#’use your head. its in a logical pattern’ OKAY!!! but i cant REMEMBER the pattern nor do i GRASP the pattern!!!

[devotioncrater]

im scared i am losing the ability to work

[sovpologist]

hi, genuine question! I want to like Mara, but d2 lore shows her, in my eyes, as selfish and cruel, set on her own goal with no consideration for others. At least that's what I got from marasenna lorebook.

Why is she liked by so many in community? I feel like I'm overlooking something over things I mentioned above, but I would appreciate a perspective from someone who likes her character! If it's okay to ask!

its totally okay to ask!! this is going to be a long post so im going to put it under a readmore :)

i just want to stress first that mara is like.... widely disliked by many in the community. it used to be very unpopular to like her and if you even said anything remotely positive about her, people would reply to your posts and send you anons about how you were a terrible person for liking such a manipulative and toxic character. it was only recently that community opinion kind of started to shift, and people started to actually appreciate her character as nuanced and interesting. i definitely dont think this is because of me or anything crazy like that, but ive tried to correct misconceptions about her and cultivate a space on my blog at least where people can just openly like mara and not feel like they have to qualify it by constantly assuring people that they know mara's done bad things too (because literally every character in d2 has done bad things, and somehow people understand that liking the uldren doesnt mean you support him killing cayde but cant apply that same concept to mara for some reason). ok, im getting off my soapbox now and im going to just talk about why i like her.

mara is genuinely just such a fascinating character to me. reading the marasenna im really struck by how alone she is, even as a 19 year old human. her mom has essentially abandoned her and says that she's mara's friend but not her mother, and mara's father is never mentioned, so mara literally has no parental guidance or supervision or love. this puts a lot more of her pre-awoken actions into context, such as her not knowing how to interact with people and preferring to keep herself away from the rest of the crew. everyone mara loves leaves her. her mom stays in the distributary, uldren is distant in his efforts to impress and surprise her and then dies, and sjur dies too.

i also love mara's character arc, although it kind of makes me sad. mara is so painfully human in the earlier parts of the marasenna. she's awkward, she's lonely, she thinks her and uldren's secret language is "cool," she gets embarassed at her mom's embarrassing petnames, she hero-worships alis li and listens to her advice. watching her lose all of this and crystalize into a queen is so interesting. remember, mara didn't go out into the fight between the darkness and the traveler bc she knew she would gain power and create the awoken, its stated that she went out there to die. so a 19 year old just trying to die peacefully ends up witnessing firsthand the power of the dark and light and being tasked with essentially creating a new species, knowing that one day she wants to go back and fight the darkness. she becomes such a politician and has to scheme and plot and really loses her humanity while following ALIS' advice- alis was the one who told her that people need a mascot, not a friend. this also makes for a really interesting scene where alis grants mara one favor, and instead of asking for political power, even though mara is such an intensely political and scheming person, she tells alis the truth about the awoken and asks for forgiveness. alis, who mara looked up to, doesnt forgive her, and mara really internalizes this and starts to permantantly close herself off. mara made herself into a queen and lost her humanity in the process. there's a couple people who see the real her, like sjur, but even sjur doesnt really understand her. but her relationship with sjur is also so well written and interesting, sjur being the one person she lets herself drop her mask around and just act human. i made a post about this once, but even mara's speech patterns change around sjur, becoming much more casual and "normal." however, at the same time, mara's mask/persona is a part of her character, and one that i love. people hate her for being "mean," but i like characters like that. mara doesnt take any shit, even from the protagonist, and has her own plans and goals that she doesn't feel obligated to share or change for other people. she's ambitious, sticks to her guns, and doesn't allow other people to influence her.

you say she's selfish, and i think it is easy to brush her off as selfish and doing everything for her own gain, but there's a lot of subtext and outright text in the marasenna and other lore that shows mara genuinely believes that the only way to fight the darkness is to become a being on the same level as the darkness and the traveler. she doesn't let the awoken become immortal gods, which some people regard as a bad thing, but she did that for a reason. mara understands that a people who are eternal and ageless will never grow as people, and she knew that the darkness wanted them to just be complacently sitting aside in their little realm while it does whatever it wants. mara wasn't going to let that happen, and knew she had to find a way to encourage people to leave paradise. you can dislike the way she went about this, essentially encouraging conflict and war among her people, but she did not just do it for her own gain or amusement. mara has also been hated on for starting the reef war/firing a missile at the house of wolves, people act like she did that just for fun too, but the eliksni fleet was heading to conquer earth. instead of just hiding and building up her own resources, which wouldve been the logical thing to do in this situation, mara put her own fleet and power on the line to draw the eliksni's attention away and help earth. she doesn't do things solely bc they benefit her, but because she genuinely loves and wants to help earth. her uncaring persona is a mask, the thing that she feels she needs to be for people to have faith in her.

