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Heyooo

Long time, no talk (it’s literally been, like, four years), but here I am, resurrecting this blog! (Kinda.) See, I have a couple ideas of things I’d like to do, mainly a series of posts of “what it’s like watching your favorite teen show as an adult” -- and my favorite show was Pretty Little Liars, which is what this blog was all about back in the day!

(I’ve also started a new blog on another interest of mine, Titanic. So you can follow me at thetitanicgirl97.tumblr.com if you’re as in love with that movie or as fascinated by the ship as I am.)

I don’t know when I’ll post again just yet (I’m back in school *whomp whomp*), so I’ll just say... See you soon!

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Stranger Things s3 prediction:

The Monster™: *physically shows up*

Joyce Byers:

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Your dash has been visited by the Eleven ghost. Reblog on Halloween for Good Luck.

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“Never have I ever had a crush on a fellow cast member.”

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We were swimming our second lap in the lake when I lost the feeling in my toes. When you first jump in water this cold you scream, gasp for air, but immediately laugh because it makes you feel extra-alive. You learn, after a few jumps, you don’t have to fear the cold. If you move around, it fades away. Soon, it’s as if you’re inside a house looking out at a snow flurry as it lightly taps the windows. You know there is cold, all around you, but it can’t hurt you. For a while, this kind of numb makes me feel invincible. But now, after maybe a half-hour in the water, the cold has returned, and not just outside the window, it’s in my skin. Beneath the surface, I probably looked like a chicken breast sitting under plastic in a refrigerator of a grocery store, pale and goose-pimpled. Then it’s in my joints, making it difficult to move. Soon, it’s in my bones, so much that even though I knew I was kicking my legs, I couldn’t tell you where they ended and the water began. I wasn’t even sure if I had toes anymore. Suddenly, I’m in very familiar territory. I know I should get out of the water before I hurt myself or make myself sick, but I just don’t. I keep swimming. Here I am, 31 years old, and I’m still denying my body the one thing it is asking me to do: take care of it. *** When I shot the pilot of Pretty Little Liars, it was December in Vancouver, and I was 24 years old. We were shooting a summer scene (the exterior of the funeral for Alison, the Queen Bee of Rosewood), and even though I don’t remember exactly how cold it was outside, I can tell you it was too cold to snow. The girls and I were dressed in skimpy black dresses with kitten heels and ballet flats. Later, in editing, they could push the saturation, add a golden filter, and BAM, it would look like we were sweating in July. But while we were shooting, well, it was December in Canada. “Rolling!” yelled the assistant director, and wardrobe would rush in and apologetically remove the giant down coats from our shoulders. Everyone watched, hoping we could get the scene before our jaws locked or our shoulders unintentionally rose around our ears. Eventually, Leslie, our director, yelled “Cut!,“and the beautiful warm jackets reappeared. Wanting to be the most professional I could be, I sniffed back the snot that was threatening to ruin every take and forced my shoulders to stay where they were, even though I could see my breath on the air. I looked around: Lucy, Ashley, and Shay all seemed cold but fine; they looked professional, powerful. Was I not cut out for this? I pushed that thought out of my mind. Suck it up, Bellisario, do your job. There came a point when I mentioned offhand, "Huh, I can’t feel my feet.” “Stop!"a voice screamed, and an angel in the form of a crew member descended upon me and demanded I follow her inside the church we were shooting near. She sat me down, removed my shoes, and began to rub my feet. She asked me to let her know when I had feeling in them again. "Don’t worry about my feet! They’re fine!"I tried to sweetly wiggle away from her, my eyes flitting to the crew that was waiting nearby. I was holding up production, a production that costs thousands of dollars per minute, all for my stupid comment about my stupid toes. I started to panic: Everyone is going to think I’m a diva, that I can’t hack it, that I’m a horrible actor, and they’ll never want to work with me again. I am practiced at ignoring [my disease], for the most part, but it’s still there, finding new ways to undermine me. But the angel remained resolute. She told me that she had worked with people who had lost toes to frostbite, and she wasn’t about to see me lose mine. Eventually, I announced (truthfully) that the feeling in my feet had returned, and she let me go. I braced myself to be yelled at by someone, anyone, in a position of authority. How dare you hold up this massive production? How dare you be so weak? So demanding! But there was no punishment to be found, not even a sideways glance. Everyone just asked me if I felt better and felt ready to