do u ever feel like you’ve accidentally tricked certain people into thinking you are smarter and have more potential than you actually do and do you ever think about how disappointed they’ll be when you inevitably crash and burn
Fun fact: Impostor Syndrome is ridiculously common among high-achievers, particularly women. If you identify with this post, odds are pretty good that you’re exactly as smart as people think you are, and the failure you’re afraid of isn’t inevitable at all.
and don’t forget this is one of the psychological barriers placed in by thousands years of patriarchy and male supremacy.
My computer science professor actually talked about this on the first day, it was really cool.
Fun brutal fact: in addition to the existence of imposter syndrome, being “twice exceptional” (also known as 2e) is also a thing. That means being intellectually gifted AND ALSO having a disability that affects your ability to succeed at study or work. Such as ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc etc etc. A lot of people believe that it’s not possible to be both, but it very much is.
Society tends to have very high expectations for how well gifted people will perform. Society tends to have low expectations for how well disabled people will perform. Society tends to attribute invisible disabilities, including mental illness, to a failure of willpower or effort or a bad attitude.
So if you read this post and went “no, but seriously, this is not just low self esteem on my part, people keep thinking I’m smart and then I keep crashing and burning and disappointing them and they can’t understand why I didn’t live up to their expectations, it happens again and again and when I tell someone how I feel and ask for help, they just tell me to stop being so hard on myself and that I’ll succeed if I have more self-confidence,” it is not just you.
(Also, one of the previous posts in this thread buried the lede a little. Imposter syndrome is ridiculously common in people from underrepresented groups in academia and other high pressure/high status fields, particularly women and people of colour. Maya Angelou did not only feel out of place because she was a woman.)
This essay also totally changed my view on the intersection of impostor syndrome and mental illness.
that all people who experience a traumatic event do not end up receiving a diagnosis of ptsd does not demonstrate or prove in any way that people who are traumatized have some “innate” biological/hereditary “weakness” and that trauma merely brought this pre-existing “weakness” to the forefront
people respond to trauma in different ways. ptsd is a specific diagnosis that grew out a specific psychiatric and cultural context that referred to specific behaviours of specific people with specific traumas who responded to them in a specific way
ptsd does not equal “truama” or “traumatized”, it is one way of classifying one type of response to trauma
not everyone who experiences even the same type of trauma exhibits the same response. not everyone who is sexually assaulted has nightmares and flashbacks to the assault
say person A has flashbacks and nightmares and a startle response when touched, and remembers the assault and names it as such and connects the experiences to the assault. person A would likely receive a diagnosis of ptsd
say person B experienced a similar assault, but they have trouble naming what happened to them as assault and in fact don’t like to talk about it all, and they don’t have nightmares and their flashbacks are experienced more as a disembodied voice telling them things the person who assaulted them said. person B becomes frightened and unsure about the source of the voice and develops a number of theories others find implausible. instead of having a startle response when touched, they fear all people generally and worry that someone else will assault them. Person B is likely to be diagnosed with some type of psychosis, and not have their trauma acknowledged at all
say person C experienced an also similar assault, and they cope by self harming through sex, drinking, cutting, and dangerous impulsivity. they have trouble trusting people and having healthy relationships because of their trauma. person C would likely be diagnosed with bpd, or something similar, and if their trauma is acknowledged, they would be told the origin of their bpd is that they had an innately sensitive temperament which reacted with an invalidating environment to create their bpd, which is a different thing than being told “this is how you responded to trauma”
now person D, they experienced a similar assault like all the previous examples. but the way they cope is just trying not to think about it. they remember it, but they do not name it as an assault. they have none of the experiences listed above, instead coping through perfectionism, repressing their feelings and overworking themselves. because their desire to succeed at their job is a socially acceptable way of coping and they have no desire to label their experiences as an assault or find different ways of coping, and because, even though they are self harming through overwork and perfectionism, this is seen as admirable behaviour and not Crazy behaviour or dangerous behaviour, they have no contact with psychiatry and receive no diagnosis. they are considered to not be traumatized even though the trauma has affected them
in conclusion,1) ptsd is a label that gets applied to some traumatized people, not all, 2) it is not a defintive marker of who is actually traumatized, 3) trauma is an environmental problem, not an individual problem. it is caused by the trauma happening to someone. how someone responds to trauma and whether or not they respond in a way that is labelled a disorder is determined by individual factors, as well as environmental factors, but 4) this does not mean that “only people develop ptsd/are traumatized” or whatever other hyper-intellectualized versions of that idea are being churned out by asshole doctors
When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:
“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”
Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either.
