#A lot of the mental health stuff is the same

[mysterious-dark-shadow]

I sometimes re-read posts from "The Before Times": from before the Sewage Flood of '22, before we discovered the Slow Methane Leak that had been gassing the house for YEARS, before Felix was officially diagnosed with HOLE IN THE BRAIN.

This specific post was during a time when we were desperately trying to figure out why things were getting better in some ways and so much worse in others. Felix especially was dealing with mental and physical issues that should have gotten better after he quit his super stressful job.

The information we have now doesn't invalidate the conclusions Felix came to in the original post: his hormones were all over the place & his diet needed changing. And responding to those issues helped eliminate some symptoms that were specifically related to those problems. The changes helped him have a clearer head a year later when I ended up going crazy* from methane overexposure.

The fact that we had been working with doctors for several years actually helped us out a lot when it came to Felix's migraines. When we finally got to a neurologist, he could see that we weren't chasing painkillers. He ordered the MRI for Felix's head that we had been trying to get for soo long. And fought insurance to give us the prescription that actually made a difference in the severity of the migraines Felix suffers from.

And today we have a much better handle on our physical and mental health. We learned how to talk to each other about what's going on in our heads. We learned so much about how to help each other physically. We know what it looks like when one/both of us are suffering from methane exposure, and how to get the gas out of our living environment, so we can actually unpack boxes of stuff that we haven't touched since early 2022.

We are literally getting our past back. There are art projects that Felix was in the middle of that were boxed up alongside the reference books that were sitting on the same table. Trinkets and keepsakes that were on the shelves of bookcases and cabinets from our adventures, separately & together, are finding new spaces in our apartment. Our dried boutonnieres from our wedding day were briefly on display and then quickly put in a cabinet because our cats are rose-eating monsters.

Sometimes I wish I could reach back in time to 2020-2021 us, but I don't know what I'd say. What we went through in 2022 was horrific. We are still picking up the pieces. What kind of warning could prepare past-us for what was to come?

And then I remember a strange encounter we had early in 2021. We were in the beginning stages of our channeling experiments. I was the channeler for a specific entity that had previously given us advice that had turned out to be prophetic, so Felix at some point asked them, "What is the most important thing we should know for our future?" The entity made a painful grimace that made my face ache for a few hours afterwards, then said, "Keep going. No matter what happens, just... Keep. Going." They refused to elaborate, and Felix dismissed the entity soon afterwards. We were puzzled by the cryptic nature of the message and the swirling mass of negative emotions - anguish, fear, anger, regret - that my body felt at the moment the entity grimaced. But we followed the advice, reminding each other that we should "keep going" when times were difficult and situations seemed impossible to overcome.

I now realize that I don't have to reach back in time to warn anyone. Someone else already did. And now I pass on that advice to you in hopes that it helps you as it has helped us so many times:

Keep going. No matter what happens, just... Keep. Going. _____________

*I'm not using that phrase lightly. I completely lost touch with reality and ended up in a hospital psych ward for 12 hours. The hospital didn't handle me well (symptoms hand-waved as "THC overdose" with no tests confirming that diagnosis...), but the event did shock me back into reconnecting with reality again.

Having Mental Illness

It’s hard to talk about my experience with mental illness sometimes because I’m not diagnosed by a professional for “everything I have.” For instance, in my household we all know that I have depression and anxiety, but it’s not really nailed down on my medical chart whether I have Generalized Anxiety or Major Depression. I’ve talked to my doctor about my anxiety, my “moods” as it is usually termed in the doctor’s office, and had my spouse at my side during the discussions, and been prescribed Zoloft for my symptoms even, and the takeaway has been:

My doctor doesn’t want to diagnose me with a mental illness, because no one wants to figure out what the insurance will do. Or what the protocols for it are. Or what the exact diagnosis should be. My therapist had further insight there: finding someone who can make the right diagnosis for me is one thing. But there could be several different diagnoses for what I could have, depending on what treatment plan they wanted to bill for, or what my insurance covers, WHICH CAN CHANGE.