return to the scene. Why did I need a complete stranger’s permission to take care of myself? **** Seven years later (and wiser?), there I was, swimming in a lake for fun, and still I couldn’t do it. My friend and I had casually agreed to try for threetimes around the island in the lake. It was just a fun challenge when we jokingly announced it to the rest of the friends and family. But now, coming around the corner of lap two, I could feel my limbs shutting down. Just like in Vancouver, despite my body desperately needing something, I didn’t want to appear weak or let people down. Where was my angel to take care of me now? So what? You might say. Don’t be crazy; you can get out of the water anytime. Who cares?Great question. I ask it of myself all the time. Who cares if I can’t swim that long in cold water? Who cares if I need to stop the scene to take care of my toes? Who cares? I do, said a familiar voice inside my head. Oh, right. You. My friend is a long-distance swimmer, and she seemed cold but ready to keep going. "Troian, do you want to stop?” That voice, that familiar voice in the back of my skull that tells me it cares. It cares if I demand things of a production, it cares if I quit early, if I fail. It is a voice I know intimately; it is my greatest and best of enemies. I know what that voice will say if I stop. I know the trouble I’ll be in. “Nope,” I said, my teeth chattering with excitement. “I’m fine!” She wasn’t buying it, but matching my determinism, we went around again anyway. When we came in, who cheered for the cold and weary warriors? Who hoisted us up in honor and fed us warm drinks in celebration? No one, because this was a necessary challenge to no one but myself. There was no great competition, except between my body and my head. *** As someone who struggles with a mental illness, my biggest challenge is that I don’t always know which voice inside me is speaking. My body voice, the one that says, Troian, I’m cold, get out of the lake, or my illness: You told everyone three times, so you can’t disappoint them. You are not enough. Who cares about the difference between two times around and three? I do. There is a part of my brain that defies logic. Once, it completely convinced me I should live off 300 calories a day, and at some point, it told me even that was too much. That part of my brain is my disease, and there was a time when it had absolute authority over me. It almost killed me, and you can see that even though I have lived in recovery for ten years now, it still finds loads of fun, insidious ways to thwart me to this day. It was a difficult journey finding my way back to health. Through hard introspection, intense medical and mental care, a supportive family, friends, and a patient and loving partner, I survived, which is rare. But I don’t want to just survive that part of my life. I want to create in rebellion. I want to stop looking at the clocks. I wanna get paint all over the floor and build a wall of feedback in the amp so loud that it starts a mosh pit as I scream back in the face of my disease: I AM ENOUGH! It’s just not that easy. Sometimes I still find myself being pushed by an invisible taskmaster, working to the point of exhaustion, swimming with numb toes. The voice of my disease is with me every day. I am practiced at ignoring it, for the most part, but it’s still there, finding new ways to undermine me. That’s partially why I wrote Feed. I wanted to channel that voice into a story and out of myself. I wanted to create a character who also wondered how she could be enough. Writing, producing, and acting in it helped me to get one more degree of separation from my disease in what I know will be a lifetime of work in recovery. It is my greatest hope that someone watching it, struggling with the same challenges I do, might think, What if I were enough too? So with all the courage I can muster, I give it to you, I give it to that one person, in hopes that it could make them feel enough. Maybe by the time you see it, I will have gotten out of the cold water and be warming myself in the sun.

Troian Bellisario for Lenny Letter (via flowercrownsandflannels)

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Gleb Savchenko and Sasha Pieterse pose at ABC’s ‘Dancing with the Stars’ Season 5 cast announcement event at Planet Hollywood Times Square on September 6, 2017 in New York City.

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mood: having an identity crisis after the show you based your blog on ends

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Can you believe they actually filmed this scene and to this day, we’ve been deprived of ever seeing it?

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we’re approaching labor day so remember: no sleepovers in barns. dont wear a yellow shirt. hide your shovels. dont drink alcohol. make sure anyone you bury is actually dead. yall know the drill by now.

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Eating disorder stories are often told from the outside looking in. You know the tale: girl has body image issues, girl starts restricting food, there is perhaps some intervention and finally, girl starts her journey towards recovery.

