[Drawing of a blue cup of coffee on a black background with a caption that says “Just because you didn’t get the help you needed doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve it. You are, always have been, and always will be worthy of help.”]
never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.
find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.
talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore
picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else
if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.
… 8|
That’s some pretty good advice. I don’t know what’s left of my humor after ‘guess I’ll just die’ jokes but it’s worth a shot.
Personally i went from “guess I’ll die” jokes to “IF I HAVE TO BE HERE FOR 5 MORE MINUTES I PROMISE YOU I WILL BUY JUST, AN ARRAY OF CLOTHES.” and other wild hyperbolic stuff. Just replace the death part with something ridiculous and off topic. Its very entertaining
This also works with calling myself things like stupid, worthless, trash, etc. Even if you do this jokingly to yourself, your brain still believes it, and keeps up the cycle. Seriously, I found that when I stopped saying these things about myself, even jokingly, it made a massive difference.
Here’s a tip I picked up from a friend that’s helped me a lot — replace self deprecating jokes with ironically self aggrandizing jokes
Like every time I trip and fall, instead of saying “l’m just a disaster human” I say “I’m the epitome of grace and beauty”
Or like, when I draw a picture I’m not 100% happy with, instead of saying “my art is trash” I say something like “you know I think it’s time we replaced the Mona Lisa”
When you do that you get to make a joke, but you’re ALSO getting practice building yourself up, y’know?
And eventually it becomes a reflex and you get so used to it that you can say nice stuff about yourself even when you AREN’T joking
I accidentally deleted the ask, but anon basically said “do you have any more florist anecdotes?” And YOU BET I DO!!
–
So one day this girl walks in, wet rag to her face, and rushes over to me, phone in hand. “HAVE YOU HEARD OF THIS….eey-low veer-uh plant??”
I had. As we’re headed to the succulents, the story comes out. She’s heard that aloe vera is good for soothing pain and….she leans close, super embarrassed, and whispers that she just went and got her mustache waxed off, and….she shows me her lip. Huge, swollen, little red bumps. She’s tried to cover it with makeup, and that’s made it worse. She’s getting teary, because she’s scared, but she’s lucky because she’s talking to me!!
We talk about a lot of stuff, skin care, hair removal, I won’t bore y’all since it’s not flowers, but I was able to give her some advice on it, and I’m thinking “okay she might not need a plant, but whatever” but she’s DETERMINED TO COMPLETE HER MISSION.
We get to the succulents, and I give her my whole aloe vera spiel (I love these plants!! My mom has a huge one that’s almost 25 years old!!) and the girl nods very very seriously, and buys one.
Before she leaves, she comes over to me, dead ass serious and informs me that this plant is her “super buddy” now, and she’s named him Ralph.
–
In my previous post I mentioned a nervous husband with his wife on their first Valentine’s Day. Here’s that story:
So the guy, for a mental image: mid-30s black man, very well dressed in a nice work suit, leather laptop bag. Normally I’m MILDLY wary of v well dressed men, because a lot of them are uh…Difficult.
This wasn’t one of them! He was super nervous, looking through all the mason jar arrangements Very Seriously. He looked super focused and was having trouble picking through them, so I went over to help.
This nice man has four ladies to get flowers for. His wife, and their three daughters. He wanted to get mason jars for the girls (all under ten) and he was hoping to find them in their favorite colors.
I realized what he was doing, which was trying to find jars with predominantly pink, red, and purple themes. And since it wasn’t super busy, I just smiled and told him we could rearrange the jars in the color themes.
He was so BLOWN AWAY. I think he wanted to cry when I busted out the ribbons and made big bows for each jar! (Appropriately colored!!) (also while I was scavenging for flowers, he whipped out his phone and showed me some of their pictures. They’re so cute!! These girls are his princesses, for sure.)
So now His Wife. We were already on a roll, so once his jars were ready we started patrolling for The Perfect Bouquet. And as it happens once you start talking about personal stuff, his story came out!
So the girls are from Wife’s previous marriage. He married her last year, and he really wants to show them that he Really Loves Them. Like, these girls are His GIRLS. His phone still has their entire wedding album!! He shows me her bouquet, and he wants to get flowers that are like the bouquet, but MORE.
So we have the choices down to three big bouquets. He legit stands there for a solid FORTY FIVE MINUTES, just comparing and thinking about it. (I left him to it, obv.)
He then comes up, very serious, and asks what it would cost to combine the two bouquets he’s picked. He’s also picked out a vase and a card, and some chocolate.
I quoted the price (Not Cheap) and he just nods, dead serious, and walks away and pays for it. Like up front. And I’m like, well shit, this needs to be the most amazing thing I’ve done. So I clear the counter, because this is a man on a mission, and we put those flowers together into a MASTERPIECE.
It’s hard to explain size, but these flowers were big enough to hide behind!! I got him a nice box and we carefully packaged this sucker for safe transport in his tiny sports car (the jars for his girls all fit in the drink holders, which was hilarious for reasons I can’t explain. Also hilarious is that he had to manually take the top off of the convertible to fit the flowers and was totally willing to drive home IN THE COLD with it down if he had to, luckily he didn’t)
I sent him on His Odyssey. He was SO HAPPY, and I was so happy because I love good experiences that have triple digit sales, and he was so patient and nice!! Love is real.
(He came back with his friends about three hours later, and they got nice flowers as well! They were all calling me Miss Hexalene by the end, and their good moods infected every other customer in the store, which is the best infection we get in flu season)
–
One of my favorite customers is this nice old lesbian who comes in and has one of our potted orchids in hand, big smirk on her face.
