you have to get yourself out of bad places. you need to resist the temptation to let everything slip and become apathetic & cynical toward yourself and your life. you need to accept that it takes time to change and it’s ok to fall over as long as u get back up. every morning is a new start and things don’t have to be this way forever. you can heal and you can change.
please make sure that wherever you’re at in life, you don’t treat it like a transitory period. don’t waste your college years wishing to already be graduated & have a job. don’t waste your single years wishing for someone to be in love with. if/when those things come, they will come in due time and they will be good. but there is nothing like looking back and feeling empty because you wasted literal years ignoring what you had because you were hoping for something better. while it’s important to better yourself and reach for your goals, don’t neglect the present because that’s where you are now and it’s your now that determines your future.
One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.
So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.
I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.
What happened?
Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”
Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”
The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.
“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”
(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)
But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.
“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”
And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”
(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)
tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.
Hello my love. I’m sorry it took me a few days to get to this – I needed to sit with it for a while, needed to mull it over with care, in order to figure out the best way to honor the sincerity of your question without indulging in its skewed logic.
My gut reaction is to say: yes, of course it’s okay, of course you are okay, my sweet. But to answer so simply would mean to legitimize the grounds on which your question is based, and I cannot do that and respond honestly.
Because honestly, the way you see yourself is a projection. The way you conceive of your face and your body, your worldly proportions, is a projection you have woven throughout your years in an attempt to settle on your youness. I know the world is cruel, and I know that seeing yourself as something undesirable feels comfortable – it’s part of how you’ve always made sense of yourself in your surroundings. But dwelling on your supposedly “inherent” nature – your ugliness, as you define it – only gives further credence to the institutions that tell you to hate yourself, that you resent but nonetheless listen to. In other words, the more you worry over whether being ugly is okay, the more you convince yourself the question is a viable one, an accurate measure of your person. And let me be clear here: it ISN’T. It never will be.
You feel so richly, and you experience so vividly, and you love what you love with such fervor – there is beauty there, everywhere, in everything you do. When you are immobilized from the fear of what others may think of your outsides, you stop seeing how gorgeously they reflect your insides, and vice versa, and vice vice versa, over and over again. You turn yourself into a single dimension. You do not deserve to think of yourself that way. You are worthy of your wholeness.
I know this probably wasn’t the response you wanted from me, but I just want to reiterate that there is no satisfactory response to “Is it okay if I am ugly?”…You will never find solace in an answer to a question that is placing that kind of value judgment on your personhood; either way you are setting parameters on what you deserve and how you deserve to think of yourself before you even get a response. I refuse to engage with that kind of resignation born from insecurity – what a disservice it would be to you, in all your nuance, in all your beautiful messiness.
I love you to bits. Let me know if you want to keep talking about this. I’m always here🧡
Ask yourself why you do what you do. Why do you react that way…? Why do you withdraw or want to fight or throw yourself into anything else when faced with stress? Why do you feel the desire to fall back on behaviors & patterns you want to move from when you’re met with a certain situation? You can identify the root, but then you have to pull it. You can get caught up in trying to identify and find the source of your suffering and think when you’ve found it you’re done. Once you find the source & put your attention on it, it begins to dissipate. When you sit with it and work to understand what it’s trying to teach you it dissolves even more. This isn’t a one time process, you can return again and again to the same root source before it’s been dissolved and released. So be patient but continue to examine your actions & speech for self-understanding.
sometimes you just gotta give yourself permission to accept that you deserve good things in life. you deserve to feel good about how you look. you deserve the attention your partner gives you. you deserve the praise for that thing you’ve worked really hard on. you deserve the people checking in on you and caring for you. you deserve all of it.
Drawing of a peacock saying “It’s okay to forgive yourself for not doing better in the past. You didn’t have all the experience then that you do now.”
Drawing of a peacock saying “It’s okay not to berate yourself for small mistakes, and to focus instead on doing your best. It’s okay and it’s enough.”
I’m moving toward my goals on patreon. When I reach 300$ a month, I’ll start posting longer comics on Saturdays. If I reach 700$ a month, I can keep posting daily for the foreseeable future *and* expand the project. I could add tie-in projects like positive astrology, positive photography, and longer series that focus on specific topics like studying, writing, healing, etc. If these are things that interest you, you can pledge for just 1$ here.
Relationships get so bananas when you start deciphering the other person’s love language.
Like I thought I was just acquaintances with this person because they never told me details about themselves and we just talked movies and writing . But then they made time to have coffee with me and they showed up out of breath because they ran. Like. RAN to be on time for coffee with me?
And I was like “i don’t mind waiting” cause I never want to run
But they said they wanted every minute they could get because I’m so busy usually
Which is when it clicked that I didn’t get how much they considered me a friend because I just straight away didn’t see MY signs of affection in them and went “cool! Casual buds it is.” But now that I’m seeing their signs of affection, I feel a little silly for dismissing them like that even though I felt like we could be best bros.
Anyway, some people show affection through time or intensity or commitment and not vocally. I really have to remember that!
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