When “Pretty Little Liars” star Troian Bellisario started working on a film inspired by her personal experience with eating disorders, she wanted to tell a different story — one from the inside looking out. Her movie, “Feed,” which she both wrote and stars in, is not your stereotypical eating disorder tale but rather a unique attempt to capture what’s actually going on inside the head of someone with an eating disorder.

“When I started to look at characters with eating disorders and the way they were observed from the outside, I was sort of like, ‘Well, this doesn’t help.’ There’s no movie I can point to that will get my father or my brother to understand why when they told me to just eat the sandwich, I just couldn’t,” she told The Mighty.

Less than one month after her movie’s release (and more than a month after the “Pretty Little Liars” finale) we talked to Bellisario about what inspired her to make a “Feed” and how similar she is to the character she plays, Olivia.

The “Twin Dynamic” of Eating Disorders

“Feed” doesn’t begin with the development of an eating disorder. Instead, we’re introduced to a pair of twins, Olivia Grey (Bellisario) and Matthew Grey (played by Tom Felton) who are starting their first day of high school, senior year. That night, Matthew tragically passes away in an car accident while Olivia, sitting in the passenger’s seat, survives. This trauma is what catalyzes Olivia’s fall into food restriction. The image of her brother appears and talks to her, encouraging her behavior and becoming, we find out, the eating disorder itself.

Growing up, Bellisario’s best friends were a pair of male and female twins. Although she says they’re not the characters who inspired Olivia and Matthew, they’re closeness and twin dynamic resonated with her. When one of them said, “I don’t know who I would be without my twin in my life,” it reminded her of the identity she had built with her eating disorder. She told The Mighty:

Their identity in the world is paired, it’s coupled, and I think that’s something people with mental issues also go through when they start to seek treatment. If you move through the world as somebody who identifies as anorexic, or who identifies as someone struggling with bulimia or with overeating, what happens when you start to forge a new identity? Is there a betrayal to your past self? Are you lying? Or are you getting “better”? Does that ever go away? That’s part of your identity. The way that Olivia is a twin and her twin is not alive anymore, is she not a twin now? For me, that was also something I wanted to explore.

She also hoped representing the eating disorder as a twin would show why disordered behaviors are often so hard to give up. Eating disorders, she said, are not just disorders — they can act as friends. In the movie, Olivia has a hard time giving up her eating disorder because that would mean giving up her brother — who she doesn’t know life without.

What I wanted to do was create a situation in which they could see the physical manifestation of the disease but also how close it is to the person themselves. That’s why it has to be Olivia’s twin brother, Matt, who is her everything in the world. Because I needed them to understand that not only is it a disease. It’s your best friend. It’s your secret. It’s your strength, and it’s your weakness. It’s everything rolled into one, and that’s why it’s so difficult to sever from.

Where Bellisario’s and Olivia’s Stories Collide

In an early scene, Olivia is talking to the principal, who tells her she has the highest consistent GPA in her class and will most likely be the valedictorian. Instead of sounding excited, Olivia notes there’s still a whole school year left and refuses to celebrate early. He then hands her a long list of colleges to apply for, and she takes it eagerly. Later, when she goes for a run before dinner, her dad questions why she didn’t run more. Before we know anything about an eating disorder, we see Olivia is a perfectionist, an overachiever and has been been put under a certain level of pressure from her upper-class family.

The daughter of two movie producers, Bellisario isn’t stranger to high standards and steep expectations, although she admitted some of it was self-imposed. Still, if there was a Venn diagram of her story and Olivia’s, Bellisario said, perfectionism and overachievement would be the main overlap:

Particularly when my eating disorder really started to manifest in a strong way, it was definitely because I didn’t feel like there was any way out. I felt like I have to hold myself to a certain standard of academic performance, of athletic performance, of being the perfect daughter in the best way that I could, and whether or not those standards were being imposed upon me, or whether I was just self-imposing them because I believed that’s what the world wanted from me.

