#I have separate coping skills for ocd

[indigoisaspookyghost2]

“I'm in the middle of a several minutes-long "what if" scenario where I've imagined everyone in my family dying gruesome deaths, and I've attended their funerals, and I'm currently imagining how life goes on without them, and I am openly physically crying IRL” OH FUCK THATS PART OF MY OCD???????

dear people with OCD: the next time you have spiraling & intrusive thoughts, what-ifs, or catastrophizing scenarios, I am sending a cardigan-wearing 46-year old NYU professor directly into your brain and he says "Aaaaand scene!!!" and he claps his hands slowly. and he says "Wow. Wow. Powerful stuff. Evocative imagery. A little bit post-modern, a little bit hysterical realism in the vein of Don Delilo but let's pause right here." and you will recognize your thoughts as a perplexing avant-garde film shown to an audience of 15 liberal arts students who are now trying to get a good grade and sleep with their professor.

[acesw]

Reverse: 1999 : Disabled Characters

The game doesn't stray too far on the neurodivergent allegory for the arcanists themselves. But at the same time, there are also inclusions of other characters who are very much known to be disabled. So for this post I'll delve into that, just a bit.

Now, there are 10 characters that I want to put in the spotlight. These mostly lean towards being canon, but a part of these are also researched upon and shortened so the post doesn’t become way too long.

Cristallo, Rabies, Erick : Chronic Illness

It's quite self explanatory that Cristallo herself has a chronic illness. She was born prematurely, with an added condition that makes her physically fragile. As seen in the game, she needs a life-support system to maintain her health when she's outside. It's also implied that her condition may be a recurrent cancer, as her arcane abilities are tied to a machine that provides cobalt therapy, a known advancement in radiotherapy in the post-WWII era.

Rabies is an odd case. In his stories, it's noted that Adam cured Alicia through unknown means at the cost of contracting rabies himself. However, instead of the virus being acute and guaranteed to be fatal, it becomes a chronic illness to Rabies due to the abundance and use of arcanum. And since the rabies virus attacks the brain, his cognitive capabilities and ability to recall things before the present had been impaired, making him rather docile and animal-like in nature as a result.

Erick, as revealed in her anecdote, has a hereditary blood condition that came with her arcane skill. With her arcane skill making her physically powerful, overusing it will accelerate the effects of her blood condition to the point that it can become fatal. To prevent this, she also inherited an armband from her grandfather, Harald. The armband suppresses one's ability to use arcane skills, but by extension it also prevents Erick's condition getting worse.

Shamane : Amputee

Shamane's circumstances are also self-explanatory. He lost his arm for unknown reasons, but after having lived without it for 20 years, it doesn't bother him anymore. However as we know, he crafted his prosthetic arm as a means to avoid scaring kids. (which I think is quite cool in itself)

Ms. Radio, Bessmert : Blindness

Ms. Radio and our new friend, Bessmert, are both canonically blind. Ms. Radio has stated that she cannot see, and asks Vertin to left in places where she can feel temperatures to make her feel at peace.

And as we know, Yenisei (or in other words, Yenisei's VA) has stated in the 1.6 livestream that Bessmert is known to be blind, but even with that, she's a great researcher and guide to her.

Mesmer Jr. : OCD [Content Warning: Mentions of Self Harm and Suicide.]

Mesmer Jr.'s character has heavily implied throughout the main story and her own to have OCD as a result of the traumatic experiences she had gone through from her field of work and her family’s history in it. She identifies that she has "incurable" anxiety, which causes her to think differently about arcanists and act a little irrationally from our own perspective. This anxiety results in double checking everything and having a slightly intensive routine.

This routine is created as a means to maintain herself and her own sanity, but an imbalance or interruption can greatly upset her. As a result, she has conflicting ideals, experiences hallucinations and panic attacks, has suicidal thoughts, and actively inflicts self harm as a means to cope with her anxiety. However, she’s calmer and at peace with herself when she's left alone in a quieter and clean space, away from others, and where nature is heard more than constant buzzing. In short, Mesmer Jr.’s mental health is really complex and would be better if it's explored in a separate post.

Baby Blue : Alice in Wonderland syndrome

It's no secret that Baby Blue has Alice in Wonderland syndrome, or in other words dysmetropsia. This affects her perception of reality and her ability to recall, but this in turn makes her arcane abilities all the more powerful. As a result, she doesn't realize that she's growing up, yet it seems she doesn't mind that much. This doesn't seem to affect her physically either; In fact, it has a heavy influence on how she displays her arcane skills.

Poltergeist : Social Anxiety

Poltergeist has been known to be anxious in social settings which conflicts with her people-pleasing tendencies. She's also insecure about herself which adds up to her not wanting to be directly perceived. At the same time, she doesn't like being left alone as a result of having been ignored and forgotten post mortem. Poltergeist is also elaborate (i.e. not wanting to be looked at for too long) yet awkward at the same time when communicating them.

