“always Trust Your Intuition” My Brother In Christ I Have Overwhelming Anxiety

Maria Vasilievna Yakunchikova

dont take bird noises for granted

i'm miserable because i keep pulling in people who take risks and live in uncertainty to achieve their goals. well i'm not like that and i never was. i like safety. i like stability. i'm not obsessed with reaching some big goal in life. i just want to live in peace. and i'm tired of constantly being made to feel like that is somehow not the right way to live. that i should be wanting more. i come from generations of women who had to live in uncertainty. who had to run away, who had to stretch the horizons of their lives not because they wanted to, but in order to survive. silence and peace. i want nothing more. and if i never find someone who shares this wish with me, then i'd rather just be alone for the rest of my life.

a couple thoughts on self-improvement

we need to understand that not giving ourselves enough time to kick a bad habit and establish a new better habit is a form of self-sabotage.

humans always want a quick solution for everything but our nervous systems were not built to adapt so quickly. that's why quitting a bad habit cold-turkey or starting a new good habit in an extreme way rather than easing in slowly usually doesn't work. (not saying it never works, but even if it does it's not the most optimal way to do things).

think about it this way: most addictions don't go from 0 to 100 immediately. since this is something that most of us struggle with, let's take for example phone addiction: you didn't just become addicted to consuming brainrot after watching a couple of reels. it's a learned behavior that develops from repetition and reenforcement.

i was already addicted to social media and the internet long before i had a smart phone. i watched hours of youtube and scrolled endlessly on tumblr. the problem just got worse and worse as I got more exposure to it and my brain became used to the sensation of that particular, easy dopamine reward. of course shortform content taking over and apps becoming more and more predatory in their design made the problem worse.

another thing that we tend to forget is that creating a better habits means making a conscious decision to do so on a regular basis. the fact that this too, is hard on our bodies and minds needs to be taken into consideration. that's why it's important to celebrate little successes. you managed to go a week without instagram? that's great! you managed to delete an app that you've been wanting to delete for a long time? there's more good things waiting if you keep going!

and if we mess up? if we re-install it or binge-scroll after a week of no social media? -we immediately feel like failures. instead of drowning in this feeling of failure, which reinforces us to go back to our addictive behavior, we need to encourage ourselves to keep trying.

and when we keep trying it's important to observe why we went back to the behavior we are trying to stop and what we could try to do better next time, so that we don't try blindly. what we perceive as failures are actually just experiences to learn something new and do better the next time.

the importance of gently and steadily building resilience and making your body and mind get used to trying again cannot be understated when it comes to forming better habits.

About journaling and more.

the ups, the downs, and the in betweens.

I've been journaling pretty regularly for the past 8 years (with little breaks in between). Ever since I started I pretty much decided my journals would all be "anything goes", meaning there would be no strict guidelines on formatting or content. I also call it creative journaling for that reason, as it encompasses far more than just regular journal entries. As such, the contents of my journals are colorful accumulations of diary entries, creative writing such as poems, essay-like writing, collages, drawings, doodles, wild scribbles, etc.

As with any hobby or habit, my relationship to journaling has changed a lot in the past few years. I've experienced some journaling fatigue, sometimes also accompanied by guilt that I was not keeping up with my habit. As we all know life sometimes gets in the way, and even though it often helped me to write out my thoughts, if I was going through prolonged stress, it sometimes felt like journaling about it made me feel worse. I rarely had energy to express myself creatively and every written entry would just be me venting the same feelings over and over, creating a strange cycle that seemed to amplify my misery instead of alleviate it.

My current journal has roughly 16 pages left. I started it in January 2023, feeling a bit fatigued from the prior year where journaling first started feeling quite weary to me, possibly due to a lot of stressful big life transitions happening. I decided I would focus more on the visual/creative aspect and only write when I truly felt like it. Then more stressful stuff happened, and I lost my passion for journaling almost entirely.

It was then that I noticed that when I had the urge to put my thoughts somewhere but felt fatigued, writing with pen and paper made me feel limited, like my hands couldn't keep up with my thoughts. When I needed an immediate outlet to express my thoughts, just opening a word document and going at it would make me feel more satisfied than grabbing my journal and writing them down by hand.

I was going to write all of this down in my journal too, but I decided to put it here instead, just because I felt like it. I've been wanting to get into blogging forever and would like to eventually have a more personal blog but tumblr is close enough for now, as it is my old homebase in a way.

Like many people on here, my teenage years were defined by tumblr. I spent over ten years on this platform (on a diff. account from 2009-2017) mostly just soaking in content and not really expressing myself. Admittedly I wasted a lot of time on here instead of having real life experiences but somehow it still felt like a less brain-rotting way of consuming content than whatever we have going on these days on the big three.

That's why I ultimately decided to come back here, at least for a while.

i bet positive thinking goes so hard when youre a normal person

i wanna collage

one day

Czeslaw Milosz, tr. by Robert Haas, from “Late Ripeness”, Second Space: New Poems