#+ delusions and compulsions surrounding the experiments that have been done on them

[eruukat]

:3c just realized i can give squall piercings......

[snarkeater]

A fine thing

Being surrounded by normal people and doing normal things can occasionally make Tarn weird.

Just one left, Tarn notes with satisfaction, taking inventory of the short list of new messages on his personal communication device.  Almost everyone’s through and back on board, even Tesarus, who, for obvious reasons, usually takes longest. 

Not bad at all.

Ahead, the waiting area is bustling with customers and staff alike; tuning out the cacophony of mixed voices coming from the crowd and the crackling public address system overhead, Tarn stows his phone and picks a path to the row of seats closest to him.  Square in his sights, a few meters across from him, is a trio of empty seats flanked by a couple of bedraggled bots unattractively wearing the day's work on their faces; without a second thought, Tarn makes a bee line for it, weaving through packs of meandering minibots and flocks of over-buffed flyers with a degree of agility and speed better suited to field maneuvers than weekend civilianism, and takes the center seat.

The mech to his right seems to have an opinion about his seat choice – he gives Tarn a side-eyed look when he sits down and collects his limbs tighter to his frame – but Tarn is unmoved.  He's got another fifteen minutes, tops, left in this place before he can free himself of all the ancillary annoyances around the core experience for what he hopes is the next little while, and this poor bastard isn't going to further sour what left's of it for him.

Just deal with it, for frag's sake, Tarn thinks and – pointedly – leans back, lifting a leg to cross his ankle over his knee, mostly blocking the seat to his left, and stretching out an arm over the back of the empty seat to his right, claws just barely grazing the opinionated mech's shoulder.

It's a dick move – he knows it is, even if he chooses to continue to stare forward steadily and not acknowledge it whatsoever – but there's just something about this place that rubs him the wrong way.

The team comes here regularly – everyone does: it's the best place in-system to get a wash and proper detailing done, and it's surprisingly affordable, as a bonus.  The problem with that, of course, is that it's extremely busy – all the time – and that popularity comes with certain inconveniences that Tarn finds particularly irritating, even in short bursts.

It's loud, it's messy, it's chaotic, and it has this...overwhelming sense of the mundane about it that pulls a string in Tarn's spark that's been badly out of tune for some time.

He can feel it now, for instance, as he idly scans the next group of bots that exit the doors to the wash racks and fixates on a particular individual among the lot.  A handsome speedster with great posture and a noble look; free of any personal hang-ups that might make doing the same difficult for other people, Tarn makes deliberate eye contact as the mech walks out into the waiting area.  As is often the case when Tarn does this, the other party experiences a moment of confusion; to the speedster's credit, though, it's not so evident on him as it typically is on most others – as a result, Tarn's not entirely sure whether or not the mech recognizes him as the leader of the DJD, and instead of growing panic on the stranger's face, Tarn only detects casual curiosity.

It looks quite good on him, Tarn decides.

The speedster looks away before Tarn does, turning left and eventually taking a seat in the gallery of chairs on the other end of the room – presumably to wait for someone still inside.

Tarn waits exactly one minute, watching others walk by without really seeing them, and then looks across the way, easily locating the seated speedster through the moving curtain of mechs.  The fellow is reading a slim datapad, noble features even nobler in profile.  

As Tarn watches him, considering, he allows himself a brief fantasy in which he isn't Tarn, but, rather, some other mech.  In this fantasy, he imagines himself as he might've been, under different circumstances and had he made different choices earlier on in his life – a fellow like that speedster, he gauges by the look of him, with a normal job and a normal life. A fellow who comes to this place to get cleaned up and fixed up and doesn't pay half a month's wages for it because his scrapes and nicks are just common wear and tear, not industrial-grade damage.  He imagines what it would be like to have normal problems – maybe he'd need credits, or he'd suffer from existential angst, or he'd be plagued by loneliness. Maybe, Tarn muses, plucking the dissonant chord in his spark, it'd be all of those things.  Or none of them.

Regardless of the details, it would definitely be a simpler existence than his current one, and maybe there's something in that...?

Across the rows of seats, the speedster looks up from his datapad and casts a glance in Tarn's direction. Catching Tarn's eye, he offers up a tentative but genuine smile.

It's instantly clear to Tarn that the bot has no idea who he is, and the wave of cognitive dissonance caused by that fact assaults Tarn with enough intensity as to make him feel physically ill.

A simple life, perhaps, but...

This time, it's Tarn who looks away first.  Suddenly, the floor is much interesting than the stranger, or anything else around him.  It stays the most interesting thing for a while.

"Ready?"

Tarn's helm snaps up, optics lifting from a spot on the floor to gaze up at the mech standing above him expectantly.  It's Kaon, the last of his crew to exit the facility and his ticket out of this place. The screwed-up expression on Kaon's face reminds Tarn that it's loud, and immediately he feels a strong compulsion to leave the noise – of all descriptions – behind.  He gets to his feet at once, but before he can act on the impulse to go, something draws his attention and stills his mind, firmly pulling him from the grip of his errant thoughts:

Freshly-cleaned and shining like the rest of him, the golden Decepticon emblem on Kaon's collar seems especially bright under the poor light.

Looking to make a stabilizing connection, Tarn reaches up to touch it.

Yes, he concludes, eyeing the thing and using it as a fulcrum to set all the pieces back in their proper places in his mind and in his spark, forcibly dispelling the dissonance – yes, he could have chosen an easier life, but nothing easy, he knows all to well, is worthwhile.  So it would've been a wasted life.

Tarn's optics flick upwards, to Kaon's face.  

