1. Become aware of how and when you tearing yourself down.
2. Now that you can catch yourself doing it. Offer counters to the negative self talk. A really useful thing I read was to talk to yourself almost the way you would child. Gentle and patient. Even when they fuck up.
3. Take time to celebrate your small accomplishments. You’ve been attacking yourself for every little mistake. Apply that same fervor to the positive things in your life. Did the dishes even though you didn’t want to? Fuck yeah! Got up and took shower? YES!!! You are taking positive steps to feeling better. Celebrate it.
4. Make lists of things you’re good at/ like about yourself. The first time I did this the only two things in my list we’re that I liked my hair and I had good friends. It was start.
5. Don’t beat yourself up if you screw up steps 1-4. It’s counter productive. When I catch myself calling my self stupid for some mistake or other my response now is,“We don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore. What’s something constructive that could actually help solve the problem.”
Most of the time that seems to work. Not always. But more and more Everytime.
ATTENTION ALL YOU WEIRDOS WHO LIKE WORKING FOR UR SALARIED OFFICE JOB LATE AT NIGHT… UNLESS SOMETHING ACTUALLY NEEDS TO BE DONE AT 10:30 PM, U CAN SAVE EMAILS AS A DRAFT AND SEND THEM IN THE MORNING SO PPL YOU CC’D DONT FEEL STRESSED OUT ABOUT NOTHING AND INADEQUATE THAT THEYRE NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH EVEN THO ITS 10:30 PM AND I KNOW ID RATHER DIE THAN BE WORKINNG AT THIS HOUR!!!!!! STOP
[Image description: Images are of a thread by twitter user @dynamicsymmetry.
Thread starts by quoting a tweet reading
“People in their 30s need to stop bitching about how they’re getting old. You aren’t getting old, but your depressing outlook sure as hell is”.
@dynamicsymmetry responds:
Okay, I actually want to talk about this for a second, regarding millennials and how really goddamn difficult it is for us to make sense of our own age sometimes.
People write about us like we’re still barely in college, when a lot of us are entering our mid and even late thirties. *A lot of us are close to forty goddamn years old.*
You see? The world itself doesn’t know how old we are.
But something else that happens – and I notice this so keenly in myself these days – is a sense of panic, that we’re getting older and running out of time and *we haven’t even grown the fuck up yet*.
Think about that for a second.
We’re not complaining about how we’re getting old, or at least I’m not. That’s not what makes my stomach quivery. It’s the sense that the world is speeding up and speeding up and I’m running out of time and I don’t own a house and I don’t have kids and oh my god what the fuck
We’re not in a mid-life crisis. Millennials are experiencing a *goddamn crisis of temporality*. We don’t know if we’re old. We don’t know if we’re young. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve lost our guideposts, our benchmarks, our rubrics for life.
And people blame us for it.
And it really doesn’t help that we’re approaching middle age (WHATEVER THAT EVEN MEANS ANYMORE) in an deeply toxic economic system, with a global future currently very much in doubt, and our parents won’t stop fucking us over.
So the next time you hear a Millennial in their thirties complaining about feeling old, maybe listen to the words behind the words. Because we are living through some shit.
Also our knees and backs hurt and we don’t have health insurance.
Also there’s a very real prospect that many of us won’t be able to afford to retire. We’re not the only generation facing that, or the only generation that’s ever faced that, but you need to understand that we’re facing that in the context of having been lied to.
and please don’t respond to this with “other people have gone through this too” because
A) I know, I do social-historical academic work
B) Every generation experiences similar trends in different ways and we are experiencing *radical* differences from what our parents did.
I’m not going to go into an even longer Twitter essay about atemporality but please just understand that this is not something about which I am prepared to argue. It’s just true.
and additional caveat: I’m not even beginning to get into race and class here because this is a twitter thread not an academic paper and I don’t feel equipped right now to give that the attention it deserves; just be aware that I know I’m oversimplifying a lot here.
AND quick denouement: just to make things nice and confusing for me personally I’m 34 and this is my hair and no it is not dyed
[mild laughter emoji] [photograph of short, uniformly mid-grey hair].
Shoutout to the people who grew up in a house where being gay or trans was just never talked about.
Shoutout to the people whose parents support lgbt rights but never told their kids until they were in their teens or twenties because they said it was “difficult to explain to children”.
