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randomgentlefolk · 2 years ago

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CPC CHAPTER 139

Tw: $uicide

Please reach out, if you need help or if someone you know is struggling. I absolutely implore you to please seek help and help your closed ones.

I'm going to try my best to discuss about this respectfully.

But to be quite honest, I don't even know how to start with this. This is yet the darkest cpc chapter. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the warning. So let's start with the beginning of the chapter, shall we?

So it turns out Leelathae will be going to another country, I think? Or at least another kingdom.

Since she's in the same carriage as Jack's, I'm guessing Jack will find out she's inside the trunk when she accidentally make a noise or when he opens it up to check the clam?

I wonder what Leelathae will ask the clam, or if she would even ask it something. Maybe she will ask what her future holds for her? Or maybe about her folktale tragedy?

Anyway, here's some sweetening before we get to the Gwen part.

Ayy we get to see young Molly :D she looks so pretty.

And Leelathae's reaction to the clam is hilarious lol. I would be pretty dang confused too if a giant clam just starts to talk to me outta nowhere 💀

Okay, let's discuss.

This chapter reminds of this post I made about Leelathae

Now, first of all.

As I said before, I'll try to discuss this topic as respectfully and thoughtfully but still thoroughly as I can.

Gosh this chapter.. Now not only Gwen feels guilty for everything, her siblings will feel even more regrets and guilt too.

This chapter hurts so bad, because it hits really hard (and unfortunately relatable for me). And the worst part? It wasn't unexpected. Gwen has shown signs and we've seen her mental health goes worse and worse. We cannot do anything because we're just an audience behind the screen. I know this is all fictional, but it still hurts knowing some people in real life actually go through this.

Mental health is very important to take care of and Lambcat has done a correct disturbing "example" of what happens if we neglect it for too long. It's not something to romanticize about, it's something really disturbing and need to be talked about. Often times, people who suffers would isolate themselves away from their loved ones. In time like this, it's important to reach out to them but also provide the safe space they need.

Self esteem problem can be something dangerous, no matter what caused it. Honestly, every problem will be dangerous if neglected for so long. Remember chapter 40?

Yeah. If Saffron hadn't pulled her out, she could've.. Gwen is too selfless, that even people around her are starting to hurt too. Maria and Lorena confronting Gwen hurts, because they feel very guilty because they think they are horrible sisters for not noticing Gwen's need. But it's nobody's fault, really. Or maybe it's everyone's fault partially. But can we even blame them? I am speaking from experience here. Talking to someone, opening up, especially to your loved ones is one of the most difficult thing to do. I can't imagine myself telling my family that I don't love myself. Because I love them.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about these to your closed ones, you absolutely should. I'm saying that it's.. difficult, ya know?

And while reaching out to someone struggling is very important to do, often times we don't even know that they're struggling. That causes us to feel guilty for not being there for them. Even though we actually are always there for them, we just didn't know that they needed help.

In short, what I'm trying to say is: Is anybody really at fault here?

I almost forgot to talk about this.

This panel was absolutely heart breaking. The regret, the fear, everything.

Gwendrick is cute and all, but I don't think they should immediately go to a relationship. Both Gwen and Frederick desperately need help. They should work on themselves first before continuing their relationship.

Alright, theory time.

I wonder who will wake Gwen up? I'm hoping we will get to learn every kinds of love (platonic, romantic, familial) through Gwen's wake. I don't want true love kiss to wake her up. Maybe a little romantic love, but familial and platonic love are important too. Maybe the whole cpc, her family, and Frederick will come to her aid? Perhaps even Leopold would come too?

Remember, I'm saying all of these from my perspective. So there's a chance I might be wrong. If I am, please do correct me. Mental health is a topic that must be handled carefully, and I'm trying to do that.

Okay, before I end this post, here's a summary of what I've written about mental health and a message for all of you.

Remember, big problems stem from a tiny little problem. It's like a seed, or perhaps a weed. If you let it grow, it will grow wildly and taking control of it will be difficult. Neglect is perfect for growing this weed. If you ignore a weed, it will grow and take the plant's nutrition (aka your happiness and health), wouldn't it?

Therefore, don't neglect your health. Pay attention to your needs and take care of yourself, alright? You're worth much more than you think you are. Loving yourself isn't something that can be done forever, but just know that there are people who love and care about you.

Stay safe, okay? Don't forget to hydrate and take care of yourself. If you're having serious problems, please seek help to a professional, as I'm not one of them. All I can do is just tell you that you're worth everything <3

(You can probably tell that I'm highly interested in talking about this. To be fair, I have always been interested in mental health subject and psychology since I was in grade school haha)

See ya guys, gals, and pals.

#cursed princess club #cpc

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thecaptainsbunk · 10 days ago

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had a moment last night i could very clearly feel the healed parts of my brain and it was weird.

recap for those who haven't read my mental breakdowns on here, or don't follow my main: i have many mental illnesses because i was neglected or otherwise treated badly for most of my life. One of the symptoms of these is the huge big depression rumination spiral that happens when any number of things that might go wrong does.

A lot of the things that trigger me are Normal Fucking Human Interactions. This probably has something to do with the Autism. This is neither here nor there.

Another thing that can trigger the depression spiral is sub-drop.

You're starting to see why this is here and not on my main now, yes?

Guess what happens when those two things collide?

yeah.

I'm gonna... figure out a patch for the sub-drop cause I am sort of still feeling it a little, and I'm not sure masturbating it away is going to help as much as I want it to lol. I mean don't get me wrong, that's absolutely something I'm doing later probably but i'm going to try not to use it as a mend for the actual problem I'm having because I could accidentally make it worse instead, I probably got super lucky the way it panned out last night.

Cause guess what happened last night.

Listen... I know what happens when I cum. I know. I'm the easiest slut and the subbiest sub this side of the Mississippi (i assume), I'm just, y'know, don't have a lot of takers on the offer as it were. But hey, I can get myself to sub-space just fine all by myself.

I just have to make sure there's a plan to catch myself and last night the plan... faltered a little. Mainly because I had not communicated this was necessary and also because of timing. It was late, everyone was tired, rough evenings had been had, it's been a long stretch of stressful shit, there's more stressful shit in the world to get taken care of, stuff's just happening.

So I wasn't expecting to have to do anything more than just the usual night time routine to catch myself from dropping and because the usual routine hit a small snag in the form of Sudden Intense RSD due to circumstances I am aware are not actually the issue, the drop happened shortly thereafter.

And I desperately tried to slide into the normal spiral. The spiral that takes me down into the worst parts of my psyche and tells me all the horrible things I believe are true, and that everyone hates me. Like I was actively aiming for the spiral at one point and I just could. Not. Get there.

My brain kept turning around and reminding me those things weren't fucking true and to say them was really mean about the people in my life actually.

DO you know how fucking weird that is? do you even understand how it feels to be cock-blocked from your own menty-b you control because your brain says that's too mean to everyone involved including myself?????

It's not perfect. Just because the spiral didn't happen doesn't mean the effects aren't still there. I did manage to get it up again, as it were, and take care of business, as it were to try and get the endorphins back running enough so I could just go straight to sleep and skip the possibility of a 2nd sub-drop (mr. president etc. etc.)

I've had a handle on my inability to have a good time post orgasm for a while now, at least that it's a Thing That's Specifically My Brainchemistry and not something people are doing to me - that's a separate type of traumatic sub-drop i've experienced, different entirely from what I usually go through for the Normal Style and masturbation levels of sub-drop. I know how to catch myself most times, and I can avoid it for the most part if I sleep immediately afterwards (assuming my dreams cooperate, if the stars are misaligned i'm fucked lmao).

And sometimes if I'm feeling especially self-hate-y I will entertain the sub-drop and subsequent extreme depression that can sometimes carry on for a couple days. Not dropping as much and also having generally a better life over all has reduced this urge for self-destruction by a lot but I was kind of feeling it last night.

except that I apparently wasn't.

I kept trying and trying and it just... my brain kept saying "no, that's not true. Reframe it. Look at it again. Remember that this is different now. Use the new rules" and turning me around, over and over again.

I reminded myself that i was stressed out - see aforementioned long-term stressors that aren't going away as quickly as we want for the whole family, my usual mental health struggles, the upcoming election, learning my sister's going to have a baby, I am currently extremely conflicted and so of course my brain is going to latch onto the negative things.

It's just never had so few negatives to latch onto and then use Actual Logic And Reasoning to talk itself out of.

And I think the main reason this has never worked before, aside from all the hard fucking work I've been doing to fix my goddamn brain and make it happier over all, is because i'm not being gaslit by anyone here. No one is trying to change the way I'm seeing the world, no one is trying to tell me my perceptions are wrong (well- I need to figure out a way to communicate my needs on that one, but like, it's a non-issue because it's not intentional, it's not manipulative, it's desperately trying to get me to be nice to myself and sometimes I just cannot but like. I get it. I'll figure it out).

My world is more stable just by virtue of being surrounded by people who aren't actively trying to make me see the world only specifically their way and no other ways. There's still stuff that like. yeah I wish some stuff worked differently than the way it does in my life, and the whole disabilities thing is...crushing most days more than it isn't. but like... at least i know the way that the world is is real, and not like... whatever i'm being fed. I think i could tell that the thigns I was being told and the stuff I was seeing didn't match up, and I think it really affected me a lot more than I realize sometimes.

Plus side, I have now identified two important things I need to work on: plans for post-nut-drop and being open outside of the breakdown on why flat pushback on my negative world view and self-esteem during breakdowns is not actually helpful despite the best intentions, and may be actually making shit worse in the moment that I can't effectively communicate *during* the breakdown. So there's that.

And, y'know, hey the healing is working. It's super unsatisfying to not go all the way down the spiral the way I'm used to because this is the only other way I know how to get through the drop is to just ride it out, which is what is currently happening right now. I'm just....gonna have to figure out how to use my words. And maybe pick a better time than today for the hard conversations.

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angelnumber27 · 4 years ago

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Checking in! I know you've been having a hard time lately with physical and mental health. You don't need to answer this if you don't want to but youre going to be alright. Take care of yourself make sure you're taking meds if you need them. Stay safe okay!!!

