time, Markx had to travel home to the Netherlands, and feared that in his absence, April would be returned to Pilgrim.
On the day Markx was scheduled to fly out, he entered the hospital one last time to check on his patient, who he typically found sitting in the dining room in her catatonic state.
But when Markx walked in, April didn’t seem to be there. Instead, he saw another woman sitting in the room.
“It didn’t look like the person I had known for 20 years and had seen so impaired,” Markx said. “And then I look a little closer, and I’m like, ‘Holy s---. It’s her.’”
It was as if April had awakened after more than 20 years.
TL;DR in case you don't want to read or you're out of free WaPo articles: Article describes two cases of young women who were diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, respectively. Both spent 1-2 decades in inpatient psychiatric hospitals because their conditions were so severe and did not respond to psychiatric treatment, including ECT. This doctor realizes they have lupus that is attacking their brains. He treats the lupus. Both of them improve quickly and drastically. Article wonders how many people with "treatment-resistant schizophrenia" actually have autoimmune diseases targeting their brains... which could be easily identified with a blood test.
"Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues."
Francis Picabia, The Blessed Virgin, 1920
horrible people thrive guilt-free all the time so why should you hide away for your whole life just because you internalised guilt from a bad childhood or whatever. you can create a life in this world too
another question that gets me is… would u be friends with your parents if they were your not your parents/ were the age you are now?? hard to tell bc who knows what they were really like at 20 something but….. we wonder. and we wonder and wonder.
One of the mobile buttons is gone, which one?
OMG That is so cute!!
Also the reason that the cat did this is actually because they are mirroring their owner. If their owner treats the thing (or in this case book) with respect and has made it very clear with their actions that the thing is important the cat will take notice and mirror this behavior!
Great addition! However, this is actually because the cat is Muslim.
explaining this to usamericans: ok it's like if there was a logan roy who ate spaghetti and said mamma mia 🤌🏻 and he died
damn i guess you guys didnt have classes on how to watch the news on tv
#na fila#former high school teacher#whenever I hear school didn’t teach us about XYZ I think about the kid#who’s mom wanted and excused absence for her daughter so that they could go get nose rings at the mall#like also maybe you have some responsibility to educate yourself once you become sentient#but also maybe you were just doing f all in school lmao#kids are kids but it does no one any good to pretend that we are physically unable to control our own actions#or that our actions don’t have consequences
Scheduling messages is really the best thing in the world, like I wish every platform and medium let me do this. I love dealing with work by scheduling a bunch of things while in a fever dream at night and then having a slow morning knowing that everything was sent in. Similarly, I have some people to contact for life stuff and it’s just like, if I could just schedule messages at 1am lmao
moment of appreciation for all religious LGBTQ+ people right now; Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or anything else. It’s okay if you’re still figuring out what your identity means to you, or how it intersects with your religious beliefs. You are valid and loved <333
“The oldest olive tree in the world located on the island of Crete. It is estimated to be as over 3,000 years old and still produces olives.”
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gotta share @telesilla’s tags -