i have more to say but this is already so long and ive said a lot, so i'll end it here :) at the end of the day, some people are just not going to like mara and thats totally fine. she's not everyone's type, bc she IS ambitious and manipulative and sometimes cruel. i just wish she didnt get a disproportionate amount of hate for being like that when i know for a fact that if she was a male character she would not get this much hate, and i wish that people could just dislike her normally without lying about her or misinterpreting her character and motivations. but if you dont like her, you dont like her! sometimes we just dislike characters, sometimes for well thought out reasons snad sometimes just for no reason! thats completely fine, as long as you're respectful!!

[coffeeandmoonthoughts]

04.05

It feels like it’s so easy for me to fall right off the side of the planet. Which leaves me feeling like I need to death-grip the whole thing just to stay afloat. It’s so easy for me to get distracted. Or my mind to fill with the wants, needs, opinions, the clutter of others’ ideas. I don’t want that. I want to feel crystal clear with myself. I want to listen carefully and hear my own intuition. It’s so effortless to get caught up with literally anything else. That tiny little whim can be so easily drown out behind the clutter of everything else I’m picking up on (a highly controversial subject of something called mirror-neurons and emotional contagion, among other things). And when I can’t hear myself, I become afraid. It’s scary to soak up everyone else, until there is no room for you. At least, it feels that way. It’s hard to recognize the difference between something stemming from roots deep within myself, or from someone else near me. It forces me to defensively cling to myself. Which, after a while, doesn’t always feel good either. I don’t want a death grip on life. Lightly, lightly. Life is too easy for it to feel this hard. Easy and lightly. It seems I can go weeks before I finally find a way to shut out everything and sit in singularity. Shut out… that’s not the right word. “Shut out” hints at closing a door, putting up a wall or tightly boarding up windows. No, it’s more of a clearing out. The sweeping out of some unwanted, unasked-for clutter. Everyone else’s mess. But, I’m not boarded up or sealed shut. I’m clear with myself. I guess that would be the word to use… It sounds so strange to talk about. Feelings. Because it requires a leap of the imagination into the unknown or unknowable. It’s a risk of sounding stupid to someone who cant think more abstract. Something science can see, but not see. I (with all my facts and scientific brain) am still learning to be okay with it. My right brain and left brain wrestling with each other when they should be working in unison, fusing different vantage points into one idea I can actually work with. I think, this is what you call surrendering to life. I can understand it, barely wrap my head around it but see it crystal clear. And instead of fighting it, find a way to work side by side with it. Flow with it. Stay clear with it. Embrace it. Rework it in a way that benefits me, or allow it to rework me in a way that benefits my life. Understanding that there is so much that I do not understand, but by having faith, it will simply be. Eventually, when I’m able to feel clear, I wont feel like I want to jump out of my skin anymore. Yes, sometimes it feels that way. When my neurons are firing so fast that all I want to do is jump out of my brain, my body, that for some reason was built/wired this way, fine-tuned and developed over time. But if I can learn a way to work with it, to bend not break, to have more flex and give, it will make things easier. Less resistance. It’s kind of like a feather in the wind. The feather gets blown around but it’s so light that it doesn’t get ripped apart. It simply floats back safely to the ground, intact. This is the reason skyscrapers are built flexible. Because if they weren’t they would snap. This is why humans, in futile resistance, might subject themselves to more suffering than needed. The trick isn’t in finding a way to land on the ground, the trick is in learning how to maintain your feather spine while bending in the gusts of wind, even embracing them. I’d like to know how to do that. 