Thank you sweet heart! I really appreciate you checking up 💓😇 Im doing much better today :) I finally got some sleep after two days and had a calm and good day 🤍🤍🧚🏻‍♂️💆🏻‍♀️🕊 I made some art, did a study on fungi and their shapes and did a lot of productive things like cleaning up and reading and writing :) my body is extremely sore like everywhere but I don’t mind as long as I’m not in full panic mode constantly. That happens occasionally. I take my meds exactly as prescribed every single day! I know myself and I know how important it is to be consistent with what I am putting in my body because my body is incredibly sensitive to changes, especially chemical ones. Therefore, its not withdrawal from medication, things would be much much MUCH worse if that was the case. I’m talking crying endlessly every waking minute and not being able to stop, calm down or self-soothe and suicidal ideation that I can’t shake, severe brain zaps every 2-5 minutes, feeling hot, nauseous, restless, sometimes I’ll get like muscle aches and spasms, and bad depression as well as all of my severe and unmanageable ocd symptoms immediately flooding back. Those rare times when I accidentally run out of medication or when I’m not able to take it for a few days for whatever reason, make me realize just how much my medication is helping and how much of a difference it makes. I’m like damn I must have felt SO horrible before I was prescribed.. or it’s likely that it wasn’t really that bad before but since my body is now used to receiving the medication every day it becomes that bad when I don’t take it for like 72 hours. Its kind of sad bc I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stop taking it. Idk about anybody else but honestly I think I would rather take one little pill daily than experience awful constant panic, hysterical crying, deep fear and impending doom. It’s worth it for me. Of course everyone is different and the medication that has been life-changing for me could very well make the next person feel suicidal. Everybody has different brain chemistry and unfortunately it takes some trial and error to find what works for you but I think (depending on the situation ofc) it is worth it to give it a try. So sorry for rambling, that’s just how my mind works lol. I think of one thing and a million other things stem from that. I don’t know if people understand this but when I say I have racing thoughts I mean seriously RACING thoughts. Nonstop, super ‘loud’ and intrusive thoughts bombarding my brain from every angle that are very very difficult to turn off or soothe. Anyway all in all I am doing well and I am staying as safe as possible. I was thinking about it today and honestly considering my situation and everything I have been through, I am doing extremely well and I am incredibly healthy. For somebody in my position, with my trauma, having being stalked and harassed daily for the past four years by somebody who knows about my trauma, the false sense of loneliness, severe depression, panicky tendencies, unbridled stress, negative surroundings, patterns of thinking, memories of abuse and the ways that has taught me to view myself, as well as the various mental illnesses I am constantly combatting, I’m excelling all things considered lol.

If anybody actually read this this far thank you SO much you’re an angel and I appreciate you caring about me and my wellbeing more than you know. I really really hope everybody is having a beautiful day and that you are all in a position in life that is comfortable and safe.

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johannas-motivational-insults · 4 years ago

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I’d love to get some commentary on the scene in Demons where Catra finally decides to say fuck it and leave the Horde? Or, if it is answered already, maybe the scene in chapter 31 where Catra is struggling with the narratives of being a villain and a victim? Because those scenes came for me while reading. In different ways, of course.

Sure thing! The first was already requested so I’ll take the second. I’ll leave out the part right at the end because that’s after the reminiscing on this theme in particular is over and the content is pretty triggering. (Commentary is bolded.)

You know, it’s funny. This wasn’t initially a theme I was planning to specifically focus on in the chapter even though it was always there in the background. But I was going through a really rough couple weeks mental health wise when I finished this chapter and the kinds of things that were going on in my head ended up making it onto the page.

I’m someone who had a very rough childhood for a plethora of reasons and has always felt the world was out to get me, but at the same time I’m not blameless either. As much as I’ve always tried to be a good person, there were times when I wasn’t, and it’s easy for me to look back at what I went through and wonder a) how much of it was due to me accidentally being selfish or alienating people and b) if maybe I ended up deserving it in the end based on who I became later. And I think that’s a mental trap a lot of abuse survivors fall into... they were hurt and end up lashing out to express themselves or because they can’t hold it in anymore, or they just don’t know how to have functional relationships and end up being toxic to other people, and then start to think “oh they were right about me, I’m a terrible person who’s undeserving of love.”

That mental battle really fit well with what was going on with Catra, because she’s been plagued with these nightmares that remind her of all the ways she was hurt but also carry all these terrible messages about her lacking worth and agency. Compound that with Lonnie showing up and not letting her act like she was only a victim (which is true) and her guilt over the way people are still afraid of her and in general over being a recovering villain, and then of course the way she reacted to Adora’s confession earlier in the chapter, it was this big mess with these two narratives of her own life being in conflict. Even the Octavia flashback lined up incredibly well with that idea once I took Baby Catra’s thoughts the direction I did. So yeah, that’s how this whole bit was born.

The longer she punches, the sicker she feels. She hates Shadow Weaver, and she hates her life. The memory won’t stop playing in her head. Remembering that pain, that helplessness, it makes her feel like a tiny bug being crushed under the heel of a cruel fate. A lowly creature destined only to suffer and then get stamped out on a whim, her remains dragged across rough concrete until they disintegrate, leaving nothing but an ugly stain to be washed away.

That imagery is beautiful and I might have cried a lot while writing it. It’s just... something I feel.

But that’s just her victim complex talking, isn’t it?

Big ouch. I owe this line to the retooled opening scene which @malachi-walker helped me build. I did write Lonnie’s line about this myself, but credit where credit is due, she gave me ideas to make the chapter better and it was so much better and coherent theme-wise after that.

No, Catra’s no victim. She’s a straight up villain. That overwhelming hatred eating her from the inside, it’s for herself as much as Shadow Weaver. What kind of monster behaves the way she did back in Adora’s room?

Okay to be fair Catra was not totally in the wrong there, it’s a complicated situation, but she’s spiralling so she’s not exactly a reliable narrator here. (Adora similarly ends up thinking she was the one at fault, so there you go.)

In her defense, she was caught off guard. Catra already understood, after much discussion, that the relationship between Adora and their guardian was not as rosy as it had appeared to her all those years. But that knowledge did nothing to prepare her. The thought of Shadow Weaver hurting Adora, hurting that anxious, loving, vulnerable child, it made her want to scream. (You and me both, Catra.) To hug Adora and tell her she didn’t deserve it, never could have possibly deserved that. But did she? No. Adora told Catra something horrifying and she couldn’t even sympathize, too caught up in her own rage and jealousy to show concern for someone she supposedly cares about. But what else is new?

Really, what else is new?

Maybe she had a point, maybe Adora was wrong to equate their experiences. Maybe Adora was never trying to, and it just felt that way. Catra’s not in the right headspace to evaluate that right now. But either way, it didn’t justify that kind of reaction. It’s like those incidents in her childhood with Octavia, with Lonnie and Adora. Standing up for herself and expressing her feelings shouldn’t mean having to attack, to brutalize her prey. But a beast knows no different.

I hate (love) when we can just see the way Shadow Weaver has shaped her thinking and is still hurting her even from beyond the grave.

Lonnie was right, Catra’s just like Shadow Weaver. She’s trying to be better than her, swore to her that she would be, but she isn't. She never will be. Shadow Weaver crafted Catra in her own image, cut away the good parts of her and molded what remained into something sharp and ugly, forged it in fire until it was as hard and unforgiving as her. (Another load of imagery I relate to and cried a lot at.) Even if she wasn’t a monster to begin with, that witch poisoned her and turned her into one. And there is no antidote, not for this affliction.

She should never have dragged the squad out here, convinced Adora to leave the safety of the Crystal Castle, let Scorpia and Entrapta believe she’s someone they can trust, someone worth following and protecting. She’ll destroy every single one of them. All she does is hurt people.

Oh daaaamn and the use of the heartbreaking canon lines to make everything worse. There is more of that coming next chapter. ;)

Man, the crippling self-doubt at the end of this chapter where you can see she wants to do good but she feels like she’s incapable of it is so fucking heartbreaking. When you get told you’re bad and nothing but a waste of space it is so hard to believe that you can actually do good things. And we know everyone currently at the Crypto Castle loves Catra and respects her enough to follow her lead, but in the throes of this spiral she can’t believe that, she can only believe the things Shadow Weaver taught her to believe about herself, which came true to an extent but really it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Catra is doing so well fighting back against that programming and seeing her backsliding like this is so tragic, but ultimately realistic. That’s why I decided to incorporate it into the story.

I should also say, the fic You Do Not Have To Be Good certainly influenced this chapter. Chapter 9 pretty much destroyed me emotionally when I was already in a bad place and it contains some similar themes and fucking amazing imagery, which no doubt inspired me to write this part in particular the way I did. So you all can also thank SleepySappho for this. Go give that fic some love, if you’re down to read more of this kind of stuff as well as BDSM.

(Bonus Fact, because surely some of you are wondering by now: the chapter ending wasn’t planned. There were vague plans for Catra to have a relapse and/or contemplate ending things but I wasn’t planning to put it here. But as I wrote that bit I realized this was where it should go, this was where it made the most sense, it felt like the correct climax/crisis in the arc that’s been building in the last 5 chapters. And the other plans I had and things I had set up worked really well with it and I decided to go that way. But shh, let everyone else think I’m just a genius for the way everything ends up coming together lol.)

#sorry this one is just like dwarfed in commentary but because it's such a recent scene I remember this well and i had Things to Say #ask games #director's commentary #spop #catradora #fanfic #demons #writing #asks #ladystud

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canadian-riddler · 6 years ago

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How are you so good at refuting common negative trends and replacing them with wholesomeness?

There are a few reasons I’m able to do this:

- I am very independent. To be independent means you have to be able to depend on yourself, no matter what happens or no matter how you feel. If I get into some sort of situation, be it mundane (like the day I accidentally ran out of money) or a little more extreme (the day I ended up in a hospital in Las Vegas), I have to be able to get myself out of it. And to be able to do that, you have to be able to push aside all the knee-jerk panic stuff and ask yourself: this is where I’m at, this is where I need to be. I have to get there, by myself. So how am I going to do it? Not doing it is not an option. I MUST do it. I literally cannot afford to be negative because once I get stuck in that, it’s all over for me.

- I am very logical. Negativity is often heavily influenced by emotion. I understand by now that I do not make good decisions when I am angry, so I no longer make decisions at that time. I try not to post about it on the Internet. I try not to even tell anybody about it. It’s better to let it go then to find some way to perpetuate it. Additionally, most trends have a core cause that you can identify and understand if you step back and assess it logically. Why don’t people post good news on their blogs? Because they open themselves up to a flood of people coming up and going ‘must be nice to have such a perfect life’. Why don’t people talk about liking themselves on their blogs? Because they open themselves up to a flood of people coming up and going ‘must be nice to be able to not hate yourself’. Every trend has a core reason. Once you understand where it comes from, you can make an informed choice to join it or to reverse it.

- I understand that negative thinking breeds more negative thinking. It’s a known fact that the human brain searches for the negative. It’s a known fact that negative emotions (sadness, anger, despair, etc.) chain your emotional state down and influence you to keep engaging in that behaviour. Even when you have the wherewithal to understand you should not be doing that to yourself, your state of mind doesn’t allow you to do anything else. The key is to catch yourself before you go down farther than you can get yourself out of.

- I do not let other people tell me what to think about myself. When you’re on social media, especially if it’s your dominant form of socialisation (i.e. you don’t talk to IRL people that much), you can quickly become dependent on knowing how other people see you. You start to care too much what largely anonymous people on the Internet think about you and you start to lose sight of who you are, at your core. Worse, you start to lose the ability to find that person, because you’ve become so used to validation from others that you cannot validate yourself. Because human beings are more or less pack-minded and don’t like stirring the pot, people just go along with whatever wave is happening at the time and keep their head down even if they think otherwise. But the trouble with that is you can end up thinking in that way regardless just because you’ve been steeping yourself in it.