And all this time, we’re just trying to live this and figure out how to do right by me and the body and brain I have.

It’s why I keep thinking I need to explain myself here. There’s no catch-all term for whatever it is that I have. There’s a lot of medical interactions between my hormones, my mood, my sleep cycle, and my information processing ability. Sometimes at 2AM I decide it’s time to read a paranormal encyclopedia, and that’s just because my body is not going to be good at doing anything else at that time, because that’s what the chemicals in my body say to do.

So, I mentioned my hormones–one reason I’ve been quiet is because I don’t want people to think that transitioning will cause you harm or that transitioning people are “crazy.” But I’ve had some severe mental health effects from my hormones being way off-balance at times, and I’m finally able to talk about it. One reason I’m able to talk about it again? I’m finally GETTING my hormones.

Last year when I switched to topical rub-on testosterone instead of intramuscular injection, it was because I was unable to do the shots anymore. My needle fears ramped up and I had to switch over. Well, turns out the absorption was never working right for me because I was getting allergy injections in the same area as I was rubbing the cream on, and apparently the testosterone got into my bloodstream instead of the lymph system, and made my levels seem incorrect? Gods it was nuts. Anyway my insurance cancelled rub-on hormones on January 1 with no warning anyway, so it’s a good thing I was planning to switch to subcutaneous injection. Which I did yesterday after being without my rub-on hormones for 3 days.

My body feels like a submarine that goes up to get air and down to dive below at times completely dependent on my hormone levels and nothing else, and my hormone levels basically all last year were bonkers. It destroyed my sense of time right as I and everyone else were all locked in our homes. My stress has ramped with the news cycles, making me unable to sleep some nights until my body finally exits hypervigilance.

There’s not a cure for this, or any single diagnosis, or a treatment other than to take care of myself and keep going.

I’ll keep going.

I want to open up more about my mental illness experience, and what it does and how I get through it, but I’m going to warn you that my mental illness doesn’t follow the discourse. It fucks the discourse. I’m a person who has decided to stop driving because I don’t like how I might react to the unexpected behind the wheel, and I still vote, I make big financial decisions, heck I make winning investment picks. Sometimes I can’t walk out my front door, and it’s not for any logical reason, and I even know logically with my brain at the time that nothing bad will happen if I go outside. Still, sometimes I can’t walk out my front door, and in those times I realize that I don’t actually have to. Because last year we as a household realized that I could no longer do the things I’d done all the previous years before, that something in my mind and body had drawn a line and said I couldn’t go ignore those boundaries anymore.

I can’t watch TV like a “normal person.” Ads really mess with me and so I often avoid commercial television, for instance. But I also have trouble sitting down and absorbing something on a screen, I’ll often have to walk around, or I’ll need to watch the show out of order, or see it “filtered” through commentary or memes, because that’s how my brain decided I was processing that day. But the conversation I have with my spouse about the subject at the end of the day is still rich and fulfilling, because I’m still having an experience of the subject, be it a show or a video game or a news event. I just take it in in a very particular way, and sometimes that way changes depending on my mood and a bunch of other factors.

Heck, my diet changes how much I can focus and think. We’re still figuring out what does what. There’s a lot of rabbit holes to chase down. At some point we discuss what’s worth putting up with versus what actually needs treatment, because when things aren’t very clear-cut you need to prioritize. Also, having a lot of different medical issues at once means that you sometimes get overwhelmed and don’t know what order to address it all in.

I communicate in GIF and youtube format on here sometimes because I don’t really have a way to articulate the feeling or thought I have other than to show something that seems to encompass it all in an abstract or more psyche-oriented way. I really enjoy being able to do that here, and to get out the things I really want to express in an environment where people let me experiment with communication. Thanks to all of you for that. Except the bots. You’re not sentient, and that’s kind of weird.

Oh yeah. Mental illness and its interaction with hormones. Are completely ruining my ability to plan things and have been for like half a year now. So thank. For your pati. Ence.