In this particular dream I was in a house. Not my house, someone else’s. I was coming over for something, with a number of people, and I was the first to arrive. In the dream I remember I was flustered because one of the rooms wasn’t clean for company. I mean, it was an utter disaster by anyone’s standards. But it wasn’t a main room. Still, I was so annoyed that the person hadn’t prepared for company or cleaned. I started cleaning myself even after the company had arrived. They stayed in a main room and I hoped they wouldn’t come into the other room while I cleaned. It felt like the more I cleaned, the messier it became. I cleaned the floor and for some reason (it’s a dream- it doesn’t have to make sense) the floor was paper thin and started peeling off. It came apart. And under it was broken strips of wood. The strips of wood were splintered and there were massive holes between beams. I tried to fix it as best I could. I even moved something over the hole to cover it but it just got worse, until everything came in swirling around the room. It was like a black hole except I was in it. Debris came in through the hole in the floor and it was utter chaos. Paper and things came flying into the room in a whirlwind and I couldn’t stop it. Eventually I gave up. I got the host and told the host that this was on them. I did what I could. It wasn’t my fault and any unfavorable opinion from the guests (three men sitting at a kitchen table) was on them, not me. I washed my hands clean of it, even though I was a mess and practically furious from frustration. Like I said, its a dream. It doesn’t have to make sense. Usually in dreams, none of it makes sense and its all a bit wonky (our vision is spotting, sometimes actions are just mere flashes or feelings, sometimes the whole dream takes place in a matter of a couple seconds and in order to remember it we need to run through the feeling and flashes immediately after we wake up). But we always remember the feeling. Because despite the facts, however exaggerated or omitted they may be, the feeling is what remains with us - you cant fake it. It sticks around with us even after the fact. That feeling of uncontrollable flying debris. The feeling of trying to damn up a gaping hole. The feeling of being the black hole. Even right now it’s making me want to crawl right out of my own skin. 

Me: Well, seems that during this time Neptune was on top of Mercury. Neptune being the planet influencing our dreams and Mercury being the planet of communication. Makes sense. Everything feeling so water and foggy. This all taking place in Pisces, which is the opposite of Virgo which rules our logic and rational mind. Opposing sign. Which may mean our logical mind isn’t working the way we like and may send us inward to listen to our intuition. Needing us to be able to discern between what is true, rooted in reality and what is coming in through intuition or what is based in fear or old patterns, programming or reverting to the past because it’s what is comfortable. And Venus (planet of love) and mercury will be moving out of Pisces and moving into Aries which is way more direct and fiery and even playful. So, thank god that watery abyss is over now.

Also me: Astrology isn’t real. You’ve had a migraine for two weeks straight. I think thats foggy enough. But good news, girl, you finally broke through your migraine. 

04.09

I was walking down a pathway. A sidewalk of sorts. It was between shops and brick buildings and I was walking with my dog and my sister. The concrete was old and cracked and weirdly poured and shaped. I remember telling her about a way to make caramel cake that I saw someone doing and I tried it myself. Then, I remember the sidewalk slanted rapidly and twisted around a tree. Part of it was broken and you had to let yourself down and then jump over something. I tried it first and was explaining to my sister how to do it. Then we kept walking. But all of a sudden I was on an old street I used to live by. I was walking down the sidewalk by myself. A truck came up behind me, still a distance away, and I turned around to get a look at it. It was an old white ford and it was swerving back and forth. The driver was drunk. He could barely keep his eyes open. I thought to myself, oh no I have to get out of his way. He wrecked his truck into a building and stumbled out with a shot gun and started walking. Oh my god, I thought. This looks really bad. He didn’t look like he was going to shoot someone up though. He looked like someone who was two sheets from the wind and trying to save the shotgun he didn’t want to leave in his truck. He carried it around and stumbled into buildings like a video game character stuck in a glitch. I looked around to see if anyone else was seeing this. No one else was around, except for his equally drunk friend who was walking far ahead of me in the exact same scenario. I quietly panicked, not wanting them to notice me but felt like I had to find someone, to get their attention. Although they weren’t causing a trouble yet, no one in their right mind walks around drunk on the street haphazardly carrying a shotgun. I felt like it had bad news written all over it and then I woke up.

Last night I fell asleep around 8 pm. I didn’t mean to. I was sitting in bed working on my laptop with my dog by my side. A sense of overwhelming drowsiness suddenly swept over me. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. There was no reason for me to be falling asleep that early, it just sort of came out of nowhere. I actually nodded off a few times before I let my laptop drop to the floor next to me. When I woke up from this dream it was 3:08 am. Despite my sleepy haze I noticed the bedroom door was wide open and the hallway light was glaring at me. That’s weird, I thought. I always keep the door shut when the dog is with me because he roams and gets into trouble. And I always keep the light off because it pours into the room and right into my eyes. I rolled over and went back to sleep until I woke up at 5 am and found my phone floating around in the blankets, no alarm even set. Most of the things in this dream make sense. Earlier that day I saw a large white truck that was driving too slow. I also saw a hack to making a homemade caramel that some woman put on a cake. I guess it hit me in my feels because it carried over into my dreams. The rest of the dream was just little bits and pieces I don’t remember. The thing I don’t understand is the two drunk men toting shotguns and why my door was wide open and the light was on. Most things I can usually link to mental processes, but sometimes they don’t make sense at all. 

