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Nov. 11th, 2015 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressTrigger Warning: Self injury
Learned a new thing about myself tonight. It is a thing that is important enough that I need to write it down. Writing things down makes them true. (Or at least, it confirms their truth, if they are a thing that is already true. I do not believe things until they are in text, not really.)
If I reach a point where I am going to start crying, at a place where I do not want to cry, it is more efficient for me to work out squares1 in my head than to dig my nails into my skin. It distracts me more effectively, and takes me more rapidly away from whatever is causing distress than self-injury does. Which is fascinating, since my number one use2 of self-injury has traditionally been "I want to cry but am not in a space where that would be okay".
(I have previously written more about me and self-injury here and here. Pretty much everything there holds true, despite being almost four years old.)
I have used nails to stop myself crying a lot. I have used the press of a thumb in the small of my throat. I have used my teeth sometimes, little nips at my hands and wrists3. All of them work, in their own ways. Which is to say, they keep me from crying. But they don't really take me away from the pain or exhaustion or whatever negative thing is throwing me off at the moment.
Distraction does.
I have tried in the past to distract myself with humour5, but even things that always make me giggle are fleeting distractions when my brain is that kind of crumpled. Computation? Computation requires more active thought out of me. I only have the first 16 perfect squares memorized, I am trying to get to the first 256, and working them all out is a fantastic way to occupy my mind.
I don't think this will stop me from sliding my hands up under my sleeves when I hit the wall, and it definitely won't stop me putting a hand around my neck if I want to still myself, but it will maybe work as a faster second step. And there's a nice usability to it --if I get good at all the squares, I can do cubes, or convert numbers to different bases, or find the prime factorization of the current time. Tiny mathy mind-puzzles to distract me from the distress at hand.
And then, where there's space and a place to write, and no one else around, I can process at my leisure. Is good plan.
~Sor
MOOP!
PostScript: I don't know a trick for cubes or higher powers, but here is a nice trick for finding what n-squared equals, if you know what n-1 squared is:
n2 = (n-1)2 + (n-1) + n
BECAUSE!
Say you have n sets of n items (a total of n squared items). If you add one more set of n, you will have (n+1) sets. If you add one more item to each set (including the new one), that will be a total of (n+1) additional items. You will now have (n+1) sets of (n+1) items each, or (n+1) squared!
EXAMPLE:
I know that 13 squared is 13 sets of 13, or 169. I add one more set of 13, giving me a total of 14 sets of 13. I add 14 more items (one more to each set), giving me 14 sets of 14.
132 = 169
+ 13 = 182
+ 14 = 196
= 142
I like math.
1: Squares as in a number multiplied by itself, not MWSD figures.
2: In fact, my *sole* use of self-injury. I have Alis and I have the weight of years and I have a lot of everything that keeps me from fucking it all up just because no one can see me. I only ever self-injure where people can see me, and I find that fact fucking hilarious. See also (TW: Rape)I have a dark sense of humour.
3: To the point where it is canonical that fictional!Sor4 has a network of tiny scars all over her hands from where she has bit herself and made her hands bleed. They don't come up often, but f!Sor is far less stable than I am, and so they're there.
4: f!Sor is not a character I write about very often anymore, which is a shame. She is from a collaborative storyworld I was part of in college. The group fell apart, but Snowtown lives on.
5: Things that are always hilarious: French ghosts (le boo!), n [animals] in a person suit, and this SMBC comic.
6: 16 and 25 are both perfect squares, which I find awesome, but that's not why I chose those numbers --16 is easy because computers, and 25 is already locked in pretty thoroughly because...powers of five? I don't know why 252 = 625 is quite so ingrained, actually.
Learned a new thing about myself tonight. It is a thing that is important enough that I need to write it down. Writing things down makes them true. (Or at least, it confirms their truth, if they are a thing that is already true. I do not believe things until they are in text, not really.)
If I reach a point where I am going to start crying, at a place where I do not want to cry, it is more efficient for me to work out squares1 in my head than to dig my nails into my skin. It distracts me more effectively, and takes me more rapidly away from whatever is causing distress than self-injury does. Which is fascinating, since my number one use2 of self-injury has traditionally been "I want to cry but am not in a space where that would be okay".
(I have previously written more about me and self-injury here and here. Pretty much everything there holds true, despite being almost four years old.)
I have used nails to stop myself crying a lot. I have used the press of a thumb in the small of my throat. I have used my teeth sometimes, little nips at my hands and wrists3. All of them work, in their own ways. Which is to say, they keep me from crying. But they don't really take me away from the pain or exhaustion or whatever negative thing is throwing me off at the moment.
Distraction does.
I have tried in the past to distract myself with humour5, but even things that always make me giggle are fleeting distractions when my brain is that kind of crumpled. Computation? Computation requires more active thought out of me. I only have the first 16 perfect squares memorized, I am trying to get to the first 256, and working them all out is a fantastic way to occupy my mind.
I don't think this will stop me from sliding my hands up under my sleeves when I hit the wall, and it definitely won't stop me putting a hand around my neck if I want to still myself, but it will maybe work as a faster second step. And there's a nice usability to it --if I get good at all the squares, I can do cubes, or convert numbers to different bases, or find the prime factorization of the current time. Tiny mathy mind-puzzles to distract me from the distress at hand.
And then, where there's space and a place to write, and no one else around, I can process at my leisure. Is good plan.
~Sor
MOOP!
PostScript: I don't know a trick for cubes or higher powers, but here is a nice trick for finding what n-squared equals, if you know what n-1 squared is:
n2 = (n-1)2 + (n-1) + n
BECAUSE!
Say you have n sets of n items (a total of n squared items). If you add one more set of n, you will have (n+1) sets. If you add one more item to each set (including the new one), that will be a total of (n+1) additional items. You will now have (n+1) sets of (n+1) items each, or (n+1) squared!
EXAMPLE:
I know that 13 squared is 13 sets of 13, or 169. I add one more set of 13, giving me a total of 14 sets of 13. I add 14 more items (one more to each set), giving me 14 sets of 14.
132 = 169
+ 13 = 182
+ 14 = 196
= 142
I like math.
1: Squares as in a number multiplied by itself, not MWSD figures.
2: In fact, my *sole* use of self-injury. I have Alis and I have the weight of years and I have a lot of everything that keeps me from fucking it all up just because no one can see me. I only ever self-injure where people can see me, and I find that fact fucking hilarious. See also (TW: Rape)I have a dark sense of humour.
3: To the point where it is canonical that fictional!Sor4 has a network of tiny scars all over her hands from where she has bit herself and made her hands bleed. They don't come up often, but f!Sor is far less stable than I am, and so they're there.
4: f!Sor is not a character I write about very often anymore, which is a shame. She is from a collaborative storyworld I was part of in college. The group fell apart, but Snowtown lives on.
5: Things that are always hilarious: French ghosts (le boo!), n [animals] in a person suit, and this SMBC comic.
6: 16 and 25 are both perfect squares, which I find awesome, but that's not why I chose those numbers --16 is easy because computers, and 25 is already locked in pretty thoroughly because...powers of five? I don't know why 252 = 625 is quite so ingrained, actually.