Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

danceswchopstck:

dsudis:

eupheme-butterfly:

icecream-eaterrr:

I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.

Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating.  It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.

This idea - You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself - hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.

In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.

Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.

You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.

So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.

But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair. 

And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.

So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.

Oo, I like this!

(via primarybufferpanel)

pilferingapples:

tenlittlebullets:

storytellerluna:

selenethedaydreamingwriter:

The real tragedy about the barricade is that we don’t know how much is true. Victor Hugo was there at the June Rebellion, so what is fact and what is fiction? That question gives me chills because we’ll never know. 

Charles Jeanne (who I think is probably actual real life Enjolras) wrote an in-detail account of the ACTUAL barricades in a letter to his sister after the fact

you can read it, tenlittlebullets translated it into English :)

it’s really graphic, he leaves no gory details out, just FYI if you’re gonna read it, keep TW: VIOLENCE  in mind

#how is he real-life enjolras if he survived (via metellus-cimber)

I’m so glad somebody asked this, because the answer is: when they finally ran out of ammunition, Charles Jeanne rounded up everyone who was still standing, went, “look, if we’re going to die, we might as well die fighting,” and led a suicidal ten-man charge against an entire flippin’ infantry column, armed with nothing but bayonets. The first few ranks of soldiers were so unprepared for such a spectacularly insane attack that they were too surprised to shoot. They crossed bayonets and tried to hold the insurgents off in hand-to-hand combat, but Jeanne’s swordsmanship was apparently aces, because he held off a bunch of them at once and covered his friends as they tried to breach the ranks. And once they were in, nobody could shoot them for fear of taking out their own guys.

So the last stand that the insurgents had intended as a noble suicide ended in them breaking through the ranks entirely and winding up in the next street over, outside the combat zone, going “well shit, what do we do now?” (I’m guessing the infantry column wasn’t very deep; central Paris at that point was a rabbit warren of narrow twisty streets, and assembling troops en masse for an organized attack was a logistical nightmare.) Unlike the National Guard, the army weren’t total chumps and got themselves turned around to give chase and start shooting once they weren’t at risk of friendly fire any longer… and that’s when all the civilians holed up in their houses went “no way, you’re not getting your hands on these crazy bastards” and started hurling furniture and crockery down on the soldiers’ heads. Jeanne was understandably distracted at the time, but afterwards somebody informed him that the barrage of unlikely projectiles included a piano. A piano. That is some straight-up Looney Tunes slapstick right there. No wonder Hugo went for the heroic death scene instead; if he’d stuck to real life, he probably would’ve gotten complaints that he’d wrecked his readers’ suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, someone opened an alley gate for them to shelter in and take stock of the casualties—most of them survived(!!!), but a few were pretty nastily wounded. Their host then had to lock Charles Jeanne in to keep him from charging right back out and taking on the whole goddamn army singlehanded. He probably would’ve broken down the door if the poor man hadn’t pointed out that going back out would give away his wounded comrades’ hiding place and the identities of the people sheltering them. They sat there listening to the gunfire gradually slow and go silent, and then in the middle of the night the ones who could still walk were allowed to slip away one by one at long intervals from each other. Charles Jeanne went straight home, slept like the dead for a few hours, was woken up at five in the morning with a warning that he’d been denounced and the building was surrounded, and then slipped out in disguise and managed to evade the police for four months before a former comrade ratted him out and he was arrested.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Charles Jeanne’s letter is an absolute treasure that deserves to be available to anyone in Les Mis fandom who wants to read it. Incidentally, “how Actual Historical Enjolras survived the barricades by being too good at his suicide mission” is also one of the stories I tell when anyone asks me what the hell is so interesting about researching people nobody’s ever heard of from an obscure chapter of French history. 

#charles jeanne#what a BAMF#and then he managed to derail the whole trial with impassioned noble speeches and dramatic gestures worthy of a Hugo play#while visibly dying of consumption#seriously how was this dude even real#saint merry#june rebellion#à cinq heures nous serons tous morts#1832#history geeking ahoy

(Source: jiubilee, via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

dylanohcryin:

nothing fucked me up more than hearing the line “now they’re going to bed and my stomach is sick, and it’s all in my head but she’s touching his chest” in mr brightside and REALIZING THAT SICK AND CHEST DON’T RHYME… ….SH E’S NOT TOUCHIGN HIS CHEST…..

(via vampiregerards)