[viralhottopics]

After 5 Years Of Relying On Medication, I Can Finally Sleep

Its been a long time since Ive written anything. And while my intentions were to blog every fortnight, this post has been extremely tough to write. For once I found it quite difficult to articulate my feelings and experiences, because of the personal nature of what I’m about to tell you.

A few weeks ago, I found myself chatting to one of my new friends, who is also an amazing business coach and mentor. He asked me how things were going aside from business, how are you feeling, just in general?. I thought about it and said, did you know, this is the first time in five years that Ive been able to sleep without taking a pill?

Insomnia has been affecting my ability to sleep properly since late 2010. It was kicked off by a freak hockey ball to the head incident, which then transpired into mental health problems (thanks, brain). Around 1 in 3 people have or have had some degree of insomnia in their lives. For an unlucky few (like me) insomnia is/was chronic. If youre one of them and are reading this, know that its okay, there IS a way out.

Back in 2010 I got a wild smack to the forehead from a fast flying hockey ball, I was briefly knocked out and I opened my eyes not even realizing what had happened, but bizarrely, I was laughing! It wasnt until I felt the huge lump on my head that it suddenly hit me (hah, pun intended). Soon after this, I had developed intense trouble sleeping and experienced extreme headaches and photophobia.

In my traditional headstrong fashion I refused to go to the doctor, that was a bad decision. Months later things seemed to be getting worse in my head space. After seeing a bunch of specialists and getting an MRI and all that, it was concluded that I had Post Concussion Syndrome (a minor form of traumatic brain injury).

Because of this, my health took a drastic downward spiral. I was lethargic, had constant headaches, was depressed, irritated, and slightly delusional. The doctors prescribed me dozens of painkillers to cope. I was studying a BMA at the time, and working so I could afford to live out of home and life spun out of my control. The brain does crazy things when it experiences trauma, and for a long long time I was not myself.

I was enrolled in a national head injury study. They interviewed me about the events and my experiences, then they interviewed some of my friends and family. Every six months my reaction time and short-term memory were tested, as well as my mood and general quality of life. It took almost two years for me to get back to normal. I dont know why it was such a long time, perhaps some people are more susceptible to these kinds of things. A lot of people in my family battle with mental illnesses. But even when I was feeling better, I still had to rely on medication to sleep.

Luckily for me, my doctors had refused to give me traditional sleeping pills such as Zopiclone, because of their addictive qualities. That was fine by me, I never intended to be stuck taking pills before bed. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt survive without them. At first it was Amitriptyline, a drug in high doses used to treat depression, but I was on it for headaches and as a muscle relaxant.

Sometime after I finished my degree in late 2012, I changed doctors due to not having access to the medical center on campus. My new doctor tried to wean me off taking the medication, I was all in. But it just didnt work. I went back to him after slowly reducing my intake at his guidance and tried a few months without anything. In mid-2013 I had more responsibility with my job which added some stress, and without any pills before bed I was getting between 1 and 5 hours sleep a night. I got sick a lot, gained a lot of weight, my mood was unstable, and I was quickly becoming very unhappy.

So I went back to my doctor, I was attempting to tell him that I still havent been able to sleep but I sat there crying in his office because I was just so exhausted and frustrated. I just wanted sleep. He recommended putting me through a sleep study and to see a sleep therapist, but this wasnt subsidized and I wasnt financially able to pay for such expensive tests (startup wages, am I right?). So, I opted for the easier just for now option. We tried something new, Quetiapine, an antipsychotic drug which in high doses is used to treat people who are bipolar or schizophrenic. I didnt get a large dose, only small enough to help me sleep. But even then I woke up every morning with a drug hangover and it took me hours every day before I could feel completely awake.