Why Filming the Movie Wasn’t the Hardest Part

To prepare for the role, Bellisario had to enter a dark place from her past — both emotionally and physically. And while she did have to follow certain diet restrictions to lose weight, she said restricting again wasn’t the hard part — it was stopping once the film was finished. Because, in her experience, an eating disorder is a coping mechanism to help deal with a deeper problem, she actually found engaging in old habits helped her deal with the stress. But it came with a cost:

I had permission to go back into that world, and the more difficult part was then extricating myself from those habits…. I was doing press and I was talking about it. Then the struggle became, OK, I’m talking about all of these feelings, but I can’t go back to restricting. I’m not filming it right now, I have to continue to make the choice of health. That, for me, that was the challenging part. Actually engaging with these feelings that the movie brought up but not being able to engage with them in a disordered way.

What Bellisario Hopes You’ll Take Away From It

While Bellisario said “Feed” was a reaction to how eating disorders are presented in the media, it was also a reaction to how people in her life treated her eating disorder. “As caring as they were and as much as they wanted to understand what I was going through… it was like they could have sympathy and not empathy,” she said. “They could have sympathy because they were like, ‘I can see that you’re suffering, I can see that it’s painful, I see that you are engaged in a sort of war with your body,’ but there’s not empathy because they can’t fit themselves into your experience, and into your body.”

She hopes the movie will help friends and family recognize when their loved one is struggling. Often, she said, at the beginning states of an eating disorder, some friends and family realize something is wrong but aren’t quite sure what they’re looking at. She also wants those who are struggling to feel understood and see that, just like Olivia, they deserve treatment and to make steps towards recovery. She told The Mighty:

I just want people to see this movie and also have a different expectation of what it might look like to struggle with this, and I think it’s important that I’m not the only voice out there who’s talking about this. I just want to add more to the conversation, and to support the conversation.

Bellisario received support from the National Association of Eating Disorder (NEDA) during the course of making the film, and to give back, she’s selling “Feed” t-shirts featuring the twins with all proceeds going to NEDA. She said the best reaction she’s gotten to the film has been from people with eating disorders — for whom, she said, the film was really made.

“I think this film it was important for me because it’s my journey of recovery to take my past experience and to take all of these experiences that I’ve heard about, or listened to, and channel it into my work and my art, in order to feel like I didn’t lose a part of my life. Or a part of me isn’t dead and gone, that it can be something that goes turned into creative and hopefully positive gift that I can give to other people,” she said, laughing. “So, it’s a lot to think about.”

You can watch “Feed” now on Amazon or iTunes.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, you can call the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline at 1-800-931-2237.

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When you’re at a red light and realise Ezra Fitz wrote today’s message at a local church

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feminism + troian

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Lucy Hale | Pretty Little Liars Season 6B Promotional Photoshoot (2015)

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1. Combine weights and cardio in one workout. Shay said, “I swear by combining weights and cardio in the same hour. I like to do cardio to start off my workout and then mix in some weights — it can even be your own bodyweight. I like to do planks or lunges with a weight. But I think it’s that switching back-and-forth that is so important — like a Barry’s Bootcamp.”

2. Workout regularly — but not necessarily at the gym. “I typically workout for an hour,” Shay said. “But sometimes I work out two times a day. When I can, I like to work out four-five times a week. But that doesn’t always mean in a gym. It can mean taking my dog for a walk or hike. Or I might jump on a bike and ride that from Santa Monica to Venice.”

3. Make a playlist! Take some time to fashion a super solid pump up playlist, whatever that may mean for you. Shay noted, “I love R&B, hip-hop, pop – anything that has a good beat. Nothing gets me more excited than 90’s hip-hop.”

4. Focus on how good you’ll feel after. When she’s having trouble getting motivated, Shay said, “I honestly think back to how I felt after my last workout and how I know I’m going to feel after this workout. It’s sometimes a little difficult to get yourself out of bed and make it to a class. But the endorphins that are released during that workout and how you’ll feel for the rest of the day are worth it.”

5. Stay hydrated! This is HUGE for Shay. “Hydration is number one when it comes to working out – you have to stay hydrated to get a good workout,” she said. “And I love flavored water…especially Propel.”

Okay, it’s impossible not to feel inspired when someone is this enthusiastic about working out. We’re gonna go turn up the beats and ease into a nice groove!

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Female Awesome Meme (6/10) LGBT+ Ladies: Emily Fields. “I’m getting really tired of everyone treating me like I’m made of glass.”