I'm a Night Owl. I like to stay up long after most people have gone to sleep. The night time feels so peaceful and quiet. I hate morning energy - so many stressed people rushing to get to work - I'd much rather sleep through all that chaos. People sometimes comment that I need to "fix" my sleeping pattern - in other words, sleep at a "normal" time, and get up in the morning. Fuck that. It feels wrong to me on some kind of primal level. My body just says No. I've tried to do it many times though. It is ...
Category Archives: Personal Growth
Becoming unreliable on purpose
People like reliable people. This makes a lot of sense. People also generally like to be thought of as reliable. This also makes sense. But, is it possible to be too reliable? I've had a lot of difficulty saying no to people, and this has resulted in people thinking of me as very reliable. Good, right? Well, actually no. Because I agreed to many things I didn't actually want to do, people expect me to do more of those things in the future. This causes a number of problems, obviously, because I don't want to keep on doing things I don't ...
The benefits of very low contact with parents
I've been very low contact with my parents for quite some time now, several months. We're mostly limited to the occasional email. This has been so very helpful for my mental health! I have my email set up so that my parents emails get filtered into their own folder that doesn't get checked automatically when I check the rest of my mail, so I don't ever get notified about anything they send me, and I have to manually go in there to see what they've sent, if anything. This makes it very easy to ignore them entirely for as long as ...
Anger is a useful emotion
Have you ever heard people say anger is bad and that you should try to "let it go"? Anger has a bit of a bad reputation, but I believe there's no such thing as a bad emotion. They all have a purpose, and anger is no exception. As with all emotions, it can be used in productive ways, or in unproductive ways. What can we learn from anger? Notice what kinds of things make you angry. As one example, I'm 100% guaranteed to get angry when people hurt children and animals. This tells me that I value children and animals and that ...
A Basic Guide To Feeling Words
When I first started journaling, I was just writing short snippets about what happened that day, so that I could read it later in order to trigger my memories of that day. This was great for remembering stuff, but what really made a big difference was when I started making a point of journaling about how I felt every day. Like I'd still write what happened, but I'd also write things like "I felt (feeling word) when that happened". Practicing putting my feelings into words regularly helped a lot to make get better at it, and to feel better in general. ...
Arguing on the internet is not worth the cost to your mental health
I checked the post history of a Reddit user who said they were feeling very triggered lately... and their post history was full of them arguing with various people in political subreddits. I thought: "well, that's certainly not helping!" Getting involved in internet arguments is really really bad for your mental health! Arguing is a trap - don't fall in it. 99% of the time people won't change their minds anyway. I mean, have you ever seen it happen? I haven't, and I was the admin of a forum for 16 years. In over 500k posts and thousands of dramatic arguments, ...
The healthiest food that can be prepared using the least possible brainpower
You can skip to The Actual Recipes section down below if you don't care about the back story here. I've spent years trying to find the balance point between how to feed myself the healthiest possible food, while also using the least possible amount of effort and brainpower. This is what I've discovered so far. Most of this stuff is relatively cheap too. A lot of recipes out there on the internet have a focus on perfection - they're all about following it precisely to get a very specific result. That's not what this post is about. This is about getting a ...
How I learned to say NO
Googling "how to say no" brings up a lot of advice articles, with tips for how to say it politely, and a few really basic things about why it's hard to say no... but I found those somewhat lacking. For me it was never a matter of finding the right words, it was about really genuinely understanding why the fuck it's been so hard, and actually finding solutions for the underlying causes. Why is it so hard to say no? Saying no feels like rebellion Rebelling as a kid meant I'd be in trouble, and being in trouble was scary, therefore saying no ...
Journaling
How journaling has helped me Journaling has helped me get to know myself better. To figure out how I feel about things, to access my feelings in general. I used to have a lot of brain fog, like I was trying to think of something but I couldn't find the words for it because it was just a thick fog in my mind. I had racing thoughts when trying to sleep. When I would lie down in bed and try to sleep, I'd lie awake for hours just thinking about stuff. Often the thoughts would race so fast they didn't even make ...