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

i can't tell if i'm just not paying attention or if mouthwashing just doesn't make any sense

[mygoodfriendjohnathanharker]

Fixed the door that Johnathan had slipped through, not letting that happen again!

[dreki-fern]

my parent is so frustrating, when she's stressed she takes it out on me and gets mad at me about dishes, or other things on top of that.

when I hardly have any energy or I don't mean to in the first place.

Sometimes I say nasty shit to myself because of this, I think of myself as lazy when really it's internalized abelism I'm trying to face.

She "apologized" but I never accept them or want to, she'll just do it again.

I wish she would take accountability instead of making excuses and saying how hard it is. We have no team work ethic and she still pushes her abelism onto me.

It used to be a lot worse when I was a kid and she showed no love or support.

I'm still trying to heal from it.

I try my best but my body, brain and depression sucks. I hate being isolated having no friends, then dealing with so much rejection and my parents neglect ontop of it fucks me up in so many ways.

I just can't wait to move out, I doubt it'll happen but I can imagine it will I guess.

[thegirlwhorideslikeasamurai]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! <3

To be honest, I don't know. The stories I'm reading and those I have read have a quite consistent audience that writes many (and even quite a lot of detailed) comments while these stories are being updated. But I usually read in other fandoms, so I can't tell if the demographic of these fandoms is generally more supportive of their writers or if these writers just know how to engage their audience. However, when I look at the stats of a couple of stories in the YOI fandom that started around the same time as CYHMH (summer 2022), I'm not so sure that it's just fandom demographics. Back then, there was one new story that had 10 chapters out with like 200 comments and I even saw one that had only 2 chapters out but already 300 comments. So, even back then and a long time before the movie cancellation, it was pretty much still possible to excite readers (For the record: I didn't look around for too long to protect my mental health, so the data I have to base my impression on is very incomplete.) Now that I know that many fans are very vocal about wanting more canon content, including some in-between-the-episodes stuff which CYHMH has in abundance, I'm genuinely puzzled. Having heard about the success of other novelisations and sequels, I doubt that's just about original content.

Interestingly, the movie cancellation didn't impact my stats at all. At that time I had a long-wished for uptick in engagement (supposedly due to the fact that I had resumed posting the improved & beta'ed version, but I'm not sure of that) and that uptick held on until about two months after the cancellation. It made me hopeful that I had finally found a steady audience. Interestingly, shortly after the eros-off ice chapter [about 2 months after the cancellation], comments and hits/chapter dropped massively and basically back to the low level they had been at in 2022.

The story has 477 comments (I'm counting the threads, not the total number), which is about 10 comments/chapter on average. From the outside that looks really good. However, a lot of that is from either readers who discovered the story later and made an effort to comment each chapter plus the success it had during the first half of this year. And don't get me wrong, I'm so happy every time a reader takes their time to comment on chapters that had been posted long ago because many readers seem to think that writers don't care getting feedback for these although most of us crave that. In many cases that finally got me the kind of feedback that I would have desperately needed to keep going in 2022, and if I had gotten that back then, the long break wouldn't have happened. Because no matter how much I appreciate these later readers (they're 3 in total, including you and I love every one of you <3), I also need some support and engagement when I post these chapters to keep staying motivated and not being on the verge of quitting writing again because just sharing them had made me feel so miserable.

Right now, there's still some engagement left. But knowing my experience with writing a series for my last fandom (before AO3), engagement drops with every instalment. So if, at this point, there is already so little excitement for my take on the ending of the show and my take on a continuation, I just know from past experiences that it will go down even further for the sequel. And for me, that really begs the question of whether I want to expose myself to another bout of losing my joy for writing and contemplating quitting it because I've already been there often enough.