However, I'm not sure how to describe Poltergeist's case quite well, but the idea of her having social anxiety resonates greatly in my mind, so it can be treated as a partial headcanon.

Balloon Party : Autism and Speech Impairment

Balloon Party as a child had contracted an illness that caused her to have a persistent high fever. In the end, she awakened her arcane skill this way, with her being able to cough up balloons that can be harmful or a cure to anything.

However, it might have also affected her speech because of the physical strain that comes from coughing, it results to BP's speech being a bit slow and having abnormal pauses before she speaks again. Though, this also might be a sign of her possibly also having autism, where rigid and uneven language development is a common pattern in how autism affects one's ability in communication. Her speech also has a pattern of echolalia, having a flat tone, and lack of control of it.

However, speech impediment isn't everything about autism, and there's a lot more about BP's character that also connects with it such as her special interests. I can better explore this in a different post, which will be explained below.

Last Notes

These are the characters I’ve written down, most of these are less headcanon and more of observations I’ve found when looking into these characters. Some people from the lore chat have also added their own insights on some of them. (Thank you lupjo for beta-reading through it and helping me out) 

Of course, there are a few more characters I want to discuss because of the implications of them having autism / ADHD, but these will be written in another post in the future because I still need to research and gather other information. Additionally, it would be an opportunity to talk about the connections between an arcanist’s and neurodivergent person’s relationships with modern society.

Congrats for reaching the bottom of this post, and feel free to add your own ideas or headcanons about the characters here and/or any other ones.

[the-coolest-pharaoh]

(This post is constantly being updated; headcanons are in no particular order.)

TW: Mental health conditions and trauma

My Headcanons for Ahkmenrah

——

He is short and likes to wear his crown (not just because he is a pharaoh) to make him look taller

He’s been claustrophobic ever since he got trapped in his sarcophagus

Refuses to take his cape off around other people (besides Bahiti) due to his scars

He hated being treated better than everyone else; if he had it his way he would have made it so that Egypt treated him like a normal person rather than above everyone else and deserving more respect

He loved his people so much; he was always so kind and generous to them

He spent his entire reign trying to create equality in Egypt (banning slavery, providing more care to the poor, etc.)

He LOVES duckies (King Tut reference the real ones know what I mean)

He pulled a Princess Jasmine a lot and snuck out of the palace dressed like a commoner so that he could just be a person

Does not like to discuss his brother, but will if asked about him because he does not want to be rude

Can walk really well in high heels

He doesn’t believe that fashion has gender—but because of the time period he is from he feels like has to refrain from wearing women’s clothes

His love language is physical touch

He is very ~skittish~ and ~jumpy~

He is pretty shy and likes to observe people before he introduces himself

He’s pretty quiet (kind of canon actually)—both in how much he talks, his volume, and his overall being

He likes to spend most of his time in his tomb where it’s quiet, especially if he had just recently spent time with all of the museum because socialization tires him out

Due to having been sheltered in the palace most of his life and kept as innocent as possible by his parents, Ahk has a hard time grasping real world events and does not have the best social skills

Going off the last point, Ahk also feels like he can fix anything and everything that is bad because he was taught that he can, and when he can’t fix something he gets very uncomfortable and upset

Hates confrontation beyond logic

When he is upset with someone he becomes pretty sassy (again having to do with hating confrontation and also not having great social skills)

He loves loves loves animals and always has; if you take him to a zoo he will refuse to ever leave

He is the only one that the lions do not try and murder; they actually really love him

He’s naturally super graceful

He can do his eyeliner perfectly on his first try

His ears are pierced but all his earrings are in other museums :((

He is physically unable to swear change my mind

He is such a mama’s boy :((

There has always been some tension between him and his dad because of their differing views on how Ahk should rule (aka he has daddy issues)

He has separation anxiety, social anxiety, and epilepsy, also suffers from weak bones, though this issue in particular didn’t start until after he died.

He has OCD from being controlled his whole childhood having high expectations put on him, and he and his brother being compared.

He fidgets with his clothing as a coping mechanism when he’s stressed, anxious or scared.

