A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.
This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.
You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.
People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.
In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.
Therefore, I present to you:
THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS
–Go on a walk
–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.
–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching
–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind
–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift
–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:
–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.
–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.
–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.
–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)
–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.
–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.
–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.
THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:
–List the capitals of all the U.S. states
–List the capitals of all the European countries
–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.
–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.
–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.
Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.
(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)
This would’ve been great an hour ago
This is good advice for anxious peeps and peeps with anxious friends. Seems obvious now but I hadn’t thought about it this way before.
Okay, seeing as I couldn’t find a list I liked, I’m making my own, with a mix of dialogue and conceptual prompts because why not.
Feel free to prompt for any ship I’ve written, regardless of whether or not I’ve been writing them recently. Also, feel free to adapt the prompts to fit the universe better (like for SWTOR or DA or something).
“What do you mean we’re out of hot chocolate?”
cuddling by the fireplace
“You. Me. Snowman. Now.”
winter sport of your choice
“What’s that smell… are you making cookies?”
“Hey, no peeking!”
“You invited over HOW many people to the holiday party?!”
Christmas shopping
“Wait, did you spike the eggnog?”
“Where did all of this mistletoe come from?”
“I’m a grown adult. I don’t want to take a picture with Santa Claus.”
trimming the tree
“Your hands are freezing!”
“Aren’t you cold like that?”
“Seriously, I told you that you would get sick going out like that.”
“What do you mean you don’t want to go sledding?”
watching movies under a pile of blankets
snowball fight
“I swear to god, if you sing another goddamn Christmas carol…”
“Where on EARTH did you get that sweater?”
“How did you manage to get tangled up in tinsel?”
kissing in the snow
“Let’s go for a walk! No, we won’t freeze.”
“Here, let me help you with the scarf.”
spending time with family
“We’ve got a white Christmas!”
“Did you eat all of my holiday chocolate?”
“Where’s all of your holiday spirit, you Scrooge?”
opening presents
“You know, when you said ‘Christmas party,’ this isn’t what I was expecting.”
“Come on, just wear the Santa hat for a little bit?”
“There’s no way I’m letting you spend Christmas alone.”
“Hey, cut it out. It’s the holidays.”
“Nope. This is not happening. It’s CHRISTMAS.”
“Wait, you’re not going home for Christmas?”
“Oh come on, it’s just a tradition.”
stuck in a snowstorm
“You’re under the mistletoe so stop stalling and just kiss.”
“Just open the damn present.”
“Hey, stop laughing and put the damn topper on the tree already.”
“If you don’t go to sleep right now, Santa’s not coming.”
“I mean, I knew you had Christmas spirit but this is ridiculous.”
“What do you mean, Santa’s not real?!”
running into each other at the airport
“No, you’ll burn the house down.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
“This is not for holiday cheer. This is blackmail.”
“Did you seriously get me a pony for Christmas?”
“No more holiday movies. Please.”
“Those cookies were for Santa!”
“Look out! It’s icy!”
“I’d like the snow a lot more if I didn’t have to drive in it.”
“Why is it so cold?”
winter power outage
“You want to go to the mall now? ARE YOU CRAZY?”
“Shhhhh, don’t tell [pronoun of choice]!”
“Secret Santa? Really?”
“Ummm… Thank you very much for the fruitcake. I’m sure it’ll be, uh, delicious.”
“Wait, you mean this whole time, you hated peppermint?”
“I feel like there’s more frosting on you than on the gingerbread.”
“What are you doing with that mistletoe– oh.”
unexpectedly spending the holidays together
“But that carol doesn’t even make any SENSE!”
“I guess… this is when we kiss?”
“No, we’re not getting a puppy for Christmas. Stop. Asking.”
“You don’t put marshmallows in your hot chocolate? YOU HEATHEN.”
“You’re going to New York for New Year’s? Are you nuts?”
winter proposal
“So… what are your plans for New Year’s?”
“You’re perfectly welcome to kiss whomever you wa–”
“Do NOT throw that snowball or else!”
“Did everyone else come with a date?”
“Hey, want to help me get my parents off my ass about not having a date?”
“Don’t you have anything else spirited that isn’t as much of an eyesore?”
“Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, love.”
Alright guys. Send me some prompts from this for AgentReign or AgentCorp!
I am not taking prompts right now but wanna save this!
so we have a conversational safeword in my group of friends and it’s great, idk why more people don’t do this. whenever someone wants a subject to be dropped immediately no questions asked we just say “spleen” and we stop immediately and it’s a really good way to avoid crossing the line between teasing friends and genuinely upsetting them by accident, or stopping debates from turning into actual arguments
Wait but no this is actually a brilliant idea.
When I was a little baby high school student, I used to do the Living Chessboard at our local Renaissance Faire. We always used “forsooth” to indicate if someone was actually injured and needed to quickly end a choreographed fight. It was also very useful when doing little street improvisations because if someone tried to stop you, you could say “forsooth good sir, I must leave.” and they knew you couldn’t do a scene right then. We all used it in real life too, to say “no really” and it was amazing because there was a word used in a casual setting that meant “I’m not playing, I need you do listen to me.” So if someone tried to pick me up or tickle me, I could say “forsooth stop.” And I was instantly obeyed. I had “forsooth” long before I learned what a safeword was, and having a non-sexual safeword for everyday use amongst a circle of friends was the best thing ever. It made me feel very safe and listened to, even as a tiny 14 year old. Because let’s be honest, 14 year old me was teeny tiny and adorable and it’s easy to coo at kids when they say “no don’t pick me up!” but to have a word that every single person respected to mean “whatever I say after this MUST be listened to” was amazing. It gave me a definitive voice when it would have been easy to dismiss me.
