for like a decade I kept getting the advice of "don't ruminate" but also "sit with your emotions" and I was like What The Fuck Does That Even Mean. until someone finally explained it in a way that makes sense:
so there's the emotional part of your brain ("I'm embarrased") and then there's the storytelling part ("all my friends hate me and I'm a piece of shit"). when people say "don't ruminate" what they mean is don't feed the storytelling part
you tend to the emotion ("I'm feeling x. why am I feeling that? how do I move forward given that information? what's something nice I can do for myself right now to cope with this?") but you treat the storytelling part like a little goblin that's trying to be as unhelpful to this whole process as possible. this doesn't shut the storytelling goblin up completely, but it keeps it from causing so much chaos and over time it stops talking so damn much
it's basically like if you were trying to comfort a friend. you'd validate their emotions, but you wouldn't sit there and let them call themself a piece of shit. do that for yourself
sharing this in case someone else is also like Why Didn't Someone Just Say That
I love drawing pen and paper maps for my D&D campaigns, here’s a bunch of my recent ones
Things suck right now. Who wants to join me in making paper crane chains? You don't need any special tools or artistic talent, it gives you something to do with your hands, and you end up with a pretty chain of paper cranes that you can either hang up, or throw away without feeling too wasteful. And if you do join me, post pictures in the reblogs! :)
Tools you will need: needle and thread, a pad of post-it notes, and sharpies/markers/crayons/etc. of your choice.
Yule Goat is here to greet you and wish you a merry solstice, may your winter festivities be joyous and safe ✨
[prints available here]
The house is bloodthirsty. The housekeeper is noisy. All the girl wants is a garden.
We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective
Imagine if you knew of a population of semi-wild hamsters that live communally near to where you live. They don't run for their lives and bolt into their nests for safety when they see you, they'll just kind of go "aw fuck there's that guy again" and just kind of lazily trot off - they know you're not really a predator, just an inconvenience. But some of them don't flee from you, they're a bit weird you guess, but those are your favourites. So every once in a while when you've got a task you really don't want to do alone, you can just walk up there, grab a hamster, pop it into your breast pocket and now you've got a little emotional support buddy for the day.
That's Gandalf's relationship with the hobbits.