You Can't Fly Unless You Let Yourself Fall.

i am obsessed with desk plants rn 🌱 ✨

24/8/2020 | So much society work to be done before the start of the semester

meirl

tips to get your life back on track after a breakdown™

sleep. your body needs to rest. the average panic attack takes as much energy as running a half-marathon. let yourself rest. take a 20 minute nap. any longer and you’ll hit your REM cycle, and you’ll wake up worse off. after, you’ll feel so much better.

clean something. literally anything. a plate, a drawer, the whole mf bathroom. it doesn’t matter how much or how little. it’ll make you feel more in control, and it’ll make your surroundings more appropriate for recovery.

get some fresh air. even just opening your window for a few hours will help. if you feel up to it, take a walk. take your dog. pick some flowers. cloudgaze. even just sit in your garden for a bit. your body will thrive off of non-stale air. 

eat and drink. I know for some people, myself included, this is Hard. it’s alright if all you can manage is a granola bar, or some cereal. anything is progress and will fuel your body. drink water if you can, but anything apart from alcohol will hydrate you.

take a shower. I have clinical depression. have done since I was 12. I know how hard it is to take a shower. but it fucking helps. if you don’t do anything else off this list, do this. it’ll help more than you know.

talk to someone. I can’t stress this enough. humans are social creatures! we crave interaction. even the most introverted introvert needs to talk to someone. call your mom. text a buddy. skype your brother. chat to your local cashier. anything !! you’ll feel less alone, and hopefully get some good serotontitty flowing.

do something fun! same as above, it’ll make u feel so much bette, and provide a distraction. some good options are writing, drawing, watching a movie, dancing - anything you enjoy!

be kind to yourself. it’s okay if you relapsed, or if you had a bad day, or anything else. treat yourself gently. you wouldn’t so harsh to a friend in your situation. it’s gonna be okay.

if you can’t do all of these, it’s okay. there are better days ahead. this, too, will pass.

going to finish a practice test for APUSH!

As I’m soon to take my first assessment of the year, I thought now would be a good time to come to you with a post on a method I find useful for fully understanding concepts and explaining them on exams. It can be very frustrating when you know a fact, but you lose marks because you don’t fully cover all the details of a the concept. This method, I hope, can help with that.

I call this method the ‘what? why? how?’ method and it is pretty much what it sounds like! Essentially, to ensure you’re covering all the needed details, you format your responses to first explain what occurs in a situation, then why this occurs, and finally how it happens. It is especially useful when applied to processes in sciences such as biology and psychology (descriptive sciences). 

To help you understand better, here’s a scaffolded example of how you might formulate an exam response using this method:

Question: Explain the role of the spinal reflex.

Answer plan: What - unconscious response. Why - to react to stimuli quickly, which can minimise harm. How - by stimuli not travelling as far.

Final answer: The spinal reflex is an unconscious response which allows a faster reaction to stimuli compared to reactions controlled by the brain. This is useful as it can minimise time exposed to harmful stimulus. The spinal reflex achieves this faster reaction time by allowing the stimulus to travel less far - to the spinal cord and back rather than to the brain and back - minimising the time it takes before a motor signal can be sent back to initiate a response.

I hope this strategy is useful to some of you to maximise the marks you receive on exams (I know I’ll definitely be using it today!). It could also be used as a way to structure your notes when learning concepts, as it can be a good way to ensure you actually understand a concept, rather than just remember a definition. If you like, I’d love if you tagged me (#heystormstudy) in pics of notes which you’ve tried this out in!

Wish me luck for my test today! Emma :)

Asians are NOT basically white.

We have been trying to tell you this for so goddamn fucking long. We are NOT basically white, we don’t get TREATED as basically white, and we are SICK of people assuming this.

If we were treated as “basically white”, we would not be fetishized the way we are. We would not be infantilized. Our cultures would not be stereotyped and demonized and ridiculed. We would not be blamed for a fucking pandemic that was not our fault in any way. We would not be blamed constantly for the actions of the Chinese government when many of us aren’t even ethnically Chinese.

We would not be SHOT because of our race. Our businesses would not be targeted because of our race.

We are often excluded from spaces designed to support POC because they think we’re “basically white”, or don’t need that support. We are excluded from mainly-white spaces because we aren’t Caucasian.

It’s a fucking SHAME that it takes a fucking MASS SHOOTING for y'all to hear what we’ve been trying to tell you this entire fucking time.

We are not your pretty little waifu anime cuties. We are not your nerds or token characters. We are not your squinty-eyed caricatures. We are not your “communist virus”.

We are not getting constantly stereotyped, put down, shoved aside, and chiseled down by white people into a box of what their “model minority” should look like, fetishized, treated as a joke, and murdered by white supremacists just for you to go and say we’re “basically white”.

Thank you for your time.

concept playlists

the breeze is biting and brutal as you swiftly move across campus to your greek literature class but all your mind can focus on is the blood beneath your blackened coat and the way your surroundings suddenly sound painstakingly deliberate

from where you lie the shadows her gestures make are distorted yet you can’t help but smile once the familiar sounds of bicycles clattering against the driveway come across your ears

the shimmering light reflects off of their cheeks as you throw your head back with slight laughter at how, frankly embarrassing, both your dancing is but you can’t find it in yourself to care 

you’re stood on the border of town with one hand on your backpack and the other laced with theirs as the two of your stare out at the sunrise, a sunrise that looms over the town you’ve decided to turn your back on

the love of your life whisks you into the arms for a slow dance which, despite the overall cheesiness, makes your cheeks sore with how much you’re smiling as they lead you through the kitchen and out towards the flower garden

you’re a dumb british teenager, the world is unfair, and all you want to do is sit by the pier and smoke until your lips turn numb and the band dies down

it’s new years eve in ‘87 and you’ve escaped the chaos downstairs in place of laying on the roof with them, some stolen cassettes, and a knack for spotting constellations

the italian sun caresses your skin and it burns but the grass is soft and their head is resting upon your shoulder so you don’t mind too much

8 . 2 0 . 2 0

remote uni classes start on monday which means having my own little space in the breezeway 🌿🌤️