“My wife hates roses, so I’m getting her thi—“ she breaks off and her eyes go HUGE.
So she’s carrying this normal orchid, about a foot and a half tall, purple, v cute. She has just spotted our cymbidium orchids behind me, which GOOGLE THESE PUPPIES!! Ours came in, they’re THREE FEET TALL without the pot. Half of the plant is bloomed into these big beautiful brown/orange flowers, and the other half is still growing. They’re massive and I love them.
So this old lesbian (she’s about 60, cute boycut with all white hair, nice mom jeans and one of those balloony pico shirts) very deliberately sets her Lesser Orchid down, and points to the cymbidium orchids. “THAT. I need that.”
She’s got the absolute best shit-eating grin on her face, btw. She can’t stop laughing. She’s even crying with laughter a bit and while we’re strapping These Beasts (SHE BOUGHT FOUR OF THEM??) into her truck, she tells me about how her wife hates roses because she got a thorn tip stuck in her hand permanently as a kid. So every Valentine’s Day she goes on a hunt for the weirdest flower/most out of season flower she can find. These orchids are the best find she’s had since the 80s, when she brought home a massive Silver Vase Plant that’s still alive 30 years later.
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So I’m gonna stop with these three before I obliterate everyone’s dashes!! 8) thank you for the ask!!
A tiny journal-ish gif-comic from a few tweets I made last night! I believed this kind of stuff until I was 14 or so, which is pretty old in retrospect…
There used to be more but I accidentally saved over it
I did manage to recover one other page, though!
(the end!)
this is my favorite thing that I have ever seen in my entire life
Anhedonia – not finding pleasure in things you normally take pleasure in – is a symptom of depression.
When depressed, you will also be reluctant to start things, and won’t find things appealing.
This sets up a nasty vicious cycle where ‘life feels bleak’ -> ‘nothing sounds fun’ -> do nothing -> don’t have fun -> ‘Hey I’m not having fun, life really is pretty bleak right now’ -> More depressed.
The way to break that cycle is to do things that you enjoy. Doing things solely for the sake of having fun is an important part of handling depression. Not only does it keep you from getting more depressed, but it can make you go ‘Hey I’m having a really nice day’ and give you bouncy energy to do productive things with.
I get so focused on all the things that need doing that I forget that when depressed, doing things solely because they’re fun is the practical thing to do if I want to get thing done.
There is a difference between procrastination and having trouble activating. If there’s a thing you need to do and you know you aren’t going to be able to do it now, do something fun, and afterwards you will have better odds of actually doing the thing.
If you find yourself in the situation in the picture, pick something that you are intellectually aware you would find fun if you were feeling better and start doing it.’ This means that you are focusing on something other than *sigh* and playing a game can make you feel productive, put ‘life is good!’ and ‘I can succeed at things!’ chemicals into a brain that is sorely in need of them.
A couple weeks ago when I couldn’t even find any interest in reading fanfic, I eventually managed to start playing a random RPG and felt much better a few hours later.
i certainly wasn’t expecting anything close to actual, halfway decent advice that might help some folks out when i threw this little Funne Picture out into the wild, but that’s nice. thank you. i’m not sure if i’ll ever break this little cycle for more than a few hours, but .. yeah man. it’s just a little nice to see folks trying to help other folks out on posts of mine instead of the usual terrible nonsense
Exactly what I needed right now.
Easy to parse version:
Anhedonia is a symptom of depression, it’s not finding enjoyment in things that once made you happy.
If you find yourself in this situation, pick something that you KNOW you would find fun or enjoyable.
When you’re depressed, the best thing to do is do things BECAUSE they’re fun, it’ll help motivate you more.
whether the answer is yes or no, or a mix of the both, i wanted to remind you that you’re great. here is some stuff that i thought might be helpful if you ever feel down or bored or just wanna try something new!!
I want to tell y’all a story about supporting and loving your partner, starring my amazing wife.
I’ve mentioned before that I had an eating disorder for many years, and though I consider myself “recovered” there are aspects of my disorder that I still struggle with today — being quite a bit heavier than my wife is one of them.
When my wife and I moved in together back when we were still girlfriends, I was at my skinniest. She used to pick me up all the time and lift me off the ground, and I’d laugh and kick out my legs ‘cause I was just delighted to have her holding me.
But I started gaining weight as I went through recovery, and where once we were pretty close in size, I began to get bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And she remained her naturally petite self. I began to almost dread when she’d try to pick me up, sure that this time she wouldn’t be able to get me off the ground.
But every time, even if I protested, she’d lift me up and say something like: “See, you’re not so big that I can’t lift you!”
And one time I just blurted out: “But someday I’m going to be so fat you won’t be able to.”
She looked me dead in the eye and said: “No you won’t. Because if that ever happens, I’ll start working out.”
It was the best possible thing she could have said to me, because she wasn’t saying I wasn’t going to get fat
—
neither of us knew that for sure. She was just saying that I was never going to be “too fat” for her.
And every time I worry about getting bigger, I remember that I’ll never be so big that she can’t lift me, because baby knows how much I love being held, and she’ll change her own habits to ensure that I never feel “too big” or “too heavy” because in her eyes I’ll never be “too” anything.
Anyway, there’s a moral to this story: Find yourself a partner who will never consider you an excess. You should never be “too much” to someone who loves you — too big, too loud, too passionate, too awkward, whatever your “too” happens to be. And even as you change and grow (in my case, literally), the right person will be there through the changes, to tell you that you’re always just right for them.
My strongwoman, the wind beneath my wings, the arms under my ass. 😍😍 😍
Question of Smoke 