500-pound stained glass crab sculpture by the late Jackie Leatherbury Douglass and her husband John Frederick Douglass, on display in Baltimore’s airport
I want to say thank you so much for all the love and support on my art 🙏 Feel free to use my artwork for personal use only - like your Tumblr banner, profile picture, etc. (credit appreciated)
Also, if you’d like, I’ve made some of my pieces available as free phone wallpapers here
Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I’m always like “why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.”
But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you’re inside the car, inside the situation, it’s easy not to notice all the extra work you’re doing just to maintain the status quo.
There’s all sorts of type of work that we think of as “free” that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.
The next time you think you’re tired from “nothing”, consider instead that you’re probably in situation where you’re doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.
opening my body’s task manager to see what’s taking up all my cpu
Also, just to add: we should not lose sight of the fact that the mammalian brain is a ridiculously energy-hungry organ. A human brain makes up 2% of the body’s weight and volume and 20% of its caloric requirement. Thinking is physical work.
Competitive chess players carb-load before tournaments. And lose weight in the process.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that thinking physically takes up energy. I would be like “why don’t i have energy I’ve been sitting inside studying all day” ma'am it’s because the phrasings, evidences and vocabularies in your brain are eating the energy
If I’ve been really focused on crafting or something, there will invariably come a point where my brain is just like “Warning! Warning! Out of Energy!”.
Getting a snack usually fixes it.
I get post-exertional malaise from just… Going places. I sit in a wheelchair, I take one bus and spend some time in a different building… And when I get home, I’m sick.
This post helped a little cause I always feel bad about it.
leaving the house is abso-effing-lutely EXHAUSTING and it’s okay to BE exhausted after having to do stuff