God apparently a group of anti trans activists are leading london pride because of a hijack and the people shouting at them and telling them to fuck off are the ones almost being arrested and told to move on by the police. Fuck cops. They don’t belong at pride and they don’t make the people who do feel safe.
Since I haven’t seen any posts about this apart from a handful of British people I follow on Twitter, a group of TERFs were allowed to lead London pride today. Here is a link to the PinkNews article detailing the events. They somehow managed to get to the front of the parade, ahead of the London mayor Sadiq Khan and lead for around 5 to 10 minutes, before stopping and lying down in the road refusing to move and disrupting the parade as the directors tried to negotiate again. They were then allowed to lead the parade without security or the parade directors stopping them. When trans people in the crowd protested their presence they were approached by the police marching with the group and told to stop or they would be asked to leave.
This is not pride, this is not a place where people can feel safe and this is not a place cops should be allowed to threaten trans people to defend transphobia.
OH LOOK- police presence at pride proves itself a 100% bad thing, and TERFs continue to be fucking attention-seeking, hateful children without the good grace to mind their own fucking business. The city should be ashamed.
This is their new thing. $5,000 says that they’re also circulating lies about being attacked by trans people there or something, because that’s the shit they pulled at SF Dyke March last month.
There, about 12 of them, with signs, were aggressively yelling things like “trans go home” at the marchers.
Some of the marchers evidently tried to rip the signs out of their hands, chanting “hey hey, ho ho, transphobia’s got to go.” The TERFs responded by shoving them away.
One of the TERFs (Vanessa) tripped and fell. Another (Mitzi) then claimed that Vanessa had been pushed over, and that she herself had been knocked to the ground three times, and that they had video of all that.
Her footage has never surfaced or been corroborated by bystanders, but there IS footage of her trying to beat people with her friend’s cane. And of the March organizers trying to stop her from beating people with the cane.
Evidently, she then hit and choked a trans women from the march. The police arrived, and even though Dyke March staff had told the TERFs to leave, and bystanders tried to show the police footage of the TERFs attacking people, the police basically gave the TERFs an escort for the rest of the march.
They, of course, have now been very vocal about claiming to have been violently attacked, and having done nothing. They’re even claiming to have been doxxed, when what actually happened was that one of the TERFs “doxxed” them all by posting publicly about it, on Facebook, and tagging the rest of them. 🙄
(In the same public Facebook post, she apologizes to another TERF, Max, for “initially swinging at you when you came to my defense,” which doesn’t do much for her attempts to claim that they were the ones being attacked.)
This mirrors a TERF attack from last year, where one physically attacked a trans woman in a bar, and then made a huge public stink claiming that the trans woman had attacked HER – despite video evidence to the contrary.
This is their new big thing: constantly trying to convince people that calling them TERFs, or opposing them in general, “promotes violence against women.” By repeatedly attacking trans women, rallying people against anti-TERF displays, and trying to take over community events, et cetera.
watching old lesbians learn new slang vid on FB and they float ‘pillow princess’ and the middle butch goes “ohhhhhhhh, i know what a pillow princess is :>>>>>” i love her
@wizphobe get ready to fall in love at least three times
‘We used to call it radar… Sometimes you’re wrong and they’re really farmers.’
‘we used to call it
radar… sometimes you’re wrong and
they’re really farmers
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
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you all need to think very fucking carefully about repeating this “queer is a slur” horseshit, because it serves a very particular purpose that is definitely not in the interest of the vast majority of the queer (gasp!) community.
“Hey, remember a year ago, when folx decided out of nowhere ‘queer’ was a slur again, despite its ubiquitous decades long use in academia and advocacy groups, and thens creamed at trans ppl who told them this was TERF rhetoric they were repeating?”
Beneath is picture of an outdoor protest with partial text that reads: “So they’re allowing a group of TERFS to star…”“I’m referring to the “lesbian, not queer” sign there)
“This rhetoric was used against a local queer and trans center in the US that I am close to; it’s pretty blatant and common! It’s so upsetting to see grooming from hate groups work because people want to yell at girls so much.“
"They spread this because they think ‘queer’ is too nonspecific and thus, of course, much more inclusive of people they don’t think belong, like trans folx, especially trans women. Trying to rebrand it as a slur is to make it feel toxic to too without questioning why.”]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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