So basically having platonic safewords is awesome and I’m all for it.
The Femslash Kinkmeme just wrapped up the prompting period for this years kinkmeme. The Kara/Alex pairing (and Arrowverse in general) has been pretty well-represented for the past couple of years. If there’s anyone out there who’s hit a dry spell and wants a challenge, there’s a huge variety of prompts (for a lot of different pairings, too, if you’re interested).
It’s a pretty manual process to get all of these prompts into one place, and with the way the event is structured–prompts and fills are both attached to the meme’s Dreamwidth page–people don’t necessarily know they’re even there.
SO, I got real bored and put together a linked page of all the Kara/Alex prompts (to the best of my ability) covering all prompts for this pairing from years
2015-2018.
INCIDENTALLY, you can ALSO continue to fill prompts from past years. There’s no expiration date. So, if you don’t like what’s in this year’s meme, hit the tag for the year prior to that, or the one before that. All of the prompts should be linked to the prompt-comment on the kinkmeme’s Dreamwidth, so if you write something and decide to post it, you should be able to click on the prompt text and go right to the prompt. (If any don’t work, just let me know.)
(WARNING: The Femslash Kinkmeme is, very definitely, a kinkmeme, and prompts can and do include things like incest, and non-con, and just about any other squick or trigger you might think of, between all the different fandoms represented. Pairings are smooshed together in the prompt lists. You may see NOTPs. Unfortunately, that’s just one of the limitations of the format and the level of manual work involved. Prompts are compiled by volunteers, linked with URLs, and put all in the same place for convenient access by fans and fic writers. They do an incredible job with the tools they have, but you will need to be aware of what you might see, and able to curate your experience accordingly.)
(And, yes, the other tags in the sidebar do mean that I at least intend to add in prompts from other memes and not just kinkmemes or smut. I know not everyone is into the smut, or the kink, but the timing for the event was, well, what it was.)
Hey all, big happy news! I’m going to be part of the writing team for season two of Jessica Best (@idiopathicsmile)’s The Strange Case of Starship Iris!
For those of you who are like ‘um okay what’s a starship iris,’ Starship Iris is a sci-fi podcast full of scrappy found families out to Fight the System, jokes about the gender binary, and saving the day with applied linguistics.
Doesn’t that sound awesome? Spoilers: it is awesome.
Eight of the first season’s ten episodes are up on Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, however you like to listen to things. It’s part of the Procyon Podcast Network (procyonpodcasts.com, @procyon-podcast-network), which is making diverse, eclectic audio drama content for fans, by fans.
If that’s got you excited (I’M EXCITED) and you want to see more Starship Iris content like fan art, behind-the-scenes details, or vignettes about the crew and world, check out @iriscasefiles, the official Starship Iris tumblr, or @thevoicefromthestars, which is run by the fantastic Ishani Kanetkar, who voices the sarcastic and pathos-tastic Arkady Patel.
Jess Best and Starship Iris also have a Patreon (patreon.com/starshipiris), which gives you access to episode scripts annotated by the cast and crew, additional vignettes, and behind-the-scenes podcast episodes. I’ve been a Patreon backer of the show for awhile now, and it’s totally worth it.
Also if they reach (if we reach??) the next stretch goal for Patreon funding, then they (we???) will create three “mini-episodes” in between seasons one and two. I am particularly excited about this possibility because I may have written one of those mini-episodes as part of the application process. I’d love to see it made.
But go listen to the show, folks. It’s free. It’s beautiful. It warms my heart and I bet it’ll warm yours.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belonging to a man – a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus – they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chastity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. —Monica Sjoo
If Cthulhu can be summoned by humans who are so far beneath it, why can’t humans be summoned by ants? The answer is they should be.
Well if a bunch of ants formed a circle in my house I’d certainly notice, try to figure out where they’d all come from, and possibly wreak destruction there.
That’s why knowing and correctly pronouncing the true name is so important to the ritual. Imagine how impossible it would be to not go take a look if the circle of ants started chanting your name.
And they’re like, you can’t leave because we drew a line made of tiny crystals – now you have to do us a favor.
And you’re like, let’s just see where this goes “yup, you got me… what’s the favor?”
and usually the favor is like, “kill this one ant for us” or “give me a pile of sugar” and you’re like… okay? and you do, because why not, it isn’t hard for you and boy is this going to be a fucking story to tell, these fucking ants chanting your name and wanting a spoonful of sugar or whatever.
And SOMEtimes you get asked for things you can’t really do, one of them, she’s like, “I love this ant but she won’t pay any attention to me, make me important to her” and you’re like… um? how? So you just kill every ant in the colony except the two of them, ta-da! problem solved! and the first ant is like *horrified whisper* “what have I done”
This is the best explanation for higher powers I’ve ever really heard.
Question of Smoke 