The problem with people, in Tarn’s opinion, is that they aren't ever satisfied with what they have – it's that loose bit that makes it easy to manipulate them, that makes them vulnerable to corruption and ruin.  Ambition is good, as is the desire to improve, but those things are different than the thing that Tarn's describing; the thing Tarn's describing doesn't drive people, it's what makes them stand still, or spin in circles. It's a form of rot.

But Tarn knows better than to let that rot take hold; this place – it has that power, if Tarn allows it to work its insidious tendrils into his spark – but he won't let it. Those foolish delusions hold no sway over him because he knows that what he has...

Calm now, Tarn's claws fall away from the emblem; he gives Kaon a nod.  "Ready."  He tells him.  Kaon wastes no time leading them out.

What he has is a damn fine thing.

[sarahburness]

Why I Was Addicted to Attention, Lies, and Drama

I’ve done a lot of things for attention that I’m not proud of. I’ve created drama. I’ve bragged. I’ve exaggerated. I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve lied and lied and lied.

No one wants to be labeled as an “attention seeker.” When people say, “She’s just doing it for attention,” they don’t mean it as a compliment. I knew this. And I knew that people said these things about me.

And still, I couldn’t stop.

I spend a lot of time around animals, especially cats. It’s easy to see which ones have experienced starvation. They have constant anxiety about food. They meow and meow when it’s feeding time. They scarf their portions down without breathing. If the bowl is left full, they’ll eat whatever’s there—even if it’s a week’s worth of food!

I was that cat with attention. I could never get enough.

But compulsive behaviors aren’t about what we’re consuming. Attention seeking isn’t about attention. Food addiction isn’t about food. Really, it’s about control.

When you’ve been starved of something, you develop a fear of losing it. You begin to cling to every morsel of what you’re desperately afraid to live without. Survival mode.

That’s what it was like for me: constant survival mode. I felt like, at any moment, I was going to be abandoned, left alone, forgotten. I fought to be noticed. Fought to be heard. Fought to be “loved.”

But despite my constant attention-seeking efforts, I never got what I truly wanted. I never felt loved for exactly who I was because I never showed her to anyone! I showed the world the person I thought it wanted to see, and I used other people as characters in my personal drama.

So that is the biggest irony: because I was so desperately hungry for love, I couldn’t have it. Because I so deeply craved attention, I repelled people away from me. Then, these experiences reaffirmed my biggest fear: there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. So I’d grasp more, cling more, lie more.

Too often, people talk about attention seeking like it’s a character flaw. I see it as an addiction.

When we’re trying to fill a love-sized hole, it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to stuff into it: drugs, money, alcohol, approval, sex. If it’s not love, it won’t truly satisfy us. We’ll keep wanting more and more.

My journey of healing my attention-seeking patterns has been long and painful. One of the most painful things has been realizing that most people weren’t reacting to me the way I thought they were.

I used to brag loudly in public, imagining people around me admiring and envying me. Now, I realize that most of them were either ignoring me or annoyed by my antics.

I used to stretch every accomplishment, imagining people respecting me. If it was two, I’d say five. If it was 100, I’d say 300. If it was one minute, I’d say an hour. Now, I realize that most people either didn’t believe me or used my lies to reinforce their own insecurities.

I used to make a tragedy out of every pain and a drama out of every inconvenience, imagining people pitying me. Now, I know that most people either felt stuck in the cloud of toxicity that surrounded me (because of their own unhealed traumas), or they avoided that cloud like the plague.

The world, I’ve discovered, isn’t quite the place I thought it was.

I was so busy talking and talking, lying and lying, that I never sat down just to listen. And that is what helped me heal: looking within myself, looking around me, and embracing reality.

Attention seeking, for me, was a kind of self-protection. On my journey of healing myself, I’ve found that self-love and self-protection aren’t the same thing. I had to remove my armor and my mask. I had to face the truth.

Beneath my defense mechanisms, I found a fragile, wounded part of me that was traumatized by childhood experiences—by emotional starvation. But this part of me wasn’t fragile because of the wounds I incurred as a kid. It was fragile because I tried to protect it.

After I got hurt, I tried to hide myself away. I tried to create an elaborate fantasy world to protect myself from rejection and abandonment. I piled layers and layers of bandages on top of my wounds, but wounds need air to heal. I tried to keep myself safe, but I ended up suffocating myself instead.

I wasn’t lying and creating drama “just for attention.” I was doing it to survive. I was grasping for scraps of approval to replace my desperate hunger for real love, for authenticity, for happiness.

On the outside, it seemed like I wanted other people’s attention. That’s what I thought I needed too. But what I really needed was to pay attention—to be able to just exist in each moment without struggling. To be able to look at myself without running away. To look at people without being afraid of them. To have peace of mind.

Maybe you know someone who’s stuck in these patterns. Maybe that someone is you. However this applies to you, I hope to communicate one important thing: attention seeking is a symptom of a bigger cause.

It’s not something to be dismissed. It’s also not something to be judged and criticized. It’s something to be accepted, understood, unraveled, and forgiven.

Healing these patterns takes time. Every step along the way, it’s been difficult for me to invite reality to replace my delusions. It’s been hard to allow myself to be raw and open instead of trying to protect myself from pain.

But this healing journey has also allowed me to enjoy real affection: from myself and from others. And that has been worth all the hard work.

About Vironika Tugaleva

Like every human being, Vironika Tugaleva is an ever-changing mystery. At the time of writing this, she was a life coach, digital nomad, and award-winning author of two books (The Love Mindset and The Art of Talking to Yourself). She spent her days writing, dancing, singing, running, doing yoga, going on adventures, and having long conversations. But that was then. Who knows what she’s doing now? Keep up at www.vironika.org.

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from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/addicted-attention-lies-and-drama/