Tag: kirkwallhellmouth does mental health

So my anxiety kicked up a bit tonight in regards to gender presentation/some related things, and I just felt like saying this:

Even though it’s been more than 20 years since I was a GNC kid (and at that time, more GNC internally than externally), I’m pretty sure the biggest problem GNC kids face today is still people pressuring them to conform to the gender “norms” and roles society has assigned to their assigned gender and punishing them if they don’t, not that people are pressuring them to transition from their assigned gendered to a different gender.

Advertising, especially for kids and teens, is still pretty normatively gendered, even if some progress is being made.

I mean, the message I got from advertisements as a kid was that girls like me didn’t exist; the message I saw was that girls liked–exclusively–Barbie, pastels, pink, flowers, cosmetics, etc., and that boys–exclusively–liked cars, action figures, bold colors, weapons, etc. Guess which ones of those things I like and which ones I didn’t. It was a very confusing message to get, and even though my parents were good about letting me play with whatever I want to, there was only so much they could do to combat that message, because as a kid, I didn’t know how to talk about how it made me feel.

So I ended up with a really complicated and also really negative view towards girls who did tend to meet the Expected Criteria for Girls for a long time (a long time in this case being elementary school through eigth grade and a little beyond). Both because they fit into that mold (for whatever reason) and because I couldn’t.

And I still feel weird about my relationship to my gender now, as a 30 year old. Largely because society is still fucked up when it comes to the myriad of ways people can express their genders. But I generally still think of myself as a woman out of a desire to make up for the years I hated and feared “other girls” and as a way of saying, “Girls like me exist! Even if you want us to ‘act like girls,’ we’re already girls.”

asynca:

“People would be less mentally ill if they had a full-time job and felt Useful™!”

Lady, being seriously mentally ill is a full time job. You know how much effort it takes to not just lie in bed and stare at social media 24/7 when you’re super depressed? The fact someone actually got up, managed to have a shower and make themselves breakfast that consisted of more than just half-stale cereal is fucking great. Good on them, and stfu. 

This. So much this.

I have a (part-time) job now, which, while it helps me feel useful and thus lessens that ONE particular issue with my anxiety and depression, does not at all mean that sometimes getting out of bed to go to work isn’t hard af or that I don’t sometimes feel utterly useless at times.

I’m not less mentally ill because I have a job that helps me feel Useful. I’m just a person with depression, anxiety, and a job which sometimes helps/sometimes Does Not Help At All with those two things.

And that’s not getting into the whole “most people with full-time, minimum wage jobs WILL very likely have stressors related to money”, which does not help mental illness at all.

Mental health stuff and some bodily-function wonkiness under the cut

So Zoloft seems to work pretty nicely for my brain when I’m not super stressed. Been on it about a month.

However.

It may also be what has been causing me to have diarhea–and nothing bowel-movement-wise BUT diarhea–for a week now. The there-is-a-real-danger-of-shitting-your-pants-if-you-don’t-get-to-a-toilet-ASAP kind of diarhea. Which means I can’t really leave the house after I eat anything.

It sucks. So much.

The only downside of the resume work shop was the woman doing it telling all us of us that we were “too young to need a mental health day.” Considering I had two different flavors of unexpected anxiety bullshit episodes today prior to that, I mental did the “::looks into camera like on The Office::” thing. Nice ableism there, ma’am.

Other moment of oddity was being a 29-year-old in a room full of people still young enough to ask if they should put stuff from high school on their “I want a teaching job” resumes.