He has a lil overbite and it’s so cute <3 he has always been a little self-conscious about it though because it slightly affects how he speaks (again kind of canon because Rami has an overbite so)

This boi wouldn’t (more like couldn’t) hurt a fly unless they hurt someone he cares about

He is bisexual

He LOVES 70s music and fashion

Ahk thinks the museum is his kingdom because let’s be honest it is

His birthday is what would now be September 14, 1105 B.C.E. though the Egyptians didn’t celebrate birthdays so he doesn’t make a big deal of it

He is a skilled hunter

He is very curious and interested in academia—he loves to read books and poetry and learn

He loves listening to music, he could dance with his headphones on for hours

Being called ‘dead’ is offensive to him, and probably the rest of the exhibits tbh

He loves all the “mom shows;” reality tv, cooking shows, home improvement shows. His most favorite show is the Kardashians because he relates to the toxic family drama <3

He has daddy issues (confirmed, actually)

His best friend is Sacagawea :)

My version of him died at the age of 24 (long explanation as to why)

[xoxoluvnicole]

Hi :) I don't know if this is something you're comfortable writing, or if you're even doing requests but do you think you could do the dteam (separately) helping reader overcome or get over an eating disorder?

TW: Eating Disorder

i didn’t do this as the normal eating disorders you see in media. i have contamination OCD so i struggle with a lot of textures, causing me to avoid a lot of foods. so i did this more as the dteam supporting you through trying new foods again after you haven’t in a while

if these kinds of posts trigger you, i will be back to posting boyfriend/husband/dad comfort tomorrow!

~

Dream

If you had any issues with eating Dream would support you through anything. You were trying a food you haven’t eaten in a while, trying to get over your fear.

“Just take your time, there’s no rush.” Dream would sit next to you, eating his own meal to make you feel less alone.

When you ate the food Dream would be holding your hand or rubbing your back if you were comfortable with it. He always tried to be prepared for if you got too upset.

SO MANY POSITIVE WORDS. “You did so good, honey.” “I’m so proud of you.” “See? You can do it!” “It’s okay, I’m here for you.”

He would try to push you out of your comfort zone to help you but he was always aware of your boundaries. All the comfort.

Sapnap

He is definitely the ‘touch is comfort’ kind of guy. He’d sit next to you, holding your hand to remind you he’s there for you. If you wanted him to he would eat it with you to show you that it’s okay.

Either way if you successfully ate it all or couldn’t finish, there would be so many cuddles after. He would let you hug him for however long and he wouldn’t mind a but if you cried on his shoulder. He would let you lay down on him and fall asleep if you needed to.

Sapnap’s main thing is showing you that someone is there and that you’re not alone. He would let you sleep on his shoulder for the whole day if it meant you conquered your fears or needed to recover. Cuddly man confirmed.

GeorgeNotFound

George definitely tries to make this the most comfortable as it can be. He will also eat the food with you. If you ate what you wanted then he would congratulate you. He would be so proud of you.

If it got to be too much he would try to make you happier and more comfortable. He would turn on your favorite movie and get your favorite blanket or comfort items.

“You did really good, and you made progress. That’s all that matters.” He would tell you while your head was rested on his shoulder.

His main coping skill is distraction. He tries to distract you if it went bad, making you move on and then try again when you were ready.

[urlocallesbiab]

ok the initial post for brotzly fake couple's therapy au has already gotten way too long, so i take this as a sign i should start posting things separately and establish a new navigation tag

so, either way, a lil background on the characters

todd: exactly the same shit as canon, just imagine that instead of the seer-of-universal-truths syndrome there's some regular non-magical neurological disease running in the brotzman family.

farah: mostly similar to canon, just a bit toned down. she's not exactly an one-woman army, but she is freakishly physically fit, combat-ready, and proficient with common types of firearms — significantly more than you would expect any random person to be; she had always wanted to become a part of the police force like her brothers and father, but never passed the screenings due to debilitating anxiety, ocd and autism (never tried to join the fbi or the military tho; both her skills and her family expectations aren't That high).

her father had gotten terminally sick when she was a teen, and that significantly cut their income and added to their spendings, usa healthcare system be damned; old family friend, successful enterpreneur patrick spring, had stepped in to support them both financially and morally. farah ended up being halfway raised by him, always hanging out at his house and playing with lydia; out of all her family, save for her father, farah was the closest to patrick.

some time before the main timeline events, maybe half a year or a year ago, farah, patrick and lydia were having a nice family outing — up until patrick had been shot to death in broad daylight. his history of rising to success hadn’t been exactly pretty, you see, and the organized crime eventually took what was due. farah still blames herself for letting that happen despite her training and her worrying habit of never leaving the house without her gun; but if you asked her, really asked her how would she go about preventing that, she wouldn't be able to give you a good answer — it's just that one second he was alive, and the next he was not.

lydia, as both the key witness and the fortune's inheritor, had been taken into the witness protection program; farah hasn't heard from her since. she misses her like crazy, possible even more than patrick. therapy was meant to help her cope with the ruinous ptsd from those events, and she's been slowly, slowly making progress. that day she was having an especially Bad One — after which she and dirk got shit-faced — was soon after her father's death.

