Apytele

Haven't been working at it as hard as I should've. She's taking treats now though!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13685404

One of my favorites is:

"Never lie, never tell the whole truth, and never pass up a chance to use a real bathroom."

"Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1945

The image is a black and white photo of a large pile of human skulls and bones in front of a barbed-wire fence.

Most of my negative self talk is self-injurious in nature so I won't trouble you further with the exact content, but I've had difficulty finding a good substitute because I have a pretty strong aversion to the more flowery language a lot of positive self-affirmations use, but I still wanted something that rolled off the tongue as well as poetry so it sticks in my head better.

I really like common meter (think "because I could not stop for death") and it turns out you can easily get it out of chat gpt by asking for 14-syllable couplets in iambic pentameter with natural word order, then splitting the lines at the 8-syllable mark and mixing and matching as-needed with a little supplementary help from a thesaurus. I asked for a few different versions and after some mixing and matching I got to:

"You make mistakes but take a breath
and let your torment go.
Forgive yourself for stuff you did,
and things you didn't know."

...so I'm gonna give myself a good ol' cognitive-behavioral thought restructuring and try to at least repeat it after each self-abusive thought, then hopefully be able to replace them entirely. I'll let you all know how it goes, but I wanted to share in case any of you wanted to try it with me!

i could post all of her vids i love her so much

...ideally one that was both genuine and that you had the confidence and self awareness to interpret as kind. And for bonus points, what's one you've given?

I'm thinking back to the guy in group therapy years ago who told me he always thought of people who swore as not knowing any better words, but that I obviously knew better words and just also swore and even used them artistically and that's just really stuck with me. Sometimes I wonder how much of my self esteem has suffered not just because I've been told not to brag, but also because I'm extremely weird so the compliments I do receive often reflect that.

My bonus one (and I'm not sure how well he was able to take it) was that one of my fellow psych nurses was frequently and obviously terrified any time shit hit the fan, but that somehow still he'd never once failed to have my back. He'd be stuttering the whole way through an incident but I'd walk out of the med room with both halves of a B52 and he'd take one of the syringes without a second thought. He was literally the epitome of "courage isn't not being scared, it's being willing to face it." I should find a nice presentation of that quote somewhere to send him because I'm not sure I phrased it well at the time.

Right now we're at the "sitting in the lobby and watching people get on and off" stage of desensitization.