as small as a world and as large as alone, Could you describe the thing you've seen where...

5:27pm February 28, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton asked: Could you describe the thing you've seen where people encourage inertia in people with mental illnesses? I typically get really bothered by posts that say 'Tumblr is encouraging sick people to stay sick,' but it's likely there are things I'm not seeing, since I only follow a few blogs.

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

fierceawakening:

A few things:
One, I think there are a lot of posts about self-care that encourage people to take time-outs, that remind people that they don’t become worthless just because they don’t or can’t do things right now. Taken in isolation, each of these is a good thing. Taken together, when there’s not as much that encourages people to become ready to handle the things they were taking a break from, and not many tools for easing themselves back into the things they need or want to get back to doing, I think that they can work to sap motivation. I’ve found they’ve done that with me, sometimes, and I have to not look at certain things.
Two, like I said — there’s not as much about how to — mm. I don’t like the phrase “push yourself” because it sounds like some godawful bad version of “inspiration” that basically makes you push yourself too hard or feel worthless for not trying. But there’s something else that’s not that but kind of like it, about taking carefully chosen, healthy, small risks to help yourself grow. And that’s not really something that’s talked about.
More than that, I feel like the very idea of that is treated as evil or wrong or bad, and I think it’s that aura of wrongness that makes me worried and uncomfortable more than anything else. I think there’s an awful lot of, like, “hey, I don’t have to love myself to love others, fuuuuuuck yooooou” rather than “Hey, whoa, I think I’d be much happier if I loved myself! But from where I am right now that’s a huge goal and it looks terrifying! How do I know if I’m ready? What does it mean to get started? What might it give me to try, and how do you recommend I begin, and how should I take care of myself if I find I’m not ready, so I don’t feel worse and like I failed?” and “Hey fellow people with whatever challenge! Here’s how I picked this goal, how I began, and what I did. I’m not saying it’s not scary and I’m not promising success, but here’s some things to try! Let me know what’s worked for you! Let’s help each other!”
That I think is my big thing. Like, I recently learned about Wellness Recovery Action Plans or WRAPs, and it’s brand new to me so I don’t know how successful they are for everyone, or whether they’re a tool that only work for a few people, or what the shortcomings are. I’m not trying to say, like, “everyone go make a WRAP and you’ll be magically better!” or any such crock of nonsense. I’m not even sure what I think of it!
But I love the idea of people focusing on understanding what wellness is for them, and committing to work on it, for themselves and for their own reasons. I love the idea of encouraging — not forcing or manipulating or pushing, but encouraging — people to try on those kinds of ways of thinking.
I know for myself, there was a point where I just found that I… decided I was sick in a way I didn’t want to be any more. And that didn’t fix me — it took a lot of work and time and help to see improvements in myself. But that commitment to “This isn’t where I want to be, this isn’t what I want my life to look like, I have PTSD but it shouldn’t have me” is what began my journey to becoming much happier and loving myself in ways that other people soon reflected in how they looked at me.
It just seems to me like… all that, whatever tools it involves, however personal or communal or medicalized or not it might be, is a very different outlook or approach to the Tumblr approach, which focuses on “you’re worthy even if you are sick,” but weirdly just kind of… stops abruptly there. And even gets mad or hurt or frustrated (or cries ableism!) if you so much as ask why it’s stopping there, or whether stopping there is the best approach for the most people, or… anything like that.
(This is also how I feel about the Internet’s reaction to triggers, by the way. I think trigger warnings are good things, and learning to include them as matters of courtesy is great. But I worry that again, we stop at “we have to take care of people with triggers,” rather than having conversations among ourselves about managing triggers, about whether there are times we actually might not want to ask for tags, about whether exposing ourselves to triggers is ever needed for our growth, etc. It’s 99% about protecting us, rather than about us as people.)
Hm… I have really bad inertia, or avolition, or executive functioning issues, however you want to call it, to the point where I can’t really do anything except read things or watch videos, and even then my brain is really selective about how long it can tolerate any of those things. I have days where my brain is so burned out all I can do is lie in bed and try not to fall asleep. I’ve also had people pushing me and using all manner of abusive and coercive tactics to make me not be like this my whole life. I don’t think I’m even on the same level as other mentally ill people who can do the daily living stuff, it’s just extremely hard and exhausting for them. I can maybe do 1-2 things a day.
For me that ‘it’s okay if you can’t do things’ reassurance was pretty important because I was still dealing with… like… internalized versions of abusive people’s attempts to ‘motivate’ me, and I had no idea how to sort out my attempts to ‘get better’ from that, and I didn’t even know where to start because I didn’t understand my own ability levels. And the anxiety that caused made it even harder.
But not stopping at ‘it’s okay’ helped, too. But I couldn’t start working on things until I was able to shake off the stuff my abusers put in my head. Like… just trying to do things or work harder or get better was inherently triggering for me, and it took a long time to get to a point where I felt like I was doing things for myself. And that came from watching other disabled people who have the same issues I do, or worse, working on things, and knowing that they were doing it for themselves, and with an understanding of their own limitations.
So I think it’s understandable if people get upset when people criticize that, and, people being people, have a hard time differentiating between ‘maybe we can go further than this’ and ‘you’re not allowed to be okay with yourself’? It’s the kind of thing that is bound to get wrapped up in triggers and misunderstandings.
And also like, when people make out of context posts that are like “Tumblr encourages bad habits in mentally ill people” there’s no way of knowing if the OP means “I don’t like it when mentally ill people have conversations that don’t revolve around self-deprecation” or if they really mean “there should be more diverse conversations about how to cope that go beyond just self-acceptance.”
I think ultimately I see your point and agree, though. Like, I still can’t do more than 1-2 things a day, but I also have a lot less performance anxiety, and a lot more confidence in myself, and I’m developing the ability to keep pushing at a task until it’s done and not worry about how long it takes, which is pretty important, and I wouldn’t have learned how to do that if I hadn’t seen other people like me doing the same things in their daily lives.
Also like I said, I haven’t really seen a lot of the conversations out there about these things. Like… maybe instead of going “Tumblr is bad for mentally ill people,” though, which makes people defensive, it’d be good to start posts about “this helped me, this might not help you, but this is how it’s done,” as stand-alone things? (I mean, pretty much exactly as you said. Maybe we SHOULD start writing about that?)