dirk: he grew up in the foster care system, and as a pre-teen was adopted by a kind and soft-bellied, if a little strict, ex-military man on a good pension, scott riggins. dirk had always been a bright kid, fascinated by complex mathematics (oh, the patterns! the beauty chaos and order! the language of the universe!) and some strains of physics (especially quantum studies; it all started with an article on shrodinger's cat and went downhill from there), quickly picking up on underlying logic within numbers (way quicker than his little undiagnosed autistic brain picked up on most social cues); teachers always promised him a bright future, even with the chronic lack of resources. scott had made sure dirk would get access to the best education possible, be taught by best tutors available, enroll into the best school imaginable; he gave dirk everything, and all the boy had to do is put in some effort. and he tried, oh god did he try; but he didn't do it hard enough. the new schoolwork load was multiple times bigger and harder than the worst he had ever experienced before, and he would often grow exhausted, distracted, unfocused and loose-minded (the adhd never got diagnosed either). some days a new and curious configuration would catch his attention and he would crack down on it with fervor, but some days he would just sit there and chew on the same three problems for hours on end to no avail. on those bright days scott saw his potential, his true and exciting and wonderful potential, and wanted the kid to live up to it; on the brain-foggy days, when he failed to do so, scott grew dissappointed. and whenever he felt disappointed, dirk felt it tenfolds on his skin. scott wasn't violent, godforbid, he's not a monster — just a little strict: it's just that he frowned, and tutted, and shook his head, and told dirk off, and didn't kiss him, and said things that dirk deserved to hear no matter how it felt, and took his books away (if there was anything the kid loved as much as math, it was thrilling detective stories, and sci-fi, ans fantasy, preferably all at once, read in one sitting) so that he wouldn't get distracted, and sometimes wouldn't call dirk down for dinner until he was done with the homework.

it hurt terribly to have the only person who'd ever cared about dirk, who had chosen him out of everyone else, who had chosen him and stuck by him, the only person in the world who loved him, be upset with dirk. for the longest time, dirk was convinced that he simply was lazy, and awful, and ungrateful, and hopeless, and the worst person to ever live, with how he let his father down time after time. but over the years, his self-hatred got so large he couldn't carry it anymore, and it spilled onto the mental image of scott, just so that he could breathe again; over the years, he grew bitter and disillusioned. as a young adult, he still couldn't tell if scott's demands and ambitions were fueled by simple materialistic hopes of fame and monetary grants, or a vain desire for glory, or some weird roundabout way of achieving personal fulfillment, but he knew for sure: scott riggins wanted himself a pet boy genius, not a son.

when the time came to attend college, dirk picked cambridge over harward, mostly because he would take any excuse to get an ocean away from scott. and he passed the exams — with flying colors! he was, after all, exceptionally smart. the teachers were delighted to have him; three months later he got booted because he missed half the classes and didn’t do any homework: drunk on the newfound freedom, stressed out by a trans-atlantic move, and lacking the only accountability system (however flawed) he'd ever had. he didn't tell scott, of course — he wasn't ready to go back home, he would do anything to avoid going there. so he took the college-student-allowance his foster father kept sending him, none the wiser, and set out backpacking across britain and then the rest of europe. soon it turned out that travelling cross-country is slightly more costly than living at the dorms, and there were only so many plausible excuses he could use to cajole more money out of scott, and coming clean about his strategical-omissal-of-crucial-information-that-wasn't-tecnhically-outright-lying was out of the question, so dirk had to cut some costs: skip a meal here, sleep on a train station bench there, get chased out by foreign policemen once or twice, a few times of staying overnight at some shady moldy place with some shady people whose language he didn't speak too well — nothing any other travelling young person hasn't seen, truly. he was coping alright. eventually scott caught wind anyway, and dirk, not that dirty and scrawny, had been forcibly dragged home. from there it's been a steep decline in the relationship: more harsh demands and more desperate pleading, more affection followed by more coldness, threats and promises from scott, and a few failed attempts at coninued education, a few move-outs followed by a few move-back-ins, plus a few ultimately abandoned career choices from dirk, who never seemed to grow out of whatever it was that was wrong with him, even as a decade slowly passed and gave way to another one.

when todd meets dirk for the first time and asks the inevitable "so what do you do for a living?", dirk introduces himself as a writer, which, combined with his rather frivolous spending habits and impressive disposable income, leads todd to assume that dirk must be some literary genius, top-nyt-bestseller, author-of-future-classics madly successful type of guy — but in reality, he sits on his arse and writes experimental-storytelling-style sci-fi/fantasy/whodunnit fusions that no agency interested in commercial success wants to look at, he's been published only once by a tiny indie house that paid him jack shit and a penny in royalties, and half his money still comes from scott. that financial dependence is the main reason dirk's in the us at the moment — he's been pulled from his latest bout of doing volunteer work for a queer nonprofit in eastern europe by the threat of cutting his whole goddamn allowance off. as a compromise, he returned to the country but not to the city, claiming that he needed fresh scenery to inspire his creativity and maybe actually write a profitable book for once; really, he just hadn't been mentally ready yet to be in the same town as scott so soon. so, settle, washington it is, why the hell not.