I lived like this for a long time, always having to take a pill before bed. Sometimes that didnt even work. I vividly remember how I felt after a huge hike over NZs Tongariro Crossing and then the 2-hour drive home. I was so tired, so exhausted after that I could hardly eat. I was thinking surely, surely I am this tired I must be able to sleep. But then as soon as my head hit the pillow my mind became awake, overactive and as much as I tried, I couldnt settle it down. A few hours later I begrudgingly got up and gulped down that damn pill, desperate for the relief of sleep.

This is when I started researching sleeping techniques. Over the past year and a half I have tried everything; yoga, meditation, walks in the evening, less coffee, less sugar, evening protein, writing down to-do lists and thoughts in a journal beside my bed, sleep tea, calm tea, chamomile tea, peppermint tea, Chinese herbs, sleep drops, lavender under my pillow, hops under my pillow, sleep apps with meditation, hypnosis, screen dimmers, installing Flux on my computer, melatonin, no screens (mobile, TV, Computer) two hours before bed, non-fictional reading before bed, homeopathy just everything.

Sometimes it would help, Id feel sleepy, try to drift off, then all of a sudden my mind would wake, even though Id be so so physically tired. I didnt know it was possible to feel so exhausted and awake at the same time. So I would carry on using my little pills to sleep and feeling hungover in the morning. I hated it, I never truly felt awake in all that time. And if I ever went somewhere and forgot my pills Id always get restless nights with little or no sleep.

A lot of time went past, living like this. After deciding to leave Hamilton to travel, I ended up in Perth, Australia. By the time I got here my little box of magic sleeping pills from New Zealand had run out. I attempted fate once more and tried to cold turkey my way to sleep. It really wasnt working out for me. The smallest noise, a single thought, any slight disturbance would set me off and my mind would begin racing once more. No matter what I did, I just couldnt sleep. There is nothing worse or more hopeless than the feeling of wanting and needing sleep so badly but you just cant get there and you realize your own mind is the only barrier to falling asleep. I remember thinking, how hopeless am I that I cant even perform the simple human function of sleeping?.

The one good thing that came out of these few weeks was my deep inner search for a reason. I didnt feel like my head injury was the cause of not being able to sleep, it just seemed like some sort of instigator. Im not going to share the details, but what I realized was that I had become afraid of sleep, and everything else was just an excuse.

I ended up seeing a wonderful doctor here who prescribed me some medication to sleep again and referred me to a counselor who specialized in sleep therapy. I gladly took the medication and debated whether I was ready for a counselor. I wanted to overcome my insomnia on my own (I had only just started acknowledging that this is really what I had), but sometimes you cant do everything on your own, sometimes you need to accept that you need a bit of a helping hand. And this is what I did.

The first session with my counselor was amazing. She knew what had happened without me having to say much, she said it and I sat there and cried. I cried as years of pent up emotion and holding back just escaped from me and it was so relieving. Her theory was I had developed an unconscious fear of sleeping because I lose control over myself and have to give in to the environment around me. I didnt feel . Of course, I knew logically that I was safe, but there was a deep fear within me that I had never let go of, a blocked memory; trauma. It had nothing to do with my head injury, that was a catalyst, as well as some other events that happened between then and now.

And so started my road to recovery. I went to the counselor once a fortnight. We didnt just talk about sleeping, we talked about a lot and it was really nice. I finally found an app that helped ease me into the sleeping mind-frame, Pzizz. Every morning within half an hour of waking up I get at least an hour of exercise outside. If not, I try to sit in the sun for 20 minutes or be active in some other way. I dont drink coffee after 3pm and limit myself to two a day (on bad days). I dont have much processed sugar, I write to-do lists every day in my diary so I dont lie in bed and think about everything I have to remember to do tomorrow. My bedroom has become an area for sleep every time I watch something on my laptop in bed it affects the amount and quality of sleep I get, so Ive stopped doing that.

Routines are also very important I do the same thing before bed every night. I also try to stick to the same hours, but Im still learning to sleep so I havent been using an alarm, just trying to slowly get back into the right rhythm. Right now I usually fall asleep between 12am, wake up at about 6, then go back to sleep until 9 or 10. Its not the pattern I love, and I still have many days where some nights are better than others, but Im getting there, Im improving and Im not giving up.

My mood has become better, my skin clearer, Im no longer getting sick every few weeks and my focus levels are at an all-time high. I still have a lot of work to do, but for the first time in over four years I can sleep without medication, and it feels so damn good.

Read more: http://tcat.tc/2k1UOuo

from After 5 Years Of Relying On Medication, I Can Finally Sleep