- I refuse to refer to myself negatively. You will never see me call myself trash, caption my drawings with ‘I know this sucks but take it’, or post my fanfiction with a note that says ‘thanks for reading through this garbage’. If I look at myself in the mirror and think ‘damn I look cute’, I will not follow it up with ‘lol how vain of me’. I of course have negative qualities. But I will not place priority on them over my positive ones. Even if I’m having a mental conversation with myself I will not insult myself and, if I do, I will immediately correct myself.

It’s not about wholesomeness. It is about how the world does its best every single day to take things from you. Your time, your money, your skill, your self-worth. Once you understand this and identify how to keep this from happening to you, that’s when you’ll be able to prevent some of it. Not all of it. But time, money, and skill are give-and-take. You give your time, you get something back. You pay money and receive something for it. Your skill is complemented by someone else’s. But your self-worth? Nobody’s going to give that back, because feeling like you’re better than others is a very potent form of power. So you learn to keep that. Don’t let anyone convince you to give it away or to stop reaching for it.

#so says Indy #asks #Kim #advice you didn't know you needed #late-to-the-fun

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eevachu · 7 years ago

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There once was a girl called kate/most think she’s very great/some people are wrong/They’ve been bad for very long/for their standards no person can abate

EDIT: The person who sent this came forward and clarified that this ask was meant to poke fun at anti-Kate trolls, not Kate fans. I misinterpreted it and flew wildly off the rails (as I am oft want to do lol). The person who sent this couldn’t have known the depths to which I have grieved over this issue as of late, so do not fault them for it. They wanted to send me a joke and I took it the wrong way (ah the similarities here to Kate’s comedy).

I appreciate someone trying to make me laugh. I don’t really appreciate further spreading this drama, but people are entitled to their opinions, so they are also entitled to the consequences of those opinions. I will say, however, I don’t really like comedy that punches down (accidentally or not), because I think many of the people, who, wrongfully justified and misinformed about her or not, are doing it out of a genuine desire to help trans people. I think the puritanical environment that spaces like tumblr create for this type of discussion creates a toxic mindset that looks ridiculous compared to a properly moderated formal debate environment.

I’m keeping the full version under the cut, because they are things that should be said and I am so very tired of seeing people drag her name through the mud based on hearsay. You may use the examples I’ve provided to draw your own conclusions on the matter, as I have drawn mine. I’ve included some footnotes and clarifications. Skip down to the bolded paragraph above the video to avoid the majority of my emotional outburst.

Thank you for sending needless and harmful negativity into my inbox, I really wish you had instead put your time towards a positive goal like volunteering at an animal shelter, working to raise awareness over the plight of indigenous people in Canada or even just telling someone their hair looks nice today. (The thank you was sarcastic, in case that wasn’t clear.) Or hey, maybe you could have just said, “I know you love Kate, but here’s some problematic things she’s done you should be aware of.” Not write a patronizing little ditty. Catch more flies with honey than with open condescension and all that?

Since you seem like one of those sick people that get off to seeing people feel bad and subscribe to tumblr’s toxic black and white morality and witch hunt culture, here is what you accomplished with this ask:

You’ve made me upset, and I’m sure that was your goal. Congrats. I am an adult woman of 25 and I am crying now because of how upset this made me. This is nothing special, I am weepy person, so don’t pat yourself on the back. I tend to care too much and feel too freely; but anon, did you want me to cry? Because here you are. I am crying. Trembling a little too. You getting your rocks off to this? Happy to be of service then.

My being upset has triggered my anxiety over the issue of my admiration of Kate as an openly lesbian comedian versus the occasional problematic content of her comedy. I think about it a lot, because I am a critical person. The anxiety is going to affect me for several days. Right now I’m nauseous. I will now sleep poorly because of it. I will get less work done because of it. I will be in a foul mood for a week, which affects the people around me. I may self-medicate with alcohol or take what I like to call “a gravol nap”. I will lose money because of lost productivity. So you’ve lost me money anon, I’m sure you enjoy that. What is it about suffering that gives you your jollies, anon?

I work freelance, and you’ve interrupted my work day, because I cannot let this stew, so I have to take time out of my day to write out my thoughts as a reply you probably won’t see and take other measures for my own well-being. This really isn’t for you anon, this has been stewing in me for months and this is the last straw.

So here under the cut are my full thoughts on Kate Mc /.Kinnon Berth/ old, they will be rambly as, hey look, I’m dissociating a little (how fun):

Did you know from 2007-2010* Kate played a problematic character called Fitzwillia m that portrayed a dmab character that wanted a vagina? I’m sure you did. Anon, have you actually watched the Fitzwillia m skits? Here’s a link to all of them:

vimeo

Watched them? Opinions? I want your real opinions on them, not just what the witch-hunters have told you to think. You’re probably a smart person, you can make up your own mind.

They’re in poor taste certainly, but a lot of comedy is. I think in the grand scheme of life, in the grand scheme of all human suffering and portrayals of queer characters, Fitzwillia m isn’t the worst. Certainly not great and certainly transmisogynistic, but like… watch a lot of TV from this time, this is practically progressive.

Is Kate maybe attached to this character because so many people loved them, approved of this character, and brought this character back for 3 seasons? That sometimes you do bad things because you don’t know they’re bad or that you do, but damn if you don’t need the money? That sometimes you’re ill-informed about something? That to create a character is to send part of yourself out into the world, and you always will love them even when you shouldn’t? That she hasn’t addressed it because to do so would be a PR nightmare for her publicist? That she likely doesn’t know this is even an issue because she’s not on social media? Probably. I’ve made some terrible characters, who did much worse things, who I am lucky to let die on paper stuffed in a folder where no one can see them. She was 22* when she made this character, in a completely different cultural climate than in 2017. Does it make it right that a whole team of people approved this character out into the world? Not to me. However, I don’t have the right to decide anything about the trans-related nature of Fitzwillia m as a cis person, but context is always important to me.When I was looking for a compilation video, I found trans people who genuinely enjoyed this character. I know I love some absolutely problematic gay characters.

Let’s put this into MY context anon, 2010 is when I met my first ever trans person. Ever. I was 18 and in college. I think it took me like… 2 years to figure out what trans actually was in a healthy way that wasn’t tainted by my culturally ingrained transphobia. I didn’t know dick all about social justice or politics or the queer community. I thought I was maybe bisexual. I thought I knew everything. By coincidence, I’m actually going through my blog today and clearing out posts from that time because they’re terrible, because I was terrible. I’ve changed so much from then, I don’t even recognize this person on this very blog. I’m not famous and those words are entirely mine, so I lose nothing by saying I’m wrong for what I said. Kate could lose jobs and colleagues and friends for addressing her past in a similar manner. She worked collaboratively on those works and people will take offence at her backtracking. It’s all very damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Is it right? Probably not, but it’s understandable. She works for Saturday Night Live, a place where they are constantly making things like:

youtube

That was made in 2015 and this is very mild. In 2015, I had a more senior coworker make a joke about how a couple we could see in the building across from us were “swapping their gay AIDs blood.” I think that’s a much worse “joke” than anything on SNL. I didn’t tell HR because I was afraid to lose my job, as shitty as it was. She wasn’t exactly in a position of power when these things were made, and she isn’t really in a place to speak out against them now. She’s just now hitting her stride. If I can’t stand up in my own workplace, I can’t fault her for not standing up in hers.

Did she joke about never seeing a penis in an interview? Yes. Did I make the same type of jokes until someone came along to tell me what was wrong with it in a nice way? YEP.**

Does she even know it’s an issue is another thing. She doesn’t use social media, certainly not tumblr. I learned basically all I know about the queer community from tumblr. I have no idea where I’d be without it; probably still making transphobic gold star lesbian jokes.

Anon, I’ve read her receipts. I always do. I know what I’m doing by supporting her is a bit problematic, but so are most of the things I do in my life. I eat meat from factory farms. I have a pedigree dog. I live on unceded First Nation’s land. I benefit from systematic racism. I don’t know what the hell my mutual funds are actually invested in. I’ve made rape jokes and said r*tarded. I was a schoolyard bully redirecting my anger onto other because of my home life. I’ve ruined people’s lives by things I’ve said. I have been a truly godawful person.

Here’s why I still love Kate, if always cautiously and never uncritically: from 2014-2015, I had a mental breakdown, until 2016 I lived in this sort of haze. I remember wanting to die a lot. I remember staring at the subway tracks and thinking, “what if I just jumped?” Do you know what that’s like anon? To constantly want to die? To be in a dead end job, to feel like you’re absolutely worthless? To have a pet die and just think “I deserve this suffering, I’m a failure”?

And then I saw her as Jillian Holtzmann and just… something changed. Something truly changed in my life. She helped me figure out I was a lesbian. She helped me see that out lesbian women could succeed. She got me through that 2016 election where I lost all hope again.

Did she actually do anything? I mean, not really. But she represented something to me and to watch people tear her down is to watch a part of myself be torn down with her.

Why do I still love Kate, even if only as an idea, not an actual person? Because her saving my life outweighs the blights in her career. Because I give people the benefit of the doubt that they don’t mean harm, because they aren’t aware of the underlying social issues they are dealing with. Because I do not minimize the harmful way that ra// dical fe /.minists are recruiting young lesbians into the T /.ERF community by calling anyone who creates transphobic/transmisogynistic content TE /.RFs. Because I do not idolize, I admire. Because her job is to make people laugh and I truly don’t think she wants to hurt anyone by doing so. Because people are complicated and good intentioned people can do bad things. Because I want to believe she’s a good person under everything.

Because I am willing to forgive other people for things I have done myself if they seem the sort to be open to learning.

If all else is still unforgivable to you anon, I leave you with this: there’s a part in the movie Julie & Julia, where the main character Julie finds out that the Julia Child, this woman she has idolized and who’s cookbook inspired her to change her life, doesn’t like her work. She is devastated. And her husband says that there’s two Julia’s: the real one, and the one in Julie’s head, who she sees as her savior. The Julia Child in her head is the one that really matters.

Let me have the Kate in my head.

In conclusion: anon, I wish you all the best, just very very far away from me.

Notes:

* I was wrong about the original dates that this aired, BGSS aired from 2007-2010, not 2008-2010, which means season 1 was likely shot in 2006 with Kate was 22-23 when she created Fitzwilli am. I was pretty stupid at 22.