by the way, "dirk gently" is his pen name — legally, he's still dirk riggins. also, in the skype calls he's sometimes talked into having, dirk still calls him "father", but behind his back it's been "scott" for almost two decades now: at some point growing up he felt the need to put some mental space between himself and that man in order to stay sane.

after his fateful Big Talk with todd, where dirk admitted the less pleasant parts of his childhood and youth in most detail he had ever did in his whole life, todd convinces him to start looking for a better job to support himself, change his legal name, and someday cut riggins off for good. also get some therapy, for fuck's sake, god.

[hauntedselves]

i had therapy today and we went over this. scary and LONG but i think it was a good idea and worth it!

essentially we just went through what i’d written above and she said what she thought about it.

StPD: ehh... most of it can be explained by autism & trauma, as well as my episodes of psychosis. not something she’d diagnose me with, but still something that i feel comfortable self diagnosing with

dyscalculia: not in her ballpark, so i’ve gotten a referral to the university clinic where the PhD students practice psychology (since that’s a hell of a lot cheaper than other methods) for a cognitive assessment (for dyscalculia, and my cognitive functioning more broadly). she thinks it’s likely though. also mentioned that time distortions are common in autism (and i know they are common in ADHD and dissociative disorders as well)

SzPD traits: she said “you flat out just don’t have schizoid PD”. i agree, and i think the traits i do line up with is also autism + trauma, as well as depression (for the anhedonia, avolition, etc). good to hear her perspective though

NPD traits: this one was interesting because she thinks that everything in my list can either be accounted for by trauma, autism, or just normal human experiences except my “belief of being special/unique”. but that one symptom alone isn’t enough to be diagnosed with NPD traits, so we’ll just.... note that and move on i guess lol

EDs: she agrees with me that i “definitely have disordered eating”, but she’s hesitant to put a label on it (or specify eating disorder instead of disordered eating) until we discuss it more. again, autism & trauma, as well as internalised fatphobia and diet industry bullshit. she was leaning into ARFID more than AN though.

ADHD: another interesting one... we’re gonna screen for it, not necessarily because it’s something she’d pinpoint as a possible diagnosis but more because she wouldn't want me to miss out on the literally life-changing medication that might help me if i did have ADHD. so it’s still definitely on the table.

OCD: also interesting (i use that word way too much...). again, autism + trauma, but she said i “definitely have intrusive thoughts” and “episodic” OCD which i didn’t know was a thing...

CPTSD: yep. no argument there. she also brought up that DID is under the CPTSD umbrella but with distinct symptoms for a separate diagnosis

psychotic thoughts: she said she wouldn’t say “psychotic features” but she would say “psychotic episodes“ that are tied to stress, trauma, and also function as / were developed as coping skills, especially in childhood. also has more weight because my dad is psychotic (either schizophrenic or depressive schizoaffective depending on who he talked to at the time, though he doesn’t agree with either of those dx’s)

pathological demand avoidance: we didn’t talk about this one much, just that it’s very common (especially in autistic kids) and usually people grow out of it. i have to do more research into how it presents before i can pinpoint how or if it affects me now in adulthood

there was also one other thing that i didn’t include in the above post, and i’m not gonna publicly share what it is, but we did talk about it and it was hard and scary... i’m glad my appointment was on the phone and not in person. the distress it causes is more important than the actual symptoms, (as with any disorder really), but there’s a lot of yuckiness and discomfort that comes with it. the main thing is that i do have insight and awareness, which is important when it comes to this particular thing.

we also talked a lot about how symptoms =/= diagnosis and diagnosis is just a convenient, agreed-upon framework mostly for quickly sharing information with other professionals, though of course it can feel good to have something to point to. all stuff i agree with but good to hear from a Professional (TM) herself.

she said she would be hesitant to diagnose me with any PD... but she diagnosed me with BPD when we first met (or rather, i’d already been diagnosed, and she agreed with the diagnosis)... idk what that means - she probably just forgot, but i’m. insecure lol

she said if she were to write a list of my diagnoses, it would be: CPTSD, DID, ASD, transient (mostly) stress-related psychotic episodes, and disordered eating

i’m still self-dx’ing with StPD, because i think it makes sense for me, even in addition to autism + trauma, and i’m still gonna self-dx with NPD traits, ADHD, OCD traits, and the dyscalculia diagnosis that i’m 100% sure will be confirmed when i get that cognitive assessment.

tl;dr: stpd sorta, szpd traits no, npd traits no but also sorta, ed yes, adhd maybe, ocd sorta, cptsd yes, dyscalculia probably but also pending assessment.

