lb_lee | Entries tagged with lunacy

Rogan: Whew! Got through Arisia. It went well! Made good money, used the quiet times to pencil and ink some stuff, and surprise: we got some important insight into how our (particularly MY) neurology works, courtesy of LJ Cohen!

We've paneled with Cohen a few times on neurodiversity panels, and she's been open about having aphantasia. Because I've been getting commenters lately on my headspace building/discovery and defense posts that boil down to "I have aphantasia, what am I supposed to do?" I went to pick her brain.

Where I learned that's what my headspace blindness is.

( Aphantastic! )

Current Music: Some terrible country music Mori put on and my clearly superior mash-ups

Rogan: if there is one thing I had to peg as the most important lesson I have learned about my brain, it would be: all of it, no matter how unpleasant, self-defeating, or painful, is on my side.

( Read more... )

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts on psychological crisis planning, made at the request of

grahamlore. See, considering the inevitable fallout of the pandemic, I decided it was time to remake a new pocket crisis plan for our wallet.

A little square cover for the pocket crisis guide, entitled Don't Do Dumb Shit, LB! with a red stop sign.

( Why Have a Pocket Crisis Plan In Your Wallet/Phone? )

( Side-Note: How to Make a Pocket Zine )

( What Should Your Crisis Plan Have? )

( Building Trust )

( The Measuring Stick: How Bad Is It? )

( What To Do )

( Where to Go )

( Who To Call )

( How to Ask For Help )

( How To Make A Please Help Script )

(This is an excised chunk of How to Make A Pocket Crisis Guide because I continually need to reference this and it's a useful tool all on its own.)

People often don't realize they're bats! When your radar is broken, you have to come up with a scale to measure how bad things are, and it has to be simple enough that you can understand it even when blitzed out of your gourd. A daunting task, yes, but these folks' work might give you a good start:

* Alice Rich's Comparative Pain Scale
* the American Chronic Pain Association's Quality of Life Scale
* Allie Brosch's Pain Scale

Here's mine, if you're curious:

How Crazy Are You? In Green: 0: Fine! 1: Something's maybe bothering me? 2: Something's bugging me. Manageable. 3: I can perform normally, but it's real hard. In Yellow: 4: can't perform normally but not too woried. Rest and recharge. 5: Okay, this is getting bad now. Straining to keep it together. 6: Death grip on reality, barely hanging on. You can feel reality bending. In Red: 7: Losing grip, but can be reasoned with and calmed. 8: Can't be reasoned with, can be calmed or comforted. 9: Can't be reasoned with or calmed, can still fear pain. 10: Can't fear pain, be reasoned with or calmed. Ultimate fail state.

You can communicate this scale in text, colors, drawings, emoticons--8D :D :) :| :( D: D8--whatever gets the message across. I use the 1-10 scale for most daily use, red-yellow-green scale when moderately impaired, and the Five Questions when I'm full-on Bruce Wayne's Basement:

Ask yourself: 1. Do you know who you are? 2. Can you see headspace? 3. Can you reach headmates? 5. Can you think a question? 5. Can you feel emotions? If you ever answer no or dunno, shit's bad! Red! Are any of your headmates looking, acting, or saying that shit's bad? Believe them! Shit's bad! Red!

Try to think of what the most salient characteristics are of your crisis state. If you can come up with a simple litmus test that even catastrophically crazy you can get through, you're golden. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you: one of my instant "shit's bad" warnings is an inability to think questions. Maybe yours is your mouth tasting like an overspent electrical socket, or inability to stop crying. Whatever it is, it's good to know.

(Sadly, building a litmus test that simple often only comes after a few times getting thrown off the rodeo brain-bronco. Live and learn, hopefully?)

Mori: So, my headmate Rogan grew wings at the start of this year, and he's been indignant about it ever since. At the very end of August, they gruesomely abscessed, rendering him a human pancake for weeks on end, and we didn't mention it in public because why would we? But now he's recovered enough (though still not capable of walking or standing) that I feel okay posting sketches of it. Compare and contrast with how they were previously.

( Drawings behind the cut, including a couple shrunk-down gross injury pics that should be small enough not to be legible if you don't want to see them, and also a couple sketchy butts. Also minor body horror for how his wings look while retracted. )

Treat Yourself: The Commodification and Misuse of Self-Care
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000
Notes: This essay won the reader poll this month and was sponsored by the Patreon crew! And just so y’all know, I am not going to be discussing any modern self-care products in this essay. This is not the place to take potshots at jade rollers.

Last year, I found myself on a panel at Arisia called "Internalizing Creative Suppression" about impostor syndrome, self-sabotage, and how to deal with or overcome it. It was a great panel, and towards the end, when we were taking questions, a hand went up. When called on, the person said that they had the problem of, they were dealing with depression, and sometimes, they'd wake up and decide that self-care was staying in bed all day and watching Netflix. How, they asked, could they tell whether this was legit self-care or just depression?

( What self-care is, what the brand is, and how to tell the difference. )

Scribbles and Bits

Entries tagged with lunacy

Aphantasia

The Lesson

Crisis Planning: How To Make A Pocket Crisis Guide

the Psychological Badness Scale (Repost)

New Wing Sketches

Treat Yourself: The Commodification and Misuse of Self-Care

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