ACTUALLY acting silly is one of the greatest joys of life. if you see me in the street meowing back at cats I see and kicking snow piles down know that I am living my best life.
Born ridiculous, Forced to have opinions on the economy 😔
If you are like me with the anxiety and the depression and the executive dysfunction
- DON’T say to yourself “I need to take a shower”
-showering is a long multistage process that requires you to be vulnerable (naked, wet, blots out sound, what if someone calls/rings the doorbell, etc)
-INSTEAD say to yourself “I’m just gonna go turn on the water right quick”
-small one step task checked off your list
-your anxiety brain is a dumb motherfucker and it will be none the wiser that you have tricked it into BEGINNING the shower process
-once the water is running you are already there in the bathroom with the water running so you might as well finish the job
NOTE that this trick works for like. Fucking everything.
-Don’t “work on your WIP”– just open the document
-don’t “make the scary phone call” – just pull up the number in your contacts
-don’t “make lunch” – just pull out a loaf of bread
-don’t “do the dishes” – just open the dishwasher. Literally just open it
Remember ur anxiety brain is a dumb motherfucker and that you CAN therefore TRICK it into being functional
also bonus tip: for those times when u just need to lie on the floor and be a worthless lump of anxiety-ridden garbage for a few hours, download Duolingo and pick a language. Are you going to be fluent in a week? No. But it’s easy to focus on and that way when you’ve been down there for half a day and your shitty fukken brain is trying to convince you you’re garbage because it KEPT you there, you can counter with “excuse you I just spent the last four hours TEACHING MYSELF A FOREIGN LANGUAGE you punk ass bitch.”
Good luck out there kids I believe in u
Both these tips are REALLY good advice! I have quite bad executive dysfunction and multi-step tasks become very difficult.
For the second one I actually put my Duolingo app in place of a social media app on my phone so I would open it automatically.
This made me nearly bite a pencil in half in enraged memory.
@ THE REST OF MY ANCIENT HISTORY CLASS; Y’ALL ARE WELCOME FOR THAT FUCKIN A THE REST OF YOU DID NO GODDAMN WORK FOR
Oh man, so I know everyone hates group projects with ample good reason, but lemme just tell you something that happened to me in my final year of uni. My dad got real sick and was in and out of hospital numerous times, one time with a suspected heart attack. Which meant my mum ended up caring for my dad, and I wound up caring for my disabled brother, on top of working a part time job and going to university full time.
My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.
It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.
And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”
And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.
And I honestly wish things like this were taught in team building exercises, cause that’s what group projects in school are. They’re supposed to be teaching you how to work well with others and achieve a common goal, while at the same time totally skipping over the fundamentals of human interaction and how to engage socially with others, and it’s fucking bullshit.
I had something snarky to say, but that last comment is too important to distract from.
