Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded

by Hannah Hart

operating in the age of the overshare,

BOUNDARIES + PROCESSING = BUFFERING

We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and some of life’s episodes take a long time to fully load.

Without treatment, schizophrenia spreads like a parasite through the mind devouring reality completely and leaving behind the wake of a world perforated by invisible nightmares.

It gives me no comfort to think that my irrational belief in things working out for the best in all likelihood may stem from my mother’s tenuous grip on reality.

trying to throw away her lifetime,

she was waiting for her life to start back up again. Is that hope?

They’ve failed to predict the apocalypse three times (in 1914, 1925, and 1975). But hey, who’s counting?

When he met my mom he was still in his “Let’s do drugs and try to contact spirits” phase.

I felt like the Universe was trying to squeeze inside my mind and wouldn’t fit.

“Hey Dad, if there is no Jehovah, what happens to us when we die?” and he replied by asking “Remember what it was like before you were born?” to which I said “No,” and he said “Exactly. Without faith in Jehovah death is just like that. Less than nothing.”

Nice to share the same feeling for a moment, even if the feeling was terror.

There were one too many trials by fire and far too much accountability placed on my shoulders and my sister’s when we were young. Still, we grew up to be women who were strong and confident with a deep sense of worth and self-respect. Which is probably why we don’t talk to him very often.

I choose to remember these moments and focus on what was given instead of what wasn’t. Gratitude.

I am living the millennial dream, a demigod of digital influence, wildly self-indulgent, rich beyond all imagination, bathing in pools of gold and resting my head against pillows of money, an indomitable force who laughs in the face of traditional media, holding rank as General in the battle of dawning digital era!!!!

It’s my belief that people “who do YouTube” do it for the ability to share. They love sharing their knowledge, their opinions, their expertise, their experience.

Are we all work-addicted egomaniacs? I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Is this career of constant output healthy or sustainable? Who knows. All I know is that this is the best job I’ve ever had. And I’ve had some pretty shitty jobs. Literally! Let’s take a peek at this excerpt

Most jobs I’ve had in my life have not been glamorous, and I took them because they paid the bills.

will have a deeper and personal relationship with my life. I will not have a casual fling with my life. I need to work for a purpose greater than myself. I will find peace in that. I want to contribute to the world around me. Casual debauchery is not fulfilling.

got a public PO box and would periodically get letters from people who felt I was someone they could open up to, or who just wanted to put some thoughts down on paper and send them my way.

How could I offer those people guidance on their lives when I so clearly didn’t know what I was doing with my own?

never opened the door for strangers or answered the phone. I was a good little latchkey child.

I realized that healthy relationships weren’t born out of the desperation to avoid a feeling of loneliness.

“Meet us between the giant beating heart and the Cheshire cat playing dubstep.”

“When you get nervous, picture everybody naked. Oh wait, they already are.”

“Welcome to the vacant heart of the Wild West.”

It felt like the jacket was hugging me, but since she was wearing it she must have felt like it was hugging her, too. All of our clothes hug our bodies. How wonderful to think that we are always being held by these fabrics. Our fabric family.

I bet our cells are wrapped in lights. Someone should make a room that looks like a cell but all the mitochondria are lights.

loved those jellyfish. I loved those people. My friends.

I use an app called Headspace that offers guided meditation and makes the practice easy and approachable.

My mother always told us that there are no bad guys in this story. That things are more complicated than one person who was wrong or one person who was selfish.

Sometimes it’s just easier to decide that someone is the bad guy. But the truth is never that simple. Hindsight is 20/20.

Everyone has a clear view from the rearview mirror.

She said that handsome men don’t stay handsome for long. Or maybe she just said they don’t stay for long. Both turned out to be true.

What was the point of keeping a fragment of something that was already gone?

when I like someone, I want things to happen at warp speed. If there is someone I want to get to know, I want to get to know that person right away, superquick, all at once, now or never! All or nothing. That’s my thought spiral. You’re in or you’re out. You win or you die. Game of Thrones is the best.

“Perhaps you’ve used pressure because you’ve lacked the ability to create your own structure.”

Through years of failing to perform, though sometimes excelling despite this, they feel a constant state of underachievement.”

“First I’d like you to read a book called Driven to Distraction. It’s very well written, and written for the adult ADHD mind. It has a series of case studies from successful people who late in life found themselves sitting in rooms like this one, expressing that same sense of failure and emotional disregulation.”

I survived the environment I grew up in by training my brain to function by “surviving,” a state of extreme awareness in which I was constantly inputting information and making judgments to protect myself and my loved ones.

I was too scared to admit that I loved being a performer.

I want to be a good role model. I like to hold myself accountable to the community around me, and I strive to be the best version of me that I can be.

Scraping my hand or punching the wall or my head when I was in pain was like an instinct. I didn’t have any other tools to process my emotions. In order to change, I had to actively unlearn the reflex.

3 This feeling is called disassociation. I would disassociate from my body during times of trauma, and then the only way I could pull myself back would be to injure myself.

fellow YouTuber Kati Morton. Kati is a good soul. She’s a licensed marriage and family therapist

If a white, wealthy, educated, famous person can’t save her parent from the streets—who can?

Who does this system work for? The system works for itself. So there you have it. The system is broken. It’s been broken since the LPS Act of 1969,

The act is out of date and based on nonscientific ideas and assumptions. It needs to be updated to reflect our current understanding of debilitating mental illnesses. It doesn’t take into consideration that many people with severe mental illness can be treated and achieve some sense of normalcy for their lives.

Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder by Edward M. Hallowell, MD, and John J. Ratey, MD.

1 For more information on the LPS Act of 1969 and all of the problems it has caused for the mental health care system, check out the Treatment Advocacy Center’s website: http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/component/content/article/194.