yours and mine.

why does this make me want to cry

There is supposed to be a place where no one can reach you. Traditionally, the home, but now we settle for the ocean, the airplane, the summit of a mountain, the middle of a lake, the shower, the womb, the grave

Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free

I really wish more ADHD mental health care told you WHY things like this matter to our quality of life.

The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it's about having a "hyperactive central nervous system" because it's a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.

But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.

So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told "hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking" rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn't safe.

Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic "busy" feeling isn't a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.

Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.

So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.

When you no longer feel like the world is actively killing you, it's a lot easier to navigate it.

S++ tier addition to the post, thank you tumblr user butts bouncing on the beltway

happy new year the grief is never-ending but the good news is so is the love (x)

Oh, and fun man ‘o war fact:

You know how they’re colonial organisms? My whole life I thought that meant “they’re made out of thousands of almost microscopic little guys”. You know, like every other colonial organism.

Turns out that’s not true.

They’re made of four guys.

One guy’s the tentacles, one guy’s the stomach, one guy’s the gonads, and one guy’s the funny balloon sail.

here are their weird babies:

you can really see the multiple polyps/medusae

imagine being the gonads

imagine NOT being the gonads

To be fair it's not four guys period but four types of guy; EVERY tentacle is a guy! A guy who's just one tentacle!!

To answer the common question of "what does that even mean?" and "how?", all the members of the colony grow from the same embryo as clones. So imagine if you were born as just a head, but with a twin sibling who was just a torso, and another sibling who was an arm, and another who was the heart, and so forth, all stuck together to function as a person. You might be saying "that just sounds like a regular person, how is a Man O' War different then, where do we draw the line between a body organ and a member of a colony???" I'm gonna let the Octopus Lady answer those questions, even though attempting to answer them apparently drove her insane, and in fact she does not reach an answer that even she finds fully satisfying as a professional biologist, but you'll still learn lots and lots of neat facts!

i'm envisioning something like this:

You wanna get really fucky?

The mitochondria used to be a separate organism from your cells entirely. It’s actually a type of bacteria, and it has its own DNA.

Every single one of your cells is a weird bacteria/eukaryote symbiote.

And forget being in the same phylum. They aren’t even in the same kingdom. They aren’t even in the same domain

The real problem with the Hasbro monolith re-defining "indie RPG" to mean "literally any tabletop RPG that isn't Dungeons & Dragons" is that now when you ask somebody what their favourite obscure indie RPG is, that twelve page zine game about robot catgirls having sex with each other is competing for oxygen with, like, Vampire: The Masquerade, and that's just not good for the ecosystem.

Somebody over on my Bluesky jokingly referred to the hypothetical game described in the preceding post as "Sapphörk Borg", and I can't get the image out of my head. Like... what would building a lightweight zine game about lesbian robot catgirls making out using fucking Mörk Borg as its foundation look like in practice?

I looked up the Mörk Borg and saw the character sheet

And now I want to learn the system so that I can make this game myself

"friends don't look at each other like that" well okay you coward you do whatever you want however i WILL look at my friends like they're the most important thing in the world. i love them with my whole heart and i will hold their hand and stare at the stars not because i wanna fuck them but because they mean the world to me and i care about them. fuck you

hell yeah brother

[id: a digital drawing. red suspenders jesse shows off alex and steve, saying "lukas, these are my parents!" lukas, offscreen, exclaims "steve and alex from minecraft???" in all caps. lukas's shocked face is attached to his speech bubble. end id]

DOMINANCE DISPLAY

Yukio Mishima as saint Sebastian