At this point, I'm just at a loss about what to do. I feel like I did already everything that I could and it's still nowhere near enough: I did tons of research for this story, especially regarding Japanese culture and figure skating. I conducted a meticulous canon analysis to ensure that the characters are in-character and that everything that I add is a logical extension of canon to make sure that this story "feels" like YOI. I worked with a beta-reader because English is not my first language and in those chapters I've posted in 2022 it really showed. I respond to every comment and thank the commenter. And I post previews with little success, at least here on tumblr (not sure what the people on twitter do with them). There's hardly anything I could still try and it's not working.

Okay, I need to get this out of my system.

I have planned to post the sequel to my YOI novelisation in exactly a month from now. My beta said that the sequel feels like an actual continuation of YOI and a friend is even drawing a cover picture, which is just so amazing. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like I'm bound to regret releasing this story a couple of weeks later.

I won't lie. CYHMH had the total opposite of a dream start. I even paused the story for an entire year to get a beta reader because I failed to keep my audience interested and concluded that it was obviously bad. Or maybe it only did so poorly because it can't compete with other novelisations. I don't know and I don't want to know because if I learned the truth, I would probably shoot myself.

The story has 600+ kudos, but that's not reflected in the hits/chapter at all despite all the improvements I've made. The number of hits/chapter which had skyrocketed for a brief time span earlier this year (aka after I resumed posting the improved version) has decreased by 75% since June and hasn't recovered since. Often, I lose bookmarks and subscriptions within hours after posting a new chapter, which couldn't be a more obvious feedback.

I see this loss in interest also reflected in my chapter announcements and previews (not they had ever been great to begin with). Often, I'm the only person reblogging them because rarely anyone else does. On the other hand, my post that I would postpone the latest chapter due to the US elections was so popular and the contrast to the reactions when I finally posted that chapter was so huge that I wonder if people just want me to shut up and stop posting. To be honest, not posting would save me a lot of time and spoons because, let's be frank: writing for a mostly silent audience is just not it. (I have a little bit more engagement on other socials, but the downwards trend is the same there.)

There are only three chapters of CYHMH left to post. The story is at its climax and seeing the lack of interest and enthusiasm so close to the end is just so fucking disheartening after putting so much work into this story which I call my love letter to YOI. Maybe I don't write the kind of stories that inspire the majority of its readers to gush about it, but a part of me had been hoping for at least some people to be thrilled that the chapter was finally out. Or to be at least excited about the sequel. And I can't decide whether my writing just sucks that much to most people, if you're just silent because you only talk about my stories in some exclusionist fic club, or whether a sequel is just not wanted or needed due to the fandom being already saturated with that kind of story.

Would you guys prefer that I stop posting? If you really want to read my YOI sequel or just anything for that matter, I beg you to tell me and to support me.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

the incredibly delicate tension between: we need art to feed us and connect us and make us feel like things have a purpose, and: art is slowly but surely making us more complacent and cowardly

[angelpuns]

I'm supposed to be asleep but I'm thinking thoughts and this is all it has culminated as:

POV you're me trying to logic/reason away what are probably actual symptoms of a mental health...thing BUT IT ARGUABLY IS ONLY PROVING IT MORE??

[rotationalsymmetry]

Every time I've tried to interpret some random stranger's confrontational discourse in the best possible light I've regretted it, so this is probably a mistake. But, trying again.

This might not be about "too sick to go outside." It might be about "too depressed to notice benefit from things that normally make people feel better" or something along those lines.

life actually gets better when you leave the house consistently btw like im serious

[non-un-topo]

Daily November crying sessions start today

[doodlingwren]

Hiatus

I am going on hiatus for a bit more. I really really hoped the stuff that have been going on lately were already "sorted out" but, uhm... they aren't. I need to take a bit more time offline once again, and try to work things out.

Thank you for your patience ❤

Wren

[pwippy]

i originally captioned this as "what do you mean no one really figures life out" but thats not really relevant anymore. i. uh. long rant ahead!

[piscadilly]

i think honestly transmascs should be able to talk abt the hatred of transmasculinity and their unique experiences of transphobia but not while also implying that cis men also suffer from people hating masculinity, or that misandry is a real actual thing. anyway.