here's the big self dx email i'm going to send to my psychologist. (the diagnostic parts of it at least). i prefaced it with a bunch of "please don't think i'm being attention seeking though attention seeking is part of npd which i'm self dx'ing as having traits of so if that counts towards it then you can totally think i'm being attention seeking but i've put a hell of a lot of time and thought into this i didnt just read the dsm criteria and decide i had it thanks~"

Keep reading

[sp00kito]

my manager kind of sort of offered/floated a new role by me this evening that sounds great and very much what I’m into but also with a lot of responsibility and I scared

I still feel like a fucking child walking into work because this is the first ‘adult’ job I’ve had - bearing in mind though I’m 28 and have been there for 9 years now so know the ins and outs of what we do better than anyone (and am constantly called upon by literally everyone else there for info, more senior than me or not) so I should not feel this way by now surely but I dooooo???? I’m just a baby!! imposter syndrome my detested

the other week my manager was like we’re gonna hire a ux/ui specialist to get this huge upgrade project done but then also that will be an ongoing role because atm we all just do our best to make decisions based on…nothing more than what we think looks good and is hopefully easy to use, which has resulted in our software being a horrible mishmash of different people’s opinions and styles over many years with barely any changes made to existing ui in prob 10 or so years, so she’s a little outdated overall. a small improvement gets developed with some new clean ui, but there’s never any time or effort put into updating existing stuff to match

but then tonight she said she’s been stewing on it and thinks I would actually be perfect to transition into that space and to hire another ba to fill my current position instead (even though I have barely done any ba work since I was promoted to that position in like fucking march last year hahahahahah)

I’m like hell yeah that does actually sound perfect for me, I was already keen for us to hire a ux/ui specialist so I could see what they do, and I really love working in that space designing how things should look and work and have a very analytical eye etc etc but now that would be me??????? I would be the specialist???? they’d pay me to do some sort of course to skill up but then I’d just be thrown in the deep-end to revamp all of our shit which would have knock on effects for hundreds of thousands of users for years to come hehehehe no pressure

I’m still spiraling a little over someone at work yesterday just very flippantly suggesting I have ocd, in a way that it was just like…a known fact about me. this is someone I’ve worked with and also been great friends with outside of work for four years now who knows me on not just the surface level most coworkers know each other, and I trust her judgement on shit so for her to say it has really sent me.

I mentioned it to someone else I work with over lunch today who’s more friend than colleague (we’ve always worked in separate departments so she doesn’t know that work-based side of how I am, more the personal/social side). she stayed very neutral on the subject, didn’t necessarily agree or disagree on the assumption, but did just encourage me to lay some things out for myself and work out whether it’s something to worry about just in terms of seeing a professional about it (and…whatever else is going on up there) or keep coasting as I am because generally speaking, I cope with what I have. if I have ocd it’s not some huge thing that’s ruining my life, and as a 28 year old I don’t have to have everything figured out. it would be crazy to suggest I COULD have everything figured out.

all of this to say, the ux/ui thing would be a super interesting path for me because of the ocd traits I have (spiralling, spiralling) and I’m really keen to try it but I’m also so so fucking scared to fail or be bad at it. half the time I feel like I’m about to be fired because????? like literally nothing just general anxiety, so for my manager to be like ‘here’s a great opportunity that I’m handing you on a silver platter because I think you’re perfect for it and it would be amazing for your career’ is very nice to hear

something about that text post that went around the other week about how weird it is being in your late 20s when you never planned for a future because you didn’t expect to make it this far. I’ve literally got no ambition or plan for my future cause I was very much under the impression I’d be done with the world by now (aaand circling back to speaking to a professional about whatever is happening in my head) I love therapised eddie so much why can’t I want that for me I don’t know if want the pressure, but fuck it’s an interesting idea for sure and dare I say I’m passionate about it????? god that feels lame as hell saying I’m passionate about ui lmaooo but I am???? I care about it and I get invested in it at work and annoyingly nitpick things other people put together and I’m obsessed with consistency now that it’s been dangled in front of me like I’m a fucking horse with a carrot I WANT TO EAT THE CARROT SO BADLY but I’m just terrified things will go to shit and I’ll ruin everything :\

[attavoid]

Introduction

Hi, you can call me Ser (rhymes with "air"). I use any pronouns, and I'm diagnosed with AvPD, as well as other diagnoses, including OCD. I am professionally diagnosed (self diagnosed at first) if anyone is wondering, and I currently am in therapy.

I'm creating this blog in hopes to educate more people about AvPD (avoidant personality disorder), as well as share information, resources, and coping skills that can help people who have it. This blog is not intended to help you diagnose yourself- please do indepth research to diagnose yourself and do not rely solely on this blog.

