#<- i hope im using that tag right

[maze-of-my-design]

Y'know what? In a dying world so cruel and bleak, I think loving is the most powerful thing you can do. In a world where capitalism wants us to break our backs, where peace is scarce, and where some of our brains decide to say mean things to us. It's so important, actually, to be kind and share joy and take care each other, and ourselves, in spite of the way the world is. To love is one of the most rebellious acts one can do

[littlest-bugz]

Relapsing is a part of healing

[one systems perspective on relapsing during Resolution/late stage DID recovery.]

This post has been cooking in my drafts for a while, but since I'm back in a headspace where I would consider myself back in Resolution, I'm comfortable talking about this. I'm airing out my dirty laundry quite a bit in this post, but the reason I'm making this post is because of the fact I don't see many late stage recovery systems talk about relapsing back into dissociation and other CDD symptoms. I'm here to say it's totally okay and a part of healing. I don't know who needs to hear that, but I definitely did. I didn't hear it until i was in therapy.

A couple of months ago [when I was initially writing this post], I went through a series of traumatic events, including little over 3 weeks of reoccurring flashbacks due to a re-traumatizing situation. I have lovingly dubbed it 'the three weeks of hell'. There was more than just that, including 2 explosive breakdowns, where I just couldn't handle all the input I was getting with what all was going on. I was a whole wreck for a moment there, that's for sure. THANKFULLY, we only split off a one new alter after everything, which is healing progress, but it meant an increase in blackout amnesia in our day to day life, let alone the dissociation it was causing the system as a whole, nearly putting us back at step one of recovery.

The moment I noticed the blackout amnesia and increase in DID symptoms, I started thinking I had ruined any progress I could've possibly made. It felt like I had taken ten steps forward and then tumbled down the stairs. I never got to process the trauma as it just began to pile on, and eventually I popped in probably the worst explosive breakdown I've EVER had- my fight or flight kicked in and for gods know what reason, my brain chose fight. But that breakdown had solidified that 'fuck, I'm getting worse again' mentality I had going on. Everyone I knew seemed to 'keep it together' during rough times, so why couldn't I?

So that brought me to this post.

I wondered why I don't see talk of relapse in Late Stage Recovery spaces, let alone general CDD spaces. I figure, in my mind, that it's because it just isn't talked about. At least, not frequently. In the space I have curated for myself, I see a lot of fellow late stage recovery systems and finally fused systems, but everyone seems to not have relapsed at any point. Granted, this is the internet, and people show what they want others to see, but I felt ashamed for a good while that I had relapsed back into the amnesiac aspects of my dissociation. I didn't feel like I could call the stage of healing I am in 'late stage recovery'. But that's just. not true. I still am. My healing is ongoing, and I was able to resolve it.

In recovery for many disorders, relapses are, inherently, a part of the process of healing. Symptoms resurfacing is, to some extent, part of healing. Everyone is bound to have slip ups and rough times, and if your go to coping mechanism is dissociation [in CDDs cases], it's possible that you might slip back into those maladaptive mechanisms due to the stress of life happenings, but that's okay. What is needed is to learn the proper coping skills to deal with that stress, but it can be extremely hard to unlearn maladaptive coping skills and make turning towards healthy ones a default. Relapsing gives you the time to reinforce and build up what skills you do have.

When the three weeks of hell was occurring, I didn't exactly have the coping skills necessary to keep on with life, and any I did have, they were not 'automatic' enough. On top of that, my therapist was conveniently out of office for those three weeks. It did give me the time to make my skills stronger. Of course, I felt terrible about it but Relapsing is okay. As long as you learn how to deal with the stress and trauma, that's what matters. I'm still learning how to properly cope with everything that happened during those weeks, to be blunt, but I have gained a grasp on Resolution pretty quickly afterwards. I don't think it would've been possible to recover so easily had I not been in late stage recovery, and like I said before, it helped reinforce my coping skill box, making them stronger and much easier to recall. I definitely would say that relapsing was a part of my healing. Didn't feel good, but it became a huge factor in how we cope day to day.

TLDR; Relapsing during Resolution [Functional Multiplicity/Final fusion] is a part of recovery itself.

[lewkwoodnco]

L&C x high school yearbook superlatives

LOCKWOOD & CO. (2023)

[kaiserouo]

if ordan karris wanna complete that sentence does that mean he also likes us?

[leverage-ot3]

the found family trope is inherently queer and you can’t change my mind

[arisaline73]

I miss them

pride flag made from the palette too. silly.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

[<==PREV PAGES] [NEXT PAGE==>(not out yet.wait a year.or maybe more.imagine.]

saw alot of comments on prev pages; saying 'i HATE that mean teacher! im gonna FIGHT HIM!!' & i LOVE the energy!! it WOULD be nice. to have that catharsis. but the story of young tidestrider is Not one of catharsis. it is a story of being so small and so special and sucking so bad.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

official finish-this-sketch-how-you-want post idk what to call thisSAMPLE TEXT

hi! I miss drawing with people in a café and some folks mentioned they'd like to mess with my sketches themselves and that sounds cool so this is now a thing. if u play gartic phone this is basically the complement mode! but without the fucking ring noise that freaks you out right when you're getting into the flow of it

few things are 1/there's no hard deadline! take this at ur own pace if u do, but 2/I'll also be finishing this sketch and I estimate it to take around uhh 3 to 4 days? from the time this is posted. so if that's a structure u like then let's aim for something done in that timespan as well! and 3/if u finish ur piece and post it and want me to see it the best way to do that is to @ this blog! above all we go into this one determined to have fun and enjoy. I already bought u a matcha latte with oat milk sorry if u don't want that

here I got u today a sketch that's supposed to be Riz Gukgak (SY) (grey bg version and transparent version for ur ease of peruse)

remember to have fun & be urself & finish ur drink & see u in 4 or 5

[ahed-posts]

A very important and sensitive topic, do not ignore it🥹🥹🥹❗️🙏

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[ghostorbz]

I was supposed to play games after school but I did this instead. I am oh so very tired

@butter1knife

[penguinpartypalooza]

I'm taking my life back. You can't hurt me anymore.

[the-sussy-imposter2]

I thought Will would like messing with louise sometimes. Louise doesnt seem to like his sense of humor, though.

(Characters are will and louise from @peachnewt 's story, getting in deep !!)

[arcanegifs]

[diddlesnap]

katniss and peeta designs real

[ozyleas]

my guess for what today's episodes are gonna be like

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.