That'll have to do

 "So I thought that if I piled somethin' good on all my bad

That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad"

Big feelings

"This is how emotions often feel to me. There's a wave behind me building, and just as it crests, I am let go. I lose my tether, and I'm pulled under with an intensity that doesn't make sense to those around me. Overcome, I frequently do and say things that make the situation worse - the equivalent of swallowing water because I am desperate for air. Often, I am unaware of the rising tide of my emotions; when I am, I'm often talked out of my concerns. To everyone else, it's just a day at the beach. (...) 

My new school sells cinnamon rolls at break. I eat them every day. The sweetness is like a life preserver. I am trying to keep my head above water. (...) I have m first panic attack at age thirty-two, and it feels as if I'm unraveling. As though someone found a loose end in the sweater that is my knitted life and pulled. I knit myself back together and keep on. Things will be easier when I get through this day. This week. This month. This project. This miscarriage. This divorce. This pandemic. This - (...) 

the waves come too quickly for me to recover. They create a riptide that pulls me far from shore, farther than I have ever been. (...) I drown for almost a year, clutching at life preservers, never finding shore. One day, I stop believing I ever will. I have promised myself "things will get easier when" and it hasn't "gotten easier when" so many times that I've stopped believing it ever can. If there is no shore, it's easier to just swim down. I can't do this forever. I'm so tired.

I realize I can stop. (...) It's shocking how quickly it happens, how practical and even easy the solution suddenly seems compared to continuing on. In the space of a few minutes, I go from a terrifying plunge into despair to a plan and, with it, relief.

The mental health expert part of me recognizes the danger and jumps in like an unwelcome lifeguard. (...) It knows what to do (...) I get myself away from anythinga I see as a great solution to my problems, and call people who can help e ride out this unexpected tidal wave: suicide hotlines, a friend a few hours away, and an ex who lives close enough to intervene if needed. He has been trying to distance himself from me emotionally, but that night he comes over and hugs me hard. "Don't go." (...)

Now when I'm angry, I'm able to acknowledge my anger, and this allows me to communicate it and set boundaries based on it. It doesn't build up and then explode out of me the way it used to, confirming my fear that anger is bad, it makes people hurt people. I'm able to tame it, sit with it, and express it in healthier ways."

How to ADHD, Jessica McCabe

(Are you... Me? Also, I love you Jessica!)

Eu te espero tanto

The Rice Hypothesis

"There do appear to be regional variations indicating that environment shapes how we behave towards one another (…) Why are there these geographical differences? (…) It is difficult to answer these questions, as culture, history, politics and a host of other factors contribute to the psychology of individuals living together, but there are some interesting accounts. As a student of behavioural science, Thomas Talhelm spent his graduate days in China, a vast country of over a billion people. Initially he lived in Guangzhou in the south and noted how, when he bumped into residents in the local busy supermarket, they would tense up, avoid eye contact, shuffle away awkwardly and avoid any conflict. They were shy around strangers and focused on avoiding conflict. However, when he visited Harbin in northern China, he noted how people behaved very differently. They were much more independent, confrontational and outgoing. Why were people from the two regions so different?

Talhelm came up with a broaden-and-build idea based on farming. Thinking about China, he noted that south of the Yangtze River, where the climate is warmer and rainfall more plentiful, farmers have been growing rice for at least 10,000 years, whereas north of the river they grow wheat.45 The crops differ significantly in how they are farmed. Rice is twice as labour-intensive compared with wheat and requires irrigation.46 An irrigation system quadruples the rice yield but it is beyond the capability of a single farmer to build or maintain one. A single family cannot provide enough labour to survive by farming rice and so success depends on the collective effort of farmers. Irrigation also has to be shared, as the same water supplies neighbouring farms. Therefore, rice farming requires cooperation and generates shared accountability and interdependence in comparison to wheat farming. Could these different farming practices influence the communities’ behaviour?

When he looked at various psychological measures of different styles of thinking, Talhelm found there was a wheat–rice divide (…) Even the way people conducted themselves in public when they thought they were relatively unobserved showed this difference between individualism and collectivism. Talhelm and his colleagues went into local Starbucks cafés in several different northern and southern Chinese cities to observe the naturalistic behaviour of customers in the café.51 People from the northern, wheat regions were more likely to be sitting alone (35 per cent) compared with those in the southern Starbucks branches (20 per cent). Researchers in the various Starbucks branches then deliberately moved chairs to partially block the aisle, to see how customers reacted to the obstacle. Based on previous observations, the prediction was that people from individualistic cultures would be more likely to change elements of the environment to amend the situation, whereas those from more collectivist cultures would be more likely to change themselves to accommodate the situation. Only three out of 100 (3 per cent) customers from the rice region moved the chairs, preferring to squeeze through the gap, in comparison to 20 per cent of those from the wheat regions, who moved the chairs out of the way."

The Science of Happiness, Bruce Hood

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31404829/

Let my love open the door

"I have the only key to your heart"

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

Neil Gaiman

(Pulp Fiction)

Tú me partiste el corazón

 "Pero, mi amor, no hay problema, no no
Ahora puedo regalar
Un pedacito a cada nena"

(Before we go)

Got me losing all my cool

Nobody tells you how fucking uncomfortable they are, especially if they last for days.

Catlike

"Een kat in het rauw maakt rare sprongen, maar komt altijd op zijn pootjes terecht." 

M.

I can't stop myself from calling, calling out your name

I can't stop myself from falling, falling back again

"One never knows what women think,

especially the women who write"

The Afflictions of an English Cat, Balzac translated by Carl van Vechten

Pretty Please

"When my mind is runnin' wild

Could you help me slow it down?"

(Dua Lipa? Who would have thought, but these beats though)

 

(Marriage Story)

You said you cared

 

"I'm falling again, I'm falling again, I'm fallin'

What if I'm down? What if I'm out?

What if I'm someone you won't talk about?"

 "(...) Their relationship persisted in the awkward limbo of two objects held at a precise distance by constant centrifugal force, unable to move either closer together or farther apart."

Jade War, Fonda Lee

Soft as it began

Estranha forma de vida

"Coração independente

Eu não te acompanho mais!

Pára, deixa de bater

Se não sabes onde vais

Porque teimas em correr,

Eu não te acompanho mais"

 "You don't think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking."

David Schnarch

I almost got the whole thing wrong

"but I got you right."

Reductionism, all the way down to math

"Reductionists are those who take one theory or phenomenon to be reducible to some other theory or phenomenon. For example, a reductionist regarding mathematics might take any given mathematical theory to be reducible to logic or set theory. Or, a reductionist about biological entities like cells might take such entities to be reducible to collections of physico-chemical entities like atoms and molecules. The type of reductionism that is currently of most interest in metaphysics and philosophy of mind involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics. This is usually taken to entail that all phenomena (including mental phenomena like consciousness) are identical to physical phenomena."

https://iep.utm.edu/red-ism/

(And another first time for me: the first time I explained what I thought, and someone said "Oh then you are a [insert philosophical view]". I liked it.)

Easy wind and downy flake

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep."

Robert Frost

Never give all the Heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

Yeats

Don't start now

Though it will take some time,

I will be better on the other side

(As it turns out, I had been stimming to the right song already, I just hadn't realised)

New every morning

[...]
Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

Susan Coolidge