** I am actually really angry about being misled by this quote, because I had never watched the full interview, which you can see here:

youtube

The interview was filmed in 2007, 10 years ago when Kate was 23, she’s 33 now. 10 YEARS. I know I don’t want to be compared to 15 year old me, or really even 23 year old me. Like I really don’t want to be out here “making excuses” but you have to think critically about the context of the things she’s said and how blowing them out of proportion is harmful to people who are actively trying to harm the trans community. Sure, she’s buying into the gold-star rhetoric for a laugh (because it’s a funny joke straight people in my life STILL make to me and so that’s what most young lesbians think is what you do), but she immediately says after “I don’t think [penises] are gross, I think they’re fun! Fun to play with.” That’s not a typical transmisogynist lesbian dialogue (they usually say penises are disgusting). Which yes, equates genitals with gender, but like… I remember in this time period of my life I was doing the same thing. Not out of malice, but because I didn’t know any trans/genderqueer/nonbinary people, I didn’t even know trans men were a thing! In the same interview she says she’s more 98.5% lesbian, it’s very clear that she’s not sure about these things.

You can tell this interview is more an open dialogue between friends trying to have an honest conversation about sexuality in a time that information about sexuality and gender was much harder to obtain. 2007 is long before it became standard for people to qualify that genitals didn’t equate gender. And it’s definitely still not comedy’s standard, and I get what it’s like to constantly be bombarded with cissexist rhetoric that sometimes you just give in to make it easy.

So in real conclusion: I personally think, from my standpoint as a cis lesbian of 25, that tumblr needs to forgive and needs to draw their own conclusions by watching these examples, not repeat this cycle of screaming examples at people without linking those examples. Let people draw their own conclusions and be open to being wrong about something. I was wrong about the entire catalyst for this post, and I am so deeply sorry about it, and will be more careful in the future.

And for the love of god tumblr, stop holding people to such high standards when you probably wouldn’t meet those standards yourself if you were in that same person’s position.

#prefer if you didn't reblog #don't @ me i'm done arguing this #i just really needed to get all this off my chest it's been festering #eevasks #anon #discourse #transphobia #transmisogyny #suicide #anxiety #depression #mental breakdown

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theinkdiaries · 5 years ago

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Earth Asylum

Looking out from a metaphorical bedroom window, iron bars arch across it's length from the windowsill upwards, and reaching further still, all the way to the sky above which is said to limit us, or so they claim.

As for the prison bars on the other side of the faintly tainted glaas. 'It's there to keep you safe.' Was the line they force fed us.

Gazing From within a cozy confinement, all warm and dry in your cage, ignorantly content within captivity, television taught you to play dead I see.

Propaganda programing sunk in nice and deep didn't it, keep playing dead so well you might even get a little treat on month's end. Good boy, keep it up, now sit and roll you ignorant fuck.

Wake up!

Next time you look out of that tightly shut window you got.

See the glass for once.

Realise that you are looking at a distortion of the world.

See the light through the curtains, then notice how its just sparce enough for you to see a picture reflective surface HD display set up to convince us that this man made reality is the only way there is; no exceptions and no alternatives.

For good measure there is a vent in each cage, they added, strategically placed and its purpose is a fucking conspiracy, the truth however is bright red letters in bold print which states: Classified.

Life as We Know It is a sad excuse for existence since living life to the fullest can get you arreste, look around us.

We're being manipulation on a master scale with that artificial glimmer of freedom in the corner of your peripial visit as a tactic to keep your attention locked in place, to override your reasoning skills and replace logical thinking with unambitition and a false self perception leads to miss comprehension which will act as you chains.

The herd mentality has effectively convinced the majority of man that the world that I find myself in is the real deal.

Reinforcement through intimidation, the threat of indirect excommunication, be cast out unless you're buying into whatever everyone else is buying at the time.

As I was, I was cast.

I became withdrawn from the factory line state of mind.

I was pulled away by the subtle Whispers of the wind and became overwhelmed by a sense of belonging as it said to my soul in some unspoken language I didn't know I could understand: 'look at the Earth.' It said, going on in verse it told me to take her tragic beauty before me and as I did I fealt the longing, alive and burning within me.

Suddenly it became super condensed like a rock in my chest and as quickly as it did it then evaporate into thin air and disappeared again.

Just like that the sky was no longer a limit but a familiar playground which existed for me to use at my leisure and I was free to touch the stars; to realise any and all of my dreams, my desire restricted by myself and nothing else.

Suddenly I fealt as if no obstacles exist but the whole truth is that the never did. For the first time since I arrived on this planet I had a sense of freedom washing over my being with no equivalent ever experienced, not before or since the day it happened have I had a more liberating feeling.

The flip side of the coin here is that man's version of freedom is not flreely give and if you do manage to have at it there is always a catch, a few strings attached.

Terms and conditions always apply to the corporate fine print slavery civilisation of modern times. 25 to life or 5 to 9 plus over time.

With this concept still fresh in my mind I can't help but lash out in a violent expression of passion, I was lost for a moment in a flood of anger.

Took a swing at the open air and in doing so I accidentally ended up shoving my fist through the blurry glass that's been blinding my vision.

The third wall shatters on impact and I can finally see the real thing for what it is.

Life in the making is like walking the tightrope trapeze but the safety net isn't there to preven rock bottom from becoming acquainted in an instant.

For balance we stretch out to both left and righ. Hoding on to our center for dear life we have one hand on the boundary between fetus and corpse, and the other reaching for the beyond.

So we keep reaching further and further through the gaps and holes, through the glitches in the system and those missing pieces of existence while the patches loads them back in.

Reaching out to touch the grass, to grasp the transparent energy so familiar yet never before seen, recognition much like a childhood friend passing in the crowd of a newly found Adult World.

After spending way too much time estranged, double take firing up a stormy disaster running in the question which answers itself asking my every cognitive response: do I know you?

Mentally the displayed result like a little box repeating error 343.

Ultimately the conclusion which is the logical step-by-step procedure going available, would you like to:

1: ask stranger if they could recognise me? or press 2: to the conversation method. suggestive reboot of memory might ring a dusty Bell, or option 3: there is a shortage of Fucks and with this economy I can't afford to give any.

The inflation on empathy these days am I right.

Better fuckig make sure your firewall is on before you talk to me, my antivirus already found 4 threats in the chest cavity, and autocorrect placed two files, sad as fuck.

1 virus: the desire to help and 1 malware: anguish, both now in the vault.

Can't be too careful these days might catch some foreign shit like aids or worse kindness, god forbid ; the survival rate is almost as low as the bar we set back in the day, before we dropped it.

Like I'll give you what I have because your in need or some shit like that lol.

Your strange customs intrigue me.

-Inkgrave.v.Godart-

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resbang-bookclub · 8 years ago

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AMA Transcript: A Lack of Armor

Last week, we held our first AMA in the discord chat with @amberlehcar, @peregr1ne and @thesockswhowearsfox, where lots of people stopped in to ask about their work on A Lack of Armor! Here’s some of what went down:

Q: Amber, could you take me through your process of conceiving/planning out this fic? What inspired it originally?

AmberLehcar: Oh man okay, so there was a post floating around that was like "I headcanon Soul as trans and here's why" and I just really dug it.

Peregrine: Wait, was it mine?

AmberLehcar: I don't remember who it was, but they said things like him being hypermasculine to appear more "manly."

Peregrine: I did say that in mine. That's crazy.

AmberLehcar: This was supposed to be for last year's Resbang, so I've kinda forgotten exactly what was all there, but it probably was yours.

Q: So what you are saying is that you and Pere were destined to work together?

AmberLehcar: Pere claimed me last year too! I had to back out after fic claims because life was becoming too much.

Peregrine: I mean you did come to me before that.

AmberLehcar: I did ask Pere a lot of questions. I'm cis/het, so I had a lot to learn and was really lucky that Pere was open and willing to teach me along with being an overall great partner.

Peregrine: I tried my best ^^; It's not like it was hard, just talking about myself pfft.

AmberLehcar: It was helpful though!

Peregrine: I'm glad it was. Was there more you wanted to say about the process?

AmberLehcar: I did a ton of research and was really invested in it. I see a lot of posts about the lack of representation for the LGBT+ community and really felt like I wanted to add.

Peregrine: Yeah, lack of representation really gets to me, especially because what representation there is is highly fetishized and honestly i'd rather have no rep than fetish rep.

Q: For all parties involved, where/how do you feel like you grew the most during this Resbang?

Peregrine: This was my first event where I did more than one fic, so working through that was hard, but I'm glad I did because I really wanted both.

AmberLehcar: I think when I've written in the past, I've been really "this happened then this happened" etc. It was a lot more introspective this time around, so I focused a lot more on the feelings of the characters and evoking feelings in the reader. When I tried to enter this last year, I got to like 6k words but really struggled to get there. With a new direction, I got to 30k fairly easily.

Sox: Well, it was my first Resbang and the first song I'd written since I was....18 I think. Just managing to write and record the song was a lot of growth for me.

Q: Amber, I am always interested in fic titles. Did you come up with the title of your fic beforehand, or did it develop as the story was created?

AmberLehcar: Okay, so I take all my chapter and fic titles from songs or lyrics. But A Lack of Armor made perfect sense to me because of my therapy. A few times in therapy we'd talked about putting on armor that was representative of support and good things in my life. The song "A Lack of Armor" has a line that says "like a knight without his armor I don't know who I am" and this all kinda spoke to me and fit really well with Soul and his depression/anxiety. I came up with the idea pretty much from the start and it's been with me since.

Q: You said it was a Motion City Soundtrack song, right?

AmberLehcar: All the chapter titles are from MCS songs, because I am trash lol. But they sorta go with the mood of each chapter if you go back and look at them.

Sox: Can confirm Amber is MCS trash.

Q: There's a sick playlist somewhere right?

AmberLehcar: I do have a playlist! https://open.spotify.com/user/1266385830/playlist/3xN37XwvUGsVqZNuhpRtng

Q: Most of the time it seems the usual characterization for the Evans fam is for Soul's father to be the 'worse' parent, either that or both of them being equally bad. (At least that's my view.) So I am wondering: was your decision to make Soul's dad the more accepting one an intentional subversion or did it just happen?

AmberLehcar: It just sorta happened? I am not a Mama Albarn fan. Aside from Marie, there are no good mamas in the series, so I just kinda went with that.

Sox: Blair begs your pardon.

[insert chorus of screaming about everyone's love for Blair]

AmberLehcar: Blair takes such good care of her kittens. Okay I lied, Blair and Marie are good. But yeah, I didn't want him to have absolutely no support from parents, and someone had to have taught Wes to be a good person. So Papa Evans eventually came around.

Q: For Pere: was there a scene that you knew immediately you wanted to illustrate and/or was it difficult to choose scenes to draw?

Peregrine: I definitely wanted to draw the first hug scene when I read it, when Maka was accepting, because the feelies. And then later Amber had mentioned how there was going to be a scene where soul plays his song for Maka, and I knew I really wanted to draw that too, but it wasn't written yet, so I asked her to describe the scene more for me in advance so i could draw it. She didn't have a solid idea though, so some stuff I made up, and she wrote the scene to fit my picture later actually ^^;

AmberLehcar: Your art definitely helped flesh out the scene there, thank you.

Sox: I love when Pete draws things.

Sox: *Pere

[Lots of people yelling about Pete]

Sox: God damn it.

