you dust the lid of a box and open it for the first time in years. when you gaze upon the objects inside, a soft golden glow reflects upon your face.
Everything in the box is absolutely vital to your existence. You do not know how you went on without them nor how you could part with them now. You smile gently, your eyes smoldering. No; you could not throw away a single thing in this box. You close the box again with a sense of satisfaction and return it to its place. The smolder in your eyes dies away.
according to your mobile phone, 3 days have passed.you have no idea what is in the box you just put back.
there is a book on every hard surface in your home. Each book is different. Each book has a bookmark at page 271. when you look directly at the book on your coffee table, it disappears.
you start to organize your desk. you start to organize your nightstand. you start to organize your dresser. you start to organize your kitchen cabinets. you start to organize your bathroom sink. you start to organize.
you are playing a cell phone game on your couch. nothing is organized.
your room is finally clean – all surfaces are dusted, all clutter is gone, all clothes out of sight, all books off the tables. Everything is gone. (You think you can hear the faint sound of chewing from the dresser drawers.)
you have 27 socks spread out on your clean floor. none of them match.
Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid.
And for people suffering, it’s okay to acknowledge your illness is a direct result of being in a terrible situation. It neither invalidates your illness or people who have that illness genetically.
Same goes for more personal-level harmful life situations. If you’re stuck in a destabilizing environment, medications may or may not even help while you’re still living under bad conditions.
None of that is your fault. No matter how invested some people may be in blaming things on you, to avoid looking at/addressing bigger problems in the situation.
And none of this is zero-sum. That type of thinking only harms people more.
I feel like getting people to recognize this as a default would make a huge difference in how bad it is too. Like it is another whole level of miserable frustration that you can be endlessly asking for help while simultaiously being shamed for NOT GETTING HELP or that help not working, because you are for all intensive purposes just stopping the bleeding on a wound that involves broken bones.
Sometimes just hearing yes, this is bullshit you did nothing to deserve is way more helpful then encoragement. Especially since there is a minimum amount of outrage needed for things to change and the fact there isn’t that much over the fact the majority of the population are mathamatically fucked as far as their odds for making it through things.
A caterpillar’s body is a squishy sausage of flesh and fluid encased
in a tough outer skin. As it grows it eventually gets too big for its
own skin, at which point it molts: the caterpillar cracks the old skin,
crawls out, and grows a new larger skin.
Each gum leaf
skeletoniser molts up to thirteen times before spinning a cocoon and
transforming into an adult moth. Starting from the fourth molt, the gum
leaf skeletoniser keeps the head shells from its old skins and stacks
them on its head.
Low placed two caterpillars in a petri dish, one with a head shell stack and one without, then introduced a predatory stinkbug into the arena and watched what happened.
The
stinkbug probed the caterpillar with its rostrum, a needle-like mouth
that injects toxins and sucks prey dry. In response the caterpillar
thrashed about, swung its head, regurgitated food and retreated.
The caterpillars without head shells succumbed within 14 seconds, but
the caterpillars with head shells thwarted the predator for at least
120 seconds – although they also succumbed in the end.
Often, the
bug stabbed the head shells instead of the caterpillar, suggesting that
the horn confuses predators. Also, when the bug stabbed the soft flesh
behind the armoured head, the caterpillar swung its horn to deflect the
bug’s needle.
It was a small study, so the results are inconclusive. But Low feels
“very confident that the head shell stack played a part in prolonging
the attack.”
First of all, it’s not nice to take pictures without sourcing them to the photographer. Which is doubly important because if you had you would have found the rest of Paul Wiggin’s photos of this sumatran tiger cub from the Chester Zoo and and used this one instead, which is objectively 10x better in every way
Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid.
And for people suffering, it’s okay to acknowledge your illness is a direct result of being in a terrible situation. It neither invalidates your illness or people who have that illness genetically.
Same goes for more personal-level harmful life situations. If you’re stuck in a destabilizing environment, medications may or may not even help while you’re still living under bad conditions.
None of that is your fault. No matter how invested some people may be in blaming things on you, to avoid looking at/addressing bigger problems in the situation.
And none of this is zero-sum. That type of thinking only harms people more.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.