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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • The real answer here is “time”. You’re grieving a loss, and it takes time for your mind to process that. It mostly isn’t a voluntary process, so the question isn’t only “how do I stop spiraling,” but also “how do I get myself through the time it takes to recover.” A few suggestions:

    1. Sleep. As much as you can until you enjoy your time awake again. Time you spend asleep is time spent letting your subconscious sort out a changed situation. It’s time spent healing.

    2. Fast. Fasting releases endorphins starting about day 3. A healthy adult can safely keep up a clear liquids fast for up to 30 days without medical supervision. Don’t do this with just water - clear liquids (see-through juices and broths) will keep up your hydration and important nutrients. The hunger basically goes away after day 3. The endorphins help make the time bearable, and help show joy is still possible.

    3. Meditate. This will be a hard one, because for best results I’m not going to suggest guided meditation, but rather a mindfulness meditation practice. You can do this on your own, but a meditation group can help you get past some of the misconceptions most Westerners have about meditation (the goal is not to stop thoughts from coming up, realizing you’ve become distracted is success rather than a failure, etc.) If you’re in college, there’s very likely a group on campus that holds sessions at least weekly. If not, look for a Buddhist temple or Shambhala center in your area. Hindu Dhyana and Vipassana are similar. The group will probably meet weekly, but ideally you would make this a daily practice on your own.

    4. Distract. Whatever takes your attention off the pain is a good thing, even if it isn’t as enjoyable right now as it normally is. Reading, TV, video games, volunteer work, hobbies, learning a new skill. As long as it keeps your attention on something other than the grief.

    5. Therapy. Again, if your in college, there may be short-term counseling available at no cost. In addition to a non-judgemental space to process out loud, many short-term therapy modalities offer tools for handling grief, sadness, and interrupting thought loops.






  • Org Mode.

    I’m generally a vim user, but for job-related task management I set up emacs with evil (too many) years ago. There were vim plugins to reimplement pieces of it, but none of them covered all the functions I would use (that may have changed in the last decade, but I have a working system so it wasn’t worth the effort to check). I add tasks, tag priorities, and set recurrences for maintenance tasks. For billable or potentially billable tasks I use the built in clocking.

    I make relevant notes under the tasks as I work on them, keep the finished task until weekly manager meetings, then archive them so they don’t clutter my working file but remain searchable if ever needed (which is more often than you might think).

    I add new tasks at the top. Unfinished lower priority tasks get pushed down out of sight over time. When we hit a slow period, I review them and archive anything no longer relevant, then reprioritize and start working through the backlog.


  • Vim has its own plugin system that can provide all of the things on your list. Most people used to use a plugin manager like vim-plug or pathogen, but plugins can also be installed manually.

    With vim 8 there is built in plugin management. Just open the editor and type

    :help packages
    

    Plugins (including the plugin managers which are plugins themselves) get installed in your user’s home directory, so you can install them yourself without affecting other users or involving the sysadmins who are giving you pushback on installing other applications system-wide.






  • Not as many problems as traveling without one.

    Having traveled before with someone in that exact situation, yes, there will be harassment and TSA may very well intentionally force you miss your flight and end up waiting to fly standby on the next one. But as of now, you generally do get through, which cannot be said for traveling internationally without any passport at all.

    Will that change? Highly likely. Soon? Probably.

    But there are a not insignificant number of people who only recently decided it’s no longer safe, applied for passports, made plans to leave, and saw recent stories about passports not being issued. This type of scare mongering does not help them, and can be actively harmful to their mental health and well-being.

    Edit: Obviously the longer they stay, the higher the chance this changes.