Peregrine: The first pic with the hair I also just thought would be cute to draw, and then just for visual concepts, I wanted to draw the different stages of Soul as a bonus even if they didn't actually ever appear in the story ^^;

AmberLehcar: That first pic with the hair cutting is probably my favorite. I love them all, but that just made my heart flutter.

Q: Sox I have sort of the same question for you, did certain scenes inspire certain lyrics?

Sox: Uhhhh no not so much. I tried to write around the Mood of the fic and I talked to a local Atlanta musician about her experiences being trans with a bad family as a kid and tried to fit those to where Amber had Soul coming from. (Originally I was trying to write a SoMa Romance song but then... it came out as a Self Love Fuck you Mom song).

AmberLehcar: I'm glad it changed. At some point when writing I realized the fic was more focused on their relationship than him, so I tried to change it up. I'm glad the song evolved that way too. After I got one of the last drafts of the song, I included it in chapter 8 in case people were wondering.

Q: For Amber: what made you want to put Kim as Soul's neighbor out of any other character? What made you want to do the neighbor sub plot in the first place?

AmberLehcar: Representation mostly. I love me some JacKim and thought that having a grump next door that Soul ends up kinda befriending and/or helping would be interesting. Kim was kinda a weird facet for me to write through. As someone who feels everything 110%, being in love can be kinda scary sometimes, so her thoughts on love are pretty darn close to my own: wanting to love someone wholeheartedly but being afraid of exactly how deeply you can really love someone.

Sox: I FEEL.

Q: There's a scene where they're watching a Youtube video. Is that video significant to you in some way, Amber? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wWBLbQInqk)

AmberLehcar: Not at all. I was talking with Brian about assignments for the first day of class, and he mentioned he had to do that exact assignment and chose that exact video. The song's not bad and the video is... interesting?

Q: For Pere: What program do you use and whats your general process for art?

Peregrine: I use FireAlpaca because it's free lol. I usually do like, a base sketch that's really scribbly and focuses on like motion lines, if that makes sense. And then i decrease the opacity of that one and draw the actual lineart on a different layer on top, and then colour. Very rarely I'll keep drawing on the base sketch and just clean it a little but that's mostly for more actiony gestural stuff, or highly detailed things where I'm not bothered about solid lineart.

Q: How long-ish did each of your drawings take? Do you tend to draw faster when you're feeling inspired, do you have a creative process or anything?

Peregrine: Ah, I never know what to say when someone asks how long it takes, because it varies so much. But yeah, usually a drawing will take a few days if it's something average and not like the fricking Pacific Rim art I did way back when, which took like a month. I can do most pieces in a day if i'm properly inspired but it's like: yes, I can get this done in only a few hours, but those are completely straight drawing hours - no food or bathroom breaks or chit chats to be had. Honestly the longest part of the drawing process is actually the sketchy first part because I need to plan it out perfectly until i can see the end product in my head and then i can start actually working, and that can take weeks.

[insert group yelling about how great Pere's art is]

AmberLehcar: The boys brought me to literal tears every time they updated me.

Sox: Lies.

AmberLehcar: EVERY TIME.

Peregrine: I spent 5 hours drawing Soul's hair even though I finished the entire rest of the picture in 2.

Sox: I just had a mental image of Pere screaming the lyrics to Maroon 5's "Misery" while drawing.

Peregrine: That's me.

Q: For Amber: what were your easiest/hardest scenes to write & why?? Were there any that were easier/trickier to write than you expected? Bonus: favorite scene to write?

AmberLehcar: All of chapter 4 is crap and I'll fight anyone who disagrees with me. For some reason writing just general happy, normal life was really hard. The pain though, that was kiddy stuff. The first full scene I wrote was Soul's accidental confession. The idea just messed me up and I couldn't stop writing until it was all done. It's probably my favorite scene too, followed closely by Maka's acceptance.

Q: You super did not write linearly. That's so cool, I have to go in order.

AmberLehcar: No, I rarely do.

Peregrine: Man it was kind of tough reading your drafts, tbh.

Sox: SAME PERE

AmberLehcar: I'm so sorry!!

Sox: "How am I gonna write a song none of this is in order" XD

AmberLehcar: I need to give people an instruction manual for how to read my WIPs.

Peregrine: There were so many scenes that were like, great scenes on their own, but then I'm like wait, how did we get from point A to point ? Also, reading updates was hard because everyone else I've fic'd with was like 'oh just scroll down to wear you last read' but in this fic it was like... I know something was added... but where tho...

Sox: Slide to the left

Sox: Slide to the right

AmberLehcar: Never beta for me, it's a nightmare.

AmberLehcar: (That's a lie, please always beta for me, I need all the help I can get.)

Sox: Yeah but working with you is a dream tbh.

AmberLehcar: The nice thing about not writing linearly is that I could really easily work with my partners to add in ideas they had. I don't know that it was easy for them, but making it more of a collab that way was really neat for me.

Q: Do you outline everything out beforehand?

AmberLehcar: As much as I can. I derail if I don't.

Q: AmberLehcar, how did you decided where to put scenes/order them?

AmberLehcar: I have an outline template I wrote up based on a youtuber's outlining method! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eP73LMnphqEUn20mKd78_EB_qPlbXjklvkXLknxl5R0/edit?usp=sharing. This is the outline that I've been using recently, it's been really helpful. You guys are welcome to use it!

Q: Amber, would you say this outlining method helped? Just in comparison to past fics etc.

AmberLehcar: Definitely. I have so many incomplete fics simply because I didn't outline or didn't outline enough.

Q: So was the end planned? That is the hardest part for me.

AmberLehcar: More or less. It definitely changed a lot. I don't have any versions of the original ending, and there's still stuff from the finished product I don't remember because I literally finished at 3 a.m. the day of posting. I always have a very clear image of how the opening to any chapter or fic goes, but the end is always weird.

Q: Do you remember anything from the first version? How'd they differ?

AmberLehcar: I know the first half was a little different at the start of Resbang last year, but I have the worst memory... There was definitely supposed to be more NB Crona. Crona was supposed to be kinda the comic relief, making comments about their computer sciences classes that Soul does not understand. They named their laptop Nora and talk about it like it's a person. "Sometimes when Nora doesn't do what I want, I have to hit her" or something like that, make Soul concerned for this poor child. The "octagonal day" joke made it to the final cut. I think there was a scene at the end where Crona and Soul were supposed to be good friends after the "there's 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't." Because it's a math joke and a binary joke.

Sox: Amber Sox: Is Sox: A Sox: NERD

Q: What was the funnest part of the fic for you to write, Amber? Or the part you were looking forward to the most?

AmberLehcar: Writing Black Star was fun. There's a few one liners that I love. My favorite bit is when Maka asks for his name and the next bit is "Nervous. Stupid. Sweating." I needed that smooch like life itself. I played with them kissing when Maka apologizes and they made up, but it didn't feel right. So I saved a sweet normal smooch for the end scene.

Sox: I literally cackled out loud on a train reading "no party like a floor meeting party because a floor meeting party is MANDATORY."

AmberLehcar: That was one of my other fave lines. My goals for the fic were representation, make it as realistic as possible, and make people feel things. I like to think I did a good job?

Sox: You accomplished all.

Peregrine: Man the parents thing hit me so hard, you did a good job.

Q: I'd love to hear about your process/writing rituals?

AmberLehcar: When it was a scene I was particularly excited to write or just suddenly inspired, I can just sit and write. But most of the time it's me sitting at the computer with tea asking myself why I do this to myself and then I just make myself write.

Q: Is there anything else you wanted to add other than more NB Crona, Amber?

AmberLehcar: When Pere showed me art of Soul's physical progression, I kinda wanted an epilogue of Soul post surgery, but time and lack of confidence in writing it well... I don't think anyone understands exactly how nervous I was to write this. I waffled a while with "you have no business writing this, you are cis, please stop."

Peregrine: Nooo it's cool because you asked. I definitely didn't think I could write trans Soul but I hoped someone would, if they asked and did it right. Which you did.

Sox: One of my close friends is trans, and when I sent him Eden, I thought he was going to tell me he hated me. And then he didn't and I was v relieved.

AmberLehcar: I definitely wanted to be as respectful and real as possible. Again, representation matters, and I wanted to help create a thing I hadn't seen done in our fandom.

Sox: You did good.

AmberLehcar: I'm really glad. I stalked the boys' tags on their work along with my own, and someone had reblogged Pere's art and was really grateful for trans Soul. I was glad to be a part of that.

Q: Did you make any playlists or anything like that to get into the writing mood? Or headspace of a character?

AmberLehcar: For headspace, Soul and I are very similar. I too am a bag of anxiety and depression trying to pass as a human. A lot of my college and therapy experience went into the fic. There's little bits of me in pretty much everyone.

Peregrine: I have my trans boy song i listened to a lot pfft. It's from Treasure Planet.

Q: Ooo which song Pere?

Peregrine: I'm Still Here. If you look at it through a trans lens its super fitting. It's like my fave song ever.

Some additional post-AMA discussion:

Q: Amber, I think that's a sign of a good writer, to take from one's own experiences and such.

AmberLehcar: Write what you know, right? And what you don't know, you find out. The whole experience definitely gave me a new appreciation for the LGBT+ community, that's for sure. I knew some stuff, but I learned so much.

AmberLehcar: To go back and slightly change my answer for difficult scene to write, while all of ch4 was like swimming in syrup to get written, Mama Evans outburst was so difficult to write. There was just so much anger and I felt icky writing a lot of that chapter in general. Writing Maka having to purposely misgender him hurt.

Peregrine: I really liked the parents thing actually even though i hated it. It felt raw and real.

AmberLehcar: So much pain, the whole time I'm just like "why would I hurt my son like this???"

Q: Noticed you guys were still talking and guh I loved your collective art/story!!! I now know the gap between dimensions can't be breached because if it could I'd have reached through the screen and force-choked Mama Evans. I was kind of mad at Maka too though like... I can understand that Soul needed some time to himself, away from her, to really figure things out, but ;-;

AmberLehcar: Yes! Maka was an interesting situation to figure out.

Peregrine: Yeah I loved what you did there actually, because as much as I wanted her to be perfect, she wasn't perfect.

AmberLehcar: I didn't want her to just immediately come back like "sorry you startled me, let's get married."

Peregrine: As much as I want people to immediately accept me, they don't, even if they do eventually. It wasn't fantasy perfect world, it was real world.

Q: I think... that's good. At first I thought Maka would be more likely to start off rough around the edges and then end the story gracefully. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you're going to relate realistic stories about trans people/anyone in a similar situation, you probably have to... I don't want to say "break the reader's heart" because that would imply that those stories can't have happy endings, which they can and should at least as often as any other kind of story, but it put me in Soul's shoes and made me accept how likely it is that someone who is trans/lgbt/otherwise oppressed will be badly hurt by someone they think the world of, someone who's hard to leave behind. I dunno if I spoke out of turn there, but i think it was an empathically-written story. In my inexperienced opinion.