I decided to do this a bit after a hospitalization, where I started learning a lot of information and coping skills that I realize many people don't have access to, especially those without therapy or any means to get help. My goal here is to help people learn about themselves and learn to cope and get better as much as they can so they can get back to a normal lifestyle.

My ask box will be open for questions and people sharing their experiences and to ask for advice, but this is not a vent space. I'm not a therapist and I cannot help you in that way. Please also don't ask me to diagnose you or another person. I also will not tolerate any anti recovery rhetoric sent to me.

Please recognize I am not a professional, and I may post misinformation. I'll always cite my sources when it comes to education posts, but there could come a time where I post something that's false. Please immediately message me letting me know it's false (with a credible source to refute it). Often times I won't post unless I have two or more sources to confirm the information.

You may follow if you don't have AvPD, as I find that a lot of coping skills and information overlap with different disorders (such as GAD and BPD), I actually actively encourage everyone to follow this blog. It's intended to educate anyone regardless of if they have it or not, so everyone is welcome. I'll be happy if my blog helps anyone regardless of if they have AvPD or not.

If you know my actual identity, please do not share it- I'm not ashamed of having AvPD, however I do not want it to be common knowledge that I do have it, and I would like to keep this blog separate from my online identity. I'm not going to vent here and whatever examples I bring up from my life will be very vague. Please do not pressure me for details.

I am not accepting other mods, but you are free to submit things you feel could fit the blog and I may work them into posts.

Thank you for following and reading my posts, it means a lot. I hope I’ll be able to provide some sort of comfort to my fellow AvPD folks. <3

[silenthillmutual]

artemy - ptsd. canonical insomnia and intrusive thoughts. also adhd and probably consumes so much fucking caffeine to deal with it. struggles w ocd symptoms after the plague but it’s hard to determine if that’s it’s own separate diagnosis or if it’s the ptsd at work.

daniil - autistic + bipolar i. spends the entirety of the game rapidcycling or having a mixed episode. canonically anxious (panic disorder?). develops ocd after the plague.

clara - bpd and ocd. she is trying so hard to keep her shit together but she’s at that age where all of her mental health disorders just hit at once so she is just barely hanging on but she’s doing so well and i’m proud of her.

rubin - double depression and intense ocd. does not even try to control his compulsions and  cannot keep himself from spiralling at every given opportunity.

lara - pervasive depressive disorder. has been struggling with depression for so long she no longer remembers what feeling normal is like. gets worse with the seasons. tries to work around it by keeping herself busy. obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it’s mild.

bad grief - some sort of unspecified disorder and refuses to get diagnosed. probable anxiety disorder.

andrey - bpd and bipolar i. biggest symptom is mania and doesn’t experience depression nearly as much as his brother does.

peter - bipolar ii w psychotic features. self-medicates. hassuch horrible coping skills that he develops agoraphobia post-plague.

yulia - ocd babey!!! she thinks she has a control over it. but guess what? she does not.

[boopypastaissalty]

Here sre some of my Sanders Sides theories. Long post btw so yee

Roman and Remus were originally one all-encompassing creativity, then they split and become the two different sides of creativity, or the "Creativitwins". Their names seem to follow a theme: Ancient Rome, specifically the legend surrounding the creation/beginning of Rome. I think that the original creativity's name was Romulus. Here's why: Remus killed Romulus over a land dispute and then started the city of Rome in his brother's name. Citizens of Rome are called Romans. Though it could be argued that Thomas's moral sense as a concept, not necessarily Patton, separated the two, thus "killing" the original creativity.

Patton may have suffered from anxiety and could have created Virgil as a way to relieve some of his stress, therefore making him Virgil's "dad" in a sense, in Patton's mind warranting him calling Virgil "kiddo" all the time.

We all know that Patton is allergic to cats, but what about the others? What are their weaknesses? My speculations are that Virgil is iron deficient, as he doesn't like to rise up because it makes him dizzy, he is also described by Roman to be the "fairest of them all" and then admitting it was a pale joke in Virgil's expense. Roman is lactose intolerant, as when Patton is feeding him cream of broccoli soup, Logan says that it will "upset Princey's stomach". Logan is OCD: Always planning and organizing things. He gets upset when things don't go exactly as he plans it. He also feels the need to always be right and to make sure everyone else is kept in line. Also: Patton seems to suffer from depression. Oftentimes depressed people crack jokes and give people the general idea that they are happy. They also try to make other people happy. Patton also sometimes gets into these sad funks and even says "I had this problem where I'd hide my less than awesome feelings, so when I would feel like sobbing I'd just smile and crack jokes. I thought that was coping, only joking, never showing sadness, hoping it would just go away".

