Kingdom of Knuffel

That's very likely. Just a few hours ago i watched a TedEx video about how constant stress can really mess up your brain, make learning and remembering things very hard for you, decision-making, too, and social skills. Supposedly it can even shrink the size of your brain and dissolve the binders (?) of neurons. Or something. Vocabulary small, memory bad, I forgot the words
They said it can even cause Alzheimer's which reminds me... my mom is constantly stressed and she keeps telling me she's afraid she's getting the disease, she forgets things a lot... and now I got worried

tbh I find it easier on myself to try to ignore things like that.

Sometimes I just try to pretend I'm okay and it kinda works

But it's not really healthy, you're neglecting yourself that way

Yeah I know

but I feel if I hide for a while I can pretend I'm normal for a bit.

Depends how long is that "while"...

We humans need better stress relief mechanisms....

I think if I didn't, I'd have more breakdowns.

It makes me understand better the prevalence of some of the drugs (and alcohol). I know it doesn't really help in the long run, but there are so many people so desperate for a little relief from the crushing weight of ongoing long-term stress, and they get it by drugs and/or alcohol, and I sometimes can't help but think that as destructive a choice as that is, at least it's more self-destructive than anything else....
but sometimes I sit there pondering history's darker sides and just look for patterns in stuff like that.
Like, riots aren't terribly common these days. They used to happen a lot more often. So sometimes I wonder if the mass shootings the US gets are actually kind of the modern equivalent of the riots that we don't have so much. We can talk about progress all we want, but we mostly are just exchanging one kind of pressure/stress for another, as time goes on.
Or so it seems to me.
I don't know, ignore my ramblings.

Aren't there a lot of riots in Paris atm??

There are riots or well protests that happen here in Australia but generally they're protests..and therefore peaceful.

I don't drink alcohol really at all.

That's true, but on the other hand Paris doesn't seem to have a lot of mass shooting incidents either. I don't know why my brain thinks that the one is sort of taking place of the other. It must have picked up on something but I can't bring it to conscious attention to be able to analyze it properly.