AmberLehcar: That's definitely what I was going for. I wanted Maka to be his closest friend, for his sake and for my shipping heart's sake. But she was just too good to be true when I was writing her, so her running away happened. I was so stuck after I wrote his confession, I didn't know how to have her react. But when I thought about some of the internalized transphobia I know I've been guilty of, it made sense to add for her. It felt real.

Look out for some more transcripts, coming soon!! Thanks again to Amber, Pere and Sox for their awesome AMA <3

#a lack of armor #rbbc #resbang AMAs #AMA transcripts

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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what's your novel about??

Oh my gosh, nonny, thank you so much for asking!!

Okay, so the absolute shortest version — the, “summarize this thing and make it sound as shitty as possible” meme version — is, “Superpowered LGBTIQ neurodivergent and/or mentally ill mutant weirdos with emotional problems (and their self-appointed sidekick, who isn’t a mutant but is very enthusiastic about the work) investigate some seemingly unrelated incidents and accidentally uncover a neo-fascist supervillain club that’s trying to take over the U.S. on as many levels as possible — currently, by pulling strings to sabotage the lead-up to the still-upcoming 2016 election — and the neo-fascist supervillains are, unfortunately, very good at this.

“Also, our heroes start out as a ragtag group of misfits with superpowers [or, in Pete’s case, enthusiasm, wit, dedication af, adaptability, and a rather sizable collection of lime-green hot-pants], and progressively become both an actual team and a set of accidental rising stars in the superhero world. Is it a bit of a tired plot? Yeah, especially given how often superhero teams have to do some kind of song and dance like this — but: 1. it’s done so often because it resonates with people and, when done well, it can work; and 2. tired or not, it’s something that viewers/readers deserve to actually see happening, rather than just being told, ‘oh yeah, now they’re a team, okay? okay cool.’”

At least, that’s the plot of the first book, since…… I can’t make anything simple or less-difficult for myself, series are often more fun in general, and I just have a lot of characters here who I love, so the whole, “These incidents are starting to string themselves together in really suspicious ways, oh shit fuck goddammit, the election is being sabotaged” plot is just the start of things.* The bigger series plot would be more about trying to deal with further attempts by the neo-fascist supervillain club to wreak all kinds of neo-fascist supervillain Hell all over everything.

Then, the way I’m looking at this, structurally? Is that I have an ensemble cast, in the end. There are different tiers of importance among the different characters, because that’s unavoidable — I mean, I rail against JKR’s habit of treating her characters as plot devices first and people second, but even if you all treat your characters as people, you have to prioritize some of them over the others at different points, or else you end up worse off than George RR Martin, drowning in impossible goals and strangled by the giant pile of fictional people you made up to tell stories about — but I still view the cast as fundamentally an ensemble.

However, for the sake of reining in my horrible attention span and trying to avoid GRRM’s example, each installment has a focal character, whose own personal story of the moment gets to exist alongside the bigger plotty plot-stuff of each book (…I am a serious business writer, oh yes I am). As an approach, this has its drawbacks — balancing things without making it all too coincidentally intertwined is a big one — but I also love it because, to me, it reflects the way that life has several different levels to it that aren’t always intimately woven together, but still affect each other and need to find some kind of balance if you’re going to get anywhere

Anywho, the focal character for book one is Sebastian, because on one hand, he was here first. Like, he was originally for a game that my Sunday night RP group was playing this past summer, which was still the same-ish idea of mutant superheroes, except that it was more closely modeled on the way that Aya Brea’s powers work in the Parasite Eve games

Meaning, “the system is very openly based on Parasite Eve, it says so in the player’s handbook and everything,” rather than a motley hodgepodge assortment of superhero comics and movies/TV, speculative fiction in general, LGBTIQ theories and histories and cultures, “okay, I’d kind of like to be more active in superhero-related fandoms, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the stories I want to tell right now are not easily mapped onto characters who already exist, I won’t feel fulfilled in trying to change them so I can shoehorn Sam and Steve and Nat and Bucky or Dick, Jason Stephanie, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Harper into them, so I’ve got to just say, ‘fuck it’ and do my own thing”

and, “what if I did [something that is a big and very, very deliberate middle finger to either Marvel or DC, possibly both, for some reason or another]” — e.g., “what if I made a pair of characters who are a pretty blatant satire of/commentary on/response to/whatever Marvel’s perpetual, annoying as fuck Cherik-baiting, except that they’re actually married — and they will be literally married as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court rules on Obergefell v. Hodges in-universe — and also they are old lady lesbians, nah nah nah nah nah nah *flips off Stan Lee et al. with both middle fingers while doing a, ‘come at me, bro’ dance and generally being a Stunning Bastion Of Authorial Maturity Lmao Not Really*”

So, yeah. I had to rescope some things after my RP group dropped that game, but in the name of, “developing my character and giving Jake, my DM and high school friend, material with which to torment my character, and also, Double-Cross’s system actually makes character development and characterization pretty important elements to playing the game,” I’d already written way too much stuff to just let it go, and Sebastian had endeared himself to me in a big way, and I just went, “Fuck it, I’ll write my own thing with him in it, it’ll be fun.”

I don’t remember when he decided to look like Hayden Christensen, only that I tried to stop that mental image from solidifying, and trying to stop it only made it worse, so I just gave up and went, “Fine, whatever, look like Hayden Christensen, see what I care.” But then, more importantly than, “Sebastian gets to go first because in fairness, he was here first”? Well.

On a thematic level, I feel like this little mutant disaster’s biggest personal story of the moment (trying desperately to get his shit together after making it to 30 without his clinical depression getting noticed as depression, much less treated; trying to stay sober and find something to do with his life that feels even vaguely fulfilling, which for him would mean, “helping people, doing some kind of good in the world, trying to make someone else happy because he is fairly certain that he never will be, period”; trying to actually deal with the past and move forward, not forgetting it or forsaking it entirely, but also not being frozen and chained to the past, learning from it and building something new)…

…has the most common ground and overlap with the current round of big plotty plot-type stuff, since it’s all about things like, “whoo, the formation of a new team! whoo, the new team getting it together and learning how to work as a team and trying to figure out their team identity and values! oh no, emergence of previously unseen threats that have not actually come from out of nowhere, even though it kind of looks like they have, and are more complicated than previously estimated! oh no, we can’t just delete them from existence because they’re insidious and entrenched in more places than we entirely realize at first, so how do we even fight this! ohhh no, progressive realization that we’re fighting a symptom rather than the actual facts problem, but we can’t just NOT-treat the symptom or shit is even more fucked than it will be if we treat the symptom by not the actual problem, and in some ways we don’t even entirely know what the bigger-picture problem is yet! oh man, what do we do!”

—so, like. These two threads work together better than they would with different parts of the larger, longer story.

(And then there’s Pete, who is an admitted authorial pet of mine, just like GRRM blatantly favors Tyrion and JKR visibly projects onto Harry and Hermione, and who I feel lends himself better to a format more like, “Dunk and Egg”-esque novellas, or a collection of, “chronicles of side-kicking” short stories about his little side-adventures and myriad hijinks that aren’t always immediately relevant to the main story but that are really fun. But I also feel like that might just be an excuse to write more weird adventures for him that aren’t necessarily tied together in the right order, like novels generally need to be unless you have some kind of reason not to do that.

idk, man, I just really love my stale cinnamon roll Dramatic bb theatre kid with a heart of gold who will tell you that you’re wrong and he so does not have a heart of gold while he is digging around Seb’s kitchen and making dinner for himself and his Princess because an unfortunate side-effect of one of Seb’s superpowers — the toxin filtering part of his mutant healing factor — is that his body doesn’t only filter out poisons, gases, narcotics, caffeine, and alcohol… it also filters the antidepressants that he gets given a prescription for about ten hours before abruptly being thrust headlong into his newly-awoken mutant superpowers.

Which is a huge mess all over — though, yes, there is a huge part of this that is a pretty deliberate, “fuck you” to literally every piece of media that goes, “and then the hero found out they had superpowers or magic or the fuck whatever and lol suddenly no more mental illness or disabilities or any kind of neurodivergence or anything neener neener” — and anyway, Pete’s hypothetically just found Seb half-spaced out and listening to, “Careless Whisper” on repeat, and Pete is going to tell you that he doesn’t have any kind of heart of gold because he’s a heartless wretch shut your mouth……

…while he’s making them dinner and going, “okay, come on, Princess. Sit up, let’s try and get you through this. No, don’t argue with me. You did the same — or similar, anyway — for me in that entire ten-day stretch when you knew I wasn’t eating disorder okay but couldn’t get me to talk about it and we’ve been over this: if that’s what friends do for each other, then it cuts both ways, so come on. Dinner. Do you want me to put on Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Female Trouble, Ten Things I Hate About You, or some other thing until you feel like talking.”)

But anyway, as I was saying.

I look at the attempt to find thematic crossover between the plot parts of a book in the series and the story parts of a book as being kind of like how, in the first three seasons of Community, whatever class the Study Group had together was a of synergistic reflection of certain season-long themes and developments for them as characters and in their relationships.

Like, in season one, they were learning how to talk to each other and the basics of building relationships with and understanding each other, so they took Spanish, a language class.

In season two, they took Anthropology — in-universe described as, “the study of humanity” and which is presented as being so open-ended that shitty memetic youtube vids are as valid an object of study as humanity’s development and use of tools, and the different processes by which humans work together to do greater shit than we can do solo — and in that year’s shenanigans, the Study Group cemented their trust as friends, but also went through Hell together in several cases, and in the last two episodes (the cowboy/Star Warts paintball two-parter), they had to face the question of whether or not removing one of them for his shitty behavior (Pierce) would be better or worse for the overall health of the group.

And in season three, they took Biology, defined in-universe as, “the study of life” (which isn’t wrong irl, but the specific phrasing is important to me, here), and they spend a lot of time exploring and developing their lives, both together and individually, both at Greendale Community College and more importantly outside its walls. There’s also the season-long theme of evolution, because the Study Group have evolved as people and continue to evolve — which reaches its biggest culminations in the finale, not just in Jeff’s Winger Speech, but also with five of the big seven (Annie and Britta are sort of adrift but Troy, Abed, Shirley, and Pierce all have moments, and Jeff has the BIGGEST, most obvious moment).

So, with the books, I’m trying to do something kind of similar. Not quite the same, because…… well, TV vs. novels, school setting vs. a variety of settings but none quite as structured as a school (even one that’s as, well, Greendalian as you get on Community), a million other reasons besides — but having some kind of thematic synergy between the plot part of each of the books and the focal characters’ personal stories in each book…… idk, it gives me a comforting sense of structure to play with?

And aside from that, I feel like it’s probably a better choice for the sake of the whole stories because having those points of connection means they can more easily work to enhance each other, rather than distracting from each other. Like, one of the biggest issues that I have with shoehorned-in romance plots in stories that don’t need a romance plot? Even overlooking how they are almost invariably white and m/f and heteronormative and can be all kinds of, “uggggh” in several other ways besides, it comes down to whether or not they work, thematically and tonally, with everything else.