The thumbnail for "Putting Others First - Selfishness v. Selflessness Redux" has a character selection screen telling the viewer to "select a side", but one thing I noticed is that there is a blank box, indicating a locked character or a character who hasn't been revealed yet. Another thing I noticed is that the sides have a rainbow theme going on. Thomas even says that he is "full rainbow all the time" as an allusion to his sexuality, and possibly even the sides in general. Roman is red, there is no known orange side, Janus is yellow, Remus is green, Patton is light blue, Logan is indigo, and Virgil is violet/purple. Red is the color of physical strength, power, confidence, and passion, which suits Roman's personality. Yellow can be happiness and joy, but also directly means cowardice and deceit, which is self explanatory. Green is a color of healing, life, and vitality, but the flip side being greed, jealousy, pessimism, and superficially. Blue is the color of trust, loyalty, faith, wisdom, truth, patience, and understanding, which sums Patton up pretty well. Indigo resembles wisdom, integrity, fairness, impartiality, and justice, which is all right up Logan's alley. Violet is the color of ambition, dignity, devotion, pride, mystery, independence, magic, being cynical, and mourning, which all makes sense in Virgil's case. Now to orange, which resembles joy, sunshine, risk taking, adventure, enthusiasm, creativity, attraction, success, rudeness, frivolity, and untrustworthiness, which is a balance of traits that both Roman and Remus have and directly resembles creativity, so orange could be a fusion of Roman and Remus, the original creativity before they split. Another possibility for the next side is someone who resembles ethos, as we have pathos and logos (Patton and Logan).

All the sides have an ancient Rome theme going on. Roman and Remus, after the legend surrounding the beginning of Rome. Virgil, after the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, who is often called Virgil. Janus (formerly known as Deceit) after the Roman god of the same name (Janus is the god of new beginnings and transitions, often depicted with two faces facing in opposite directions, one for the past and one for the future). All of the sides except for Patton and Logan, whose names are derived from pathos and logos, an ancient Greek concept proposed by Aristotle. And have you noticed that they mirror each other in almost every way, suggesting that, much like Roman and Remus, they are brothers, possibly even twins?

Dukes tend to not be a part of the royal family, but if so they are princes who have gotten married. Does this mean that Remus is married?!?!? If so to whoooo?

Welcome to me overthinking things again! What if Roman has control over the other sides? Like he's creativity and the sides are figments of Thomas' imagination, so like what if one day he was just done with Logan's nonstop fact train he just (this is extreme) went: "Fuck you, Logan, you're dead now" and Logan straight up dies? Like where would his power end if he could do that? Overthinking things can be scary kids, let me do it for you.

If you overthink it: Patton basically just was like "Nah" in POF SvSR. So he said in SvS that going to the wedding would make Thomas feel good, something that he basically controls because he is Thomas' moral sense and at the center of most of his feelings. Basically Thomas went to the wedding and Patton was like: "This is nice and all and you did the right thing, but uhmmm about those happy feelings. No." And then got all sorts of frustrated about being wrong. So yee. I am just doing the overthinking things thing again.

What if creativity split solely as a big "Fuck you, Logan"? Like I just imagine: C: "Hey Logan, I'm performing mitosis"

L: "Yes, your cells- *he looks up* Whaaaaa?"

R&R: "Cha cha real smooth, Logan"

And thus the twins were "born"

Logan thinks feelings are bad and claims to not have feelings, even though he clearly does (cough, cough, Crofters the Musical? Getting angry in some episodes? Logan, you're a bad liar, bud). So he bottles up most of his feelings, for all practical purposes making him a ticking time bomb. Something's probably going to happen and he won't be able to hold it all in and he'll have an emotional breakdown of sorts. Another thing is he will not duck out. He knows he's too important to Thomas' mental wellbeing for that. He is also getting progressively more angry as the others listen to him less, so he's probably going to overwork himself trying to get everyone to listen to the point where he physically can't be there for Thomas. Cuz like I suspect Logan leaving would have the same effect as Thomas having a massive stroke: The right side of his body wouldn't work, he wouldn't be able to talk/communicate, and his reasoning skills would be gone.

Janus just loves philosophy. Every episode in the main timeline, he makes references to famous philosophers to get his point across.

Patton is always the first of the light sides to accept the dark sides. First with Virgil and then with Janus. He may be taking them in as his troubled but lovable children who he will defend under almost any circumstance.

Virgil's name is not Virgil. People think his full name is Virgilius, though Thomas and Joan have previously stated that it isn’t. Bc of that, some people have theorized that Virgil was lying about his name, or that when he moved to the “light sides” he changed/used a different name, and maybe they’re going to reveal that sometime. Like the scene with Remus and Vee where Re goes, “I would never hide anything from you” looks pointedly at Virgil, and you assume it’s bc he took forever to tell Thomas, but what if it’s bc he was lying about his name from the moment he told Thomas??? And also the moment when Janus says "It takes a