The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Not only am I pretty certain I'm autistic (undiagnosed but the constellation of social deficits, special interests, executive function disorder and intense catastrophic burnout fits me all too well to ignore), I have independently written about coming across the normifying tendency in my own life and steadfastly refusing to succumb to it. Most of your comment could have been written by me, and fucking hell I also write massive unreadable blocks of text which then get trimmed down to something more manageable.
The primary difference is that I don't live in "merry-go-round cycles" as you describe them - I am now sustainably functional, though currently working in a job that threatens to burn me out a lot. And neither do I swing back and forth in terms of the actual opinions I hold; I have always been rather politically radical from young and very strongly police any such tendency to just moderate my opinions since I view that as stultifying one's own intellectual development for the sake of social harmony. What has varied over time is my ability to argue my positions, and the amount of energy I have to care about them and articulate them.
When it comes to keeping myself intellectually honest, I personally find that hashing things out with people and participating in places like this one helps; actually trying to test your opinions and rearticulate them via debate really helps clarify and sharpen your point of view. It can change your point of view too, but at least reasoned debate is an actually valid means through which to shape your beliefs as opposed to simply succumbing to a zeitgeist.
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