[this is where i had a tangent trying to illustrate my point by talking about pointlessly shoehorned-in white, m/f romance plots in otherwise no romo stories, then cut it after i started to feel moderately ashamed of how many examples and trends about this that i just have in my back pocket]

The point being: you can use dissonance and conflicting juxtaposed parts of the story to different effects, but it’s often harder to pull off and you do need to have some idea of what you’re doing, otherwise you’re going to end up with a huge mess and no idea where to start sorting through it (I say this based on having done this exact thing several times before)

So, in the interests of not doing that, I like the idea of trying to find the big points of synergy and connection between any given book’s focal char’s story, and the plot points of that installment and how it fits into the larger story. And, for the sake of book 1, Sebastian’s big story of the moment is the one that lines up best with the plot stuff, thematically.

Also, apropos of nothing but, he spends like all of two minutes coming up with his nom de spandex, and ends up with Pete being Unimpressed at him because…… Really, Princess? Princess, really. Like. Princess. Really. Your family is obnoxiously insistent on your Frenchness, even though you were all born and raised in fucking Baltimore and your Dad’s family hasn’t been in France itself since your ancestor sold the old ancestral marquisate and came to save the Revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette… and now you turn into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man…… and you picked out the official, “it is on your actual facts government-issued vigilante hero license” name of…… Gévaudan.

Really, Princess. Fucking. REALLY. Ugggggggh, you’re more creative than that, why did you pick the stupidly obvious werewolf name ffs, your family isn’t even FROM Gévaudan or anywhere in its general damn vicinity, why did you have to pick THAT name, it’s BORING.

And now I don’t know how to wrap this up so I’m gonna abruptly stop talking (apart from the footnote below, which I wrote a couple hours ago, whoops)

Thank you so much for asking this and giving me a free excuse to talk about my novel, nonny

*: Given my chosen subject matter, I feel like it has to be? Partly, yeah, it’s authorial self-gratification because I love my weirdos and their adventures.

But another part of it is the idea that it’s not enough to punch fascists in the face. Like, yes, by all means, we need to do that, too — but fascism is insidious and easily enabled by so many aspects of our contemporary societies. So, we need to resist the urge to simplify the discussion. We can go, “Fascism is wrong, period” while also trying to understand the different ways that fascism draws people into supporting it, how it can spread so far and so thoroughly in nominally non-fascist societies, and its different manifestations and ways of working, so that we can better fight it.

Additionally, we’re products of the same societies that create people who do become fascists and we can easily become complicit in both fascism and oppression more generally, so we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable while trying to fight fascism, instead of putting it off for later, because…… historically, and based on several different precedents? Putting off addressing the internal issues among ourselves doesn’t work; it just creates fertile ground for more problems to breed and makes it even harder for people down the line.

And there aren’t any easy answers here. There are some part of them that are easy or at least easier than others — e.g., agreeing on the statement, “Fascism is wrong and we should oppose it” — but unfortunately, not everything in life and resistance can be as easy as, “This thing is wrong, we should oppose it.”

Even getting into the questions of HOW to best and most effectively fight back against fascism gets complicated, to say nothing of situations where there isn’t an obvious Right Side or Wrong Side, no matter how many people try to turn those discussions into Right vs. Wrong and get into a lot of binary-thinking moral absolutism that ultimately upholds a lot of the shit we’re nominally trying to fight, and does more harm than good to everyone involved.

(ftr, those discussions are not things like, “Fascism is wrong, Y/N,” but more like disagreements between people, none of whom are outright in the wrong, but all of whom have different sets of values, different kinds of grievances with each other [some fair, some not so fair], different points of view on any given topic, and so on, usually about things like, “is it more important for people to be free but with more potential for people to abuse that freedom in hurtful ways, or for people to be safe but in ways that give us new ways to hurt each other in the name of safety,” however the Hell these issues are manifesting in a specific context at any given moment)

And, well. It’s a precarious line to walk on, as someone who wants to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be and as true to my handful of basic guiding principles as possible. Principles that I have because…… uh, I want to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be? And I want to always work on failing better, as @saathi1013 would put it?

so, if you’re going to do that, you kinda need to have something to stand for and try to be more aware of what’s going on in the world, more aware where the content you’re making fits into those discussions, and more aware of yourself and how you work so that you can try to find places of potential Unfortunate Implications or places where you’re not actually living up to the values that you want to put in your work — c.f., JKR’s handling of House Elves and Muggles in the HP series, or how she wants the books to be anti-abuse but gives Dumbledore a free pass on hardcore manipulating both Harry and Snape [to say nothing of how he doesn’t do shit to make Snape act like a teacher, not a bully, because of reasons], and gives Molly and Arthur a total free pass on all of their unadulterated abusive bullshit

—and part of all this is knowing what you stand for, knowing what you think and feel as much as you can, and being willing to actually interrogate your positions and adjust your views and stances as you come into new information, new experiences, etc. Call it a belief, call it a good idea, call it whatever you want, but for me? You have to have some kind of principles to stand for/by, if you really want to be ethical and/or responsible content creator, because if you don’t have your principles, then what’s guiding you in this, exactly? Principles are what separate people who at least try to be ethical and/or responsible content creators from fuckbishops like the Dadaists, the Marquis de Sade, and the creative team of Family Guy.

And one of my principles here is, essentially, “People are people, and this means, on one hand, that all people deserve basic human rights and civil liberties. But on the other hand, it means that many of our problems are, in the words of Pterry and Gneil in Good Omens, caused not by people being either Good or Evil, but by people being fundamentally people. We’re all a bunch of disasters to varying degrees, and most situations are not going to come down to Good vs. Evil, but to (as Richard Siken puts it) need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone has the potential to be doing wrong by/unto someone else, even if some of us are going to come out more wrong than others based on our actions and/or the context of the situation.”

Which all basically adds up to…… yes, “Fascism is wrong” is a simple and straightforward statement, but there are situations and debates that arise surrounding most simple, straightforward statements that are tangled up and complicated. In this case, for example, how fascism takes root and spreads, how to best fight it in which situations, how it takes advantage of structures and practices even within non-fascist communities and uses them to fester and draw people into supporting it + what the fuck to do about that especially since at a certain point all of us become complicit in it to some degree or another, by virtue of being people who are alive and take part in our civilizations, and what’s at stake for everyone in all these discussions + how best to approach the question(s) of priorities

(…see, what I mean when I say that yes, I have interest in contemporary sociopolitical goings-on for their own sake but also bring them back to the novel pretty easily and regularly? It’s kinda unavoidable when you’re living in the times we are now, writing about superheroes who have to fight very explicitly neo-fascist supervillains)

So, anyway, the TL;DR of my basic point here is that I do try to approach my writing with principles in mind, but I don’t believe in oversimplifying shit — based on what I’ve encountered so far, I believe that oversimplifying things in a lot of these discussions usually starts in an understandable sort of place, but only ends up creating more problems for everyone in the long run, because it too easily fosters binaristic thinking and moral absolutism, dehumanizing each other, creating arbitrary hierarchies that we always end up using to justify hurting each other, and so on — and I don’t want to be a preacher in my work. I’d be a lot happier if I inspired actual discussions.

……Unfortunately, I’ve been in fandom and literature generally for too long to think that this is going to happen without the risk of people playing the apologist cards, the [douchebag character] in Leather Pants card, and all of that good stuff, but…… well.

I’m just trying to tell myself that this is a risk I’m going to have to live with, and if I do everything that I can reasonably do to prevent that and it still happens anyway, then hey, I’m in good company with George Orwell (all the people who have read 1984 as a defense or endorsement of right-wing anything when Orwell was a Socialist, he just opposed fucking Stalinism), Dr. Seuss (the anti-reproductive rights brigade who co-opted Horton Hears A Who to make it a screed against abortion), Emily Brontë (everyone who thinks Heathcliff is romantic and awesome when no. NO. fuck ALL the way OFF, he is an abusive jackass who literally kills a puppy and torments a generation of kids into reenacting his and Cathy’s relationship, just to get back at her for dumping him, and whose author was a fucking abuse survivor, now can everyone please get off her tits and stop using her book to justify their own abusive garbage behaviors), and so many countless others

But that’s a whole other kettle of monkeys, and I should only be so lucky to maybe someday have enough people reading anything I write that there are actually popular misinterpretations of anything. Like, would it be ideal if the misinterpretations didn’t happen? Yeah, but that’s not how writing works and it’s not how reading works and it’s not how most contemporary socialization trains us to read and see things, and everyone who reads anything I write is going to come up with their own interpretation because I can’t tell them how to read it, so

*shrugs* The Author Is Not God, y’know? I can do the work to try and best actualize my vision of things, but there will be things in it that other people see that I didn’t intend or didn’t notice, and my version of the story can’t be the absolute truth because the readers’ input is just as vital to the life of a written work as the work itself. It’s an unavoidable risk of writing shit on shit, so we make do, the end, I guess?

#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #pete x seb #mine: asks #mine: writing #nonny hi you're my favorite today if ur still around #reaction gifs//#depression cw//#writing meta #Anonymous

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mortal-compass · 8 years ago

Text

2016 (A Diary Entry Of Sorts)