Shoutout to the people whose religious communities came out in support just a little too late.
Shoutout to everyone afraid to come out just because they know they’ll be safe physically but they don’t know how everything will change socially.
Shoutout to everyone whose internalized homophobia that they’re trying to overcome came from subtle cues and not explicit statements.
Shoutout to the in betweeners. The pain you felt is real.
Do fanfic discoursers ever…read anything other than fanfiction? Like, I feel like it’s only possible to be this horrified by problematic fanworks if you’ve never actually read a book.
Then again, if your only engagement with media is Marvel movies, that explains a lot about why you’d be so blindsided by anything that smacks of moral complexity.
Do they know what’s in books? Or do they sincerely think that all media has the emotional and thematic depth of a PG-13 blockbuster franchise, and naughty fandom pervs are introducing previously unprecedented elements to this uniformly tepid world?
“They don’t know what’s in books” is definitely a possibility; after all, most books don’t come with trigger warnings that you can read at a glance to condemn the contents. The major books I see complained about are ones popular enough that “everyone knows” what’s in them even if you haven’t read it (e.g. Lolita, 50 Shades of Grey). “They only watch Marvel movies” is also a possibility; apparently there are people in the MCU fandom complaining about the Spider-Man/Deadpool ship because “Spidey is 17!!!”… in the movies. In the comics, he’s been an adult for a while now, and Deadpool canonically has a crush on him. Like, some of them seem genuinely unaware that the Marvel fandom has existed since long before the movies came out. Anyway…
But I also think a lot of the time it’s less, “They don’t consume other media” and more “They hold fanfic to a different standard.” For some reason, there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real. Hence arguments like “shipping something bad is romanticizing it by definition because ‘shipping’ means you think that’s an ideal relationship” (even though many shippers have said repeatedly that’s not how we use the term) or “those silly women who ship Reylo, don’t they know that a guy like that wouldn’t make a good boyfriend in real life??” Whereas when the same elements appear in a professionally-published work, people seem more willing to believe it’s just part of the story and not necessarily the author’s fantasy of an ideal relationship.
The weird part is that “fanfiction is all shallow wish fulfillment porn” is something I’m used to hearing from normies who have never read a fanfiction and just think of it as some weird hobby. They don’t realize that many fanfic authors put a lot of work into writing and editing their fics, and think of it as basically, “it’s like daydreaming except you write it down.” But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.
Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way. For example, one argument I’ve seen against darkfic is along the lines of, “But the world has so much bad stuff in it already, why would you want to write about bad things happening?” which suggests that wish fulfillment really is the purpose of fanfiction for those people, and they don’t get that that’s not true for all of us. That might also explain complaints about “problematic” fanfics for franchises where the original work is just as bad (or worse); to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to “fix” canon so keeping the “bad” elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.
“‘They hold fanfic to a different standard.’ …there’s this perception that all fanfic is some kind of wish fulfillment porn and anything you put in fanfic is something you want for real.”
“But hearing this from people who are ostensibly in fandom and read fanfic is bizarre.”
“Maybe this is due to fanfic becoming more mainstream, so more new folks are coming in, who have a different approach to fandom and can’t/don’t want to understand that older folks who have been around for a while don’t engage with it the same way.”
“to them, the purpose of fanfiction is to ‘fix’ canon so keeping the ‘bad’ elements of canon must mean the author approves of them.”
^ These are the points that stood out the most for me.
Lets not forget that the authors of fic are public, easy to access, generally women, and basically its socially acceptable to scold or yell at women doing free labor while published authors don’t have to deal with your shit.
I would love to know if these same people go scream at authors on nifty.org for their rapefics? Do you write them essays about how wrong they are? No. You don’t. Because they are men for the most part.
But policing women’s thoughts and virtue and tone is somehow ok?
I find it particularly bizarre when people accuse fanfiction of “normalizing” things. Fanfic itself is not viewed as particularly normal in mainstream culture. Maybe Kinkporn Georg, who lives in a cave and reads 10,000 tentacle daddy kink rape fic a day, has a warped conception of what is sexually ethical in real world relationships, but he is an outlier. Most fanfic readers do not rely entirely upon fanfiction, of all things, to inform their worldview.
konekorambles 