[destiny-in-the-universe]

Well. This is kind of embarrassing and I’m struggling just to write this but it seems I’ve hit a block on things I want to write- it feels genuinely like I’m about to crash into the deepest icy waters that exist, and I’ve honestly my mental limit this week and it’s only a damn tuesday; feels like I am not all here atm, and I just don’t know if I can carry out any ideas or plans right now

You might still see me reblogging and posting smaller content for a few days- or it’ll go away tomorrow, but fuck I just feel not myself?

I’m deeply sorry, it’s either burn-out or I’m just drained and need a bit to recover, ‘m not going anywhere. I will be back, I’m just… tired is all

~ Mod Danny (🐾) / Co-Front: Rivaille, Ray, Saiki

[polarfarina]

I guess I'm just confused that fans of watcher are willing to pay sometimes $100 or more in ticket prices to see the live shows with Shane and Ryan but then $6 is really offensive and a betrayal of an ask... like one mystery files hoodie costs more than a year of their (currently announced price of the) site subscription. Don't get me wrong because I do NOT think the paywall was the right decision or announced the right way, I don't think it's going to work. But. I have seen and heard several people say they buy tickets and merch, why can't that be enough? $6 is too expensive! But I'm sitting here confused because. The tickets and merch are way more than six dollars..???? I'm really really confused about that point. It's not that I don't understand that $6 can be unaffordable, it's just... so many people say they can't spend $6 while in the same breath have been boasting about how so far they've been able to spend money on concerts and patreon and buying shirts and blind boxes and the premium YouTube subscription because creators get a bigger chunk of the money that way (watcher should be GLAD they supported them btw!); but SIX DOLLARS? They can't pay that! It's odd. Is all I'm saying.

On the flip side, I saw people saying that because they live outside of the us they would get charged a double tax that they couldn't afford due to having to transfer money overseas; I feel like that's a really good point. Once this goes behind a paywall, international audiences will have a much harder time accessing content moving forward, if they can at all (not every country plays nice with PayPal). Even if they can afford the $6, there will be a heap of fees on top of it - or there won't even be a way to get the money to the service in the first place.

Absolutely the fact that Watchers' content is suddenly becoming paywalled seemingly immediately moving forward with little warning is a big shock and at first when watching the video, I didn't think they were serious. Having witnessed a successful launch of a YouTube channel into a paid subscription site with the exact price that watcher is asking for... they are not doing it right. Not for their audience. But people are so so focused on how expensive six dollars is and not on the other implications of this decision, which just... am I in the wrong here?? There's a bigger conversation i feel could be had but everyone is really really focusing on the BETRAYAL of six dollars... and I feel like I'm going crazy because that wasn't even in my first handful of thoughts about why this was a bad idea

[theheadlessgroom]

@beatingheart-bride

In turn, Randall squeezed her hand back, as he drew in a deep breath. Despite his best efforts, clinging to the notion that his parents would at the very least be understanding once everything was laid out on the table for them, seeing that Emily really meant him no harm and that they truly were in love, there was no denying that growing cold pit in the bottom of his stomach, worsened only by her suggestion. A part of him sort of wanted to (however lamely) protest, instead suggest they save it for another day, and just enjoy themselves for now...

...he knew, in his heart, she was right. They would have to tell them at some point, and it was better to do it now rather than later; Randall had never been one keen to lie to his parents, and he knew the guilt of keeping such a massive secret from them would eat him up from the inside out. Thus, it was just better to get it out of the way-for both his and Emily's ease of mind.

"You're right," he sighed, as he brought her closer, wrapping his arm around her as he nodded, "They...they do deserve to know. I'll, uh...I'll give them a call in a little while, tell 'em when I'll be home, and that you'll be with me. We'll...we'll tell them together."

He punctuated this with another loving kiss, this one pressed to her cheek as he reassured her, "It'll be alright, Emily."

[dredshirtroberts]

people?? being niceys to me???? for no reason except loves me?????????????

it's more likely than i think, apparently.