2016 was wild. From the start. On January 1st, I woke up to screaming— yet another quarrel in my best friend’s on-again-off-again relationship. This was followed by a spontaneous trip to Boston filled with gay art and gay friends and other adventures in Portland. Still, amongst all the excitement and happy reconnections, I could feel my mental health begin to waver. I felt anxious every time I left my bedroom and depressed every time I didn’t. But I didn’t really give it much thought, because (on the outside) everything was fine. After spending six weeks at home (which I’ve decided is Too Long), I came back to NYU just in time for a snow storm. I woke up before sunrise that day. My friends and I shared a delightful morning taking pictures in the park and wandering through the village. There was something surreal about the emptiness of that day. The roads were shut down, all the cars were snowed over, most of the city was staying inside— leaving my friends and I free to run through the streets without a care in the world. The magic quickly faded. My anxiety convinced me that these friends who had been wonderful all day didn’t like me at all and didn’t want me around and so I decided to spend the night alone. This boy I had been crushing on had brought his girlfriend to campus that weekend and we were all supposed to meet her that night, but I couldn’t. And I was so worried everyone thought I just didn’t want to meet her… part of me didn’t want to meet her. In February, I fell in love. Er, well, I came as close to love as I have in the past 19 years. I don’t really believe you can ~fall in love~ with someone who doesn’t love you back. But I certainly fell into something. After heated encounters, relentless cuddling, and Deep Meaningful Conversations, he decided to end things with a “just… this… no.” And when I asked for clarification he muddled things even further with a kiss. I remember being so upset that I couldn’t stop shaking. I remember sitting upright in my bed, where he left me, until the sun came up. I remember that cup of tea growing cold and old and moldy because I couldn’t bring myself to dump it out. And, somehow, that was the end of that story. As much as I tried to reach out and be a friend to this boy who clearly did not respect me, he shut me out time and time again. PLOT TWIST: All of this bullshit dug up a fuck ton of disruptive thought processes and destructive behaviors. So, in this time where I really needed the luv n support of my friends, I did a great deal to put those friendships in jeopardy. And because I didn’t have a solid support system, my mental health got worse. The cycle continues… In March, I started my YouTube channel, which was a pivotal moment for me. This platform allowed me a space to process and share all of the things I was going through (in thinly veiled original songs). As a result, self-esteem was up and I was ~feelin’ good~. Then I went to PRAHA and became real close with my pals in jazz choir and got shitfaced for whole week. Happy Easter. Was really hoping to hook up with someone but that DIDNT HAPPEN lol. As the seasons changed, so did my mental health. March was warm, I was warm. I TURNED 19!!! Holy heck. 19 is fun bc nothing happens except you’re like Not A Teenager but also Not Not A Teenager (liminalityyyyy) . My parents came down for my birthday and I accidentally spent 3x what I thought I was spending on Broadway tickets (Good One). A little while later, the whole crew took a trip to Coney Island which was magical even though I was little nauseous— corn dogs + cheese fries + rollercoaster = bad time. Saw the girl who inspired me to start my YouTube channel in concert and then chickened out afterward and didn’t attend the meet and greet. And just like that, the semester was over. All in all spring is still a little fuzzy for me. So much of it just felt like… aftermath? If that makes sense. Although I did spend a fair amount of time back in Maine over the summer, Paris feels more important. I was only there for a month, but I learned so much, and wrote so much, and read so much, and saw so much, and ate so much, and connected with so many people, it’s hard to believe June wasn’t a year in and of itself. So so so grateful for that experience. Also just like— meet your fucking idols ok. Like if it turns out, they’re shit people then you probably shouldn’t be idolizing them anyway. And who knows? Maybe they’ll turn out to be just as wise, and funny, and heart-filled as you imagined. OMG ALSO. I went to my first Pride(s) this summer (one in Portland and one in Paris) and LET ME TELL YOU. Pride is so important!!! For such a long time, I really was hesitant towards the idea of being radically queer. Especially as like a white, cis, dude living in a country that had just legalized same-sex marriage (which we all know is the be-all-end-all of LGBTQ+ rights), it was hard for me to see what the big deal was. But Orlando hit me really hard, and made me think really carefully about the kind of social environment I had been creating and the one I wanted to create. So yeah, I got so much funking queerer in 2016 and I couldn’t be ~prouder~. This semester felt like a whirlwind, a waterfall, a sloppy chaos slapped onto my year like the rushed finale of a bad Shonda Rhimes soap. But that’s not what I want to remember about this year. In spite of heartbreaking elections, tumultuous drunken encounters, terrifying police activity, and a persistent mental-heath rollercoaster, I did (as Prophet Kylie Jenner predicted) realize a lot of things. I got to the root of my destructive romantic tendencies and my intense insecurities. I figured out some people are worth letting go. I discovered that waiting around for things to happen is precisely what has made me unhappy in the past. And I’ve just got to start asking for what I want in the future. On top of all that, I saw a great deal of my favorite bands and musicians this fall— each of which was incredible. And I made some really good friends (and maybe some not-just-friends, who knows???). So I’m really hopeful about the coming year. Although, on a large scale, there is a lot of progress to be made… it feels like I’m on my way to a lot of small, personal victories— which will have to do for now. Lol I cannot believe how long that was. But then again, I can’t believe how long this year was. Peace n luv

#agh #personal #mine #I'm sure there are a shit ton of typos in this #I did NOT proofread it #I'm sorry #but it felt good to process all these things in writing #I'm sure no one is going to read it tho and I'll probably delete it tomorrow

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droppingthebasssince1997 · 7 years ago

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Even though its January 14th and new years was 14 days ago i just feel the need to talk about some stuff thats happened. Im not the kind of person to talk about things that happened. I’d rather keep it in and figure it out myself cause i guess I'm just used to it and also its so hard for me to voice out my emotions at some times. I just can never put it into words. 2017 was honestly the hardest year of my life and i know there are people out there who have it way worse but it was pretty shitty. So many things happened. I fell in love with an abusive, angry, self indulged coke head who made me hate myself and made me feel like everything i did in life was stupid. I stopped believing in myself, slacked hella in school, skipped school to basically be his fucking maid. all i did was clean, cook, sleep, drink and repeat this entire cycle. and if he was having a rough day well that just meant that id get yelled at for the tiniest things even if it means us arguing over who could get a can of pop. I guess thats when i stopped caring about everything, my mental health and physical health, my relationship with my family and friends (the 2 friends that i had lol) and my education. I was so lost and confused that I had pretty much given up on everything. I stopped trying to be positive or doing everything with a smile like i usually do. Long story short I had a little slip on june 9th. that was the day when i decided to end everything. fortunately enough i got stopped and long story short i got slapped with a record for trying to call out for help. Instead of saying its okay for wanting everything to stop in life for once, the first thing the psychiatrist told me at 12pm (after being taken in at 4am and being kept there) was that i was slapped with a criminal record. After he said that i guess i just shut down as usual. why the fuck would you consider someone a criminal for trying to kill themselves. Till this day i can't put the pieces together or come up with an idea of why they would do so. yes i had empty blow bags in my wallet and maybe its because i was drinking that night but still it made no sense in my head. It made me feel unimportant and unworthy despite everything that i had just went through. I didn’t talk to anyone for 3 days and funny story even tho i was told to stay away from alcohol my ex and his fam still got drunk and drank around me the entire night. the same night i got out of the hospital. I spent the first night alone because well everyone was partying and I didn't have any good friends to talk to. I lost kalli because i was dating a jerk and i lost kayla well basically because she had a busy life. long story short my parents found out i was lying about doing summer school and i went back to live with them beginning july. i really broke their hearts and my dad didn't talk to me or even look at me for 2 weeks. My dad is a sweetheart and in my 20 years on this planet he has raised his voice at me once and he apologized 30 minutes after. I really hurt them and I guess i waS still to dumb to see how i was still hurting them. i was still with josh the entire summer and i would come home hammered and coked out at 3 in the morning way past my curfew and fight with my parents. it got so bad once to the point where my dad and i got almost got into a physical fight. I was trying to leave the house and he grabbed all my stuff and chucked it. It was a horrible night. that was also the night i came clean to my mom about everything except coke because i don't think i could ever come clean about it. long story short i decided education was what i wanted to do for the rest of my life esp after having a great time during the summer being a summer camp leader. So i went back to kelowna to start year 2 well kinda. I was on probation cause i fucked year 1 up hard. i was still with that jerk but my good friends that i lived with made me realize what he was doing to me. he had me shoved up against car doors and walls while being right up in my face yelling at me. or getting made and pushing me because i accidentally lost cocaine. well i finally got the courage to break up with him for good. It was probably the hardest thing i have ever done. I never thought i could break up with him or get out of that abusive relationship. and sometimes it still hits me that I'm done with his bullshit for good and I'm okay. Im safe and I'm never going back there and he can never ever hurt me again. I guess I'm just scared and so fucking angry at myself for not seeing everything and the larger picture. I called myself a feminist for the longest time and would be like “how can girls stay in abusive relationships?” and now i know how. Being manipulated and controlled is a real thing. You are completely blinded by everything. your sense of power and identity get ripped away from you and your abuser becomes the only thing you have and find comfort in. Its weird and some people might not understand it. But i sure do and i finally realized all the things he had done to me. mentally and emotionally. anyways this is where 2017 got better for me. I started talking to my old friend edwin again. Josh made me ghost him when we got together. we talked everyday. it was like nothing had changed and within 2 days of talking to him i basically told him everything that happened in a year and 7 months. it was a lot tbh and i never actually noticed haha. but he stuck thru everything including my wild drunk nights out. I turned into something else and hoed around. I guess it was my way of dealing with stuff and found comfort in seeing guys? Because i didn't know who i was and my confidence was so used to being dependent on a guy for security and empowerment that i couldn't do it alone. I couldn't empower myself and thats mainly the reason to why i slept around. anyways edwin and i talked 25/7 day and night and we got so close without even realizing it. we gave each other relationship advice as he was seeing a couple girls and so was I. when i came back for reading break he kissed me and thats when i realized he had feelings for me all this while. I was so blinded by all these fuck boys to see he was right under my nose the entire time. and when he was flirting with me he actually was flirting with me and not joking about it. well i made a mistake after but long story short i liked him in an instant. i liked him more than like. i loved him but i knew it was too soon. i was scared to get serious so fast considering its only been a couple months since i broke up with josh. anyways he asked me out and i said yes in a heartbeat. He is not like any other guy and i know it. he’s far from them and he;s never going to hurt me. he didn't even have to say that to reassure me i just know. and I'm dating my best friend like how much better could it get. he helped me get sober and i could be 5 months sober but i had slip up. so its been 2 months fully clean and i couldn't feel anymore cleaner and pure. end of 2017 started to look better for me. I started dating my best friend, got sober, got out of probation, got a job in kelowna and my relationship with my parents got so so so strong. My mom and I haven't been closer and its honestly the best. little did i know we are the same person esp when drunk haha. But then some stuff with my little sister when down and i ratted her to my parents because it was the only way to get her out of that situation. anyways she doesn't talk to me anymore or ever. And i guess I'm so hurt and thats why i decided to write everything out because I'm hurt. I lost my best friend since 2013. yes she is my sister but she is also my best friend. If you ask me who i want as my bridesmaid id say shalini right off the hook. without thinking because when we moved here we had no one but each other. we moved half way across the country and left everything and everyone behind just because I was failing school in singapore. we got close i guess after only having each other and it just stings a little that she can't trust me cause who do i trust now.I know i have edwin but its different. she’s my sister she just knows me like no body else. we were fobs together and we matured and grew together. i don't have any other girl friends i trust besides her. i don't have a girl best friend and i guess I'm just sad over that. I lost all my girl best friends cause of josh and the others are back home half way across the fucking world and i just don't mean as much as i used to to them. distance and time difference can play a part lol. I really don't know what got to me to talk about everything or at least a couple things but maybe its just cause i finally got my period after 3 months and I'm super emotional and hormonal? sighs anyways i know 2018 is going to be my year and so many things are happening this year its defs gonna be a year to remember. I just wish for my best friend to come back or for me to find a good girlfriend who's on my level and wants to talk to me about her date or texts me while she;s on her date or something or comes over to nap or eat food or netflx or maybe go shopping with idk. i know i already have a friend./ twin sister like that, hanna, but she’s half way across the country and boy have we distanced. anyways i took like 45 mins typing this out and crying so i think its time to toughen up and get back to reality and life. Im a strong girl who’s been thru a couple things and with that experience of being hurt, used and manipulated I'm gonna make a change and 2018 is going to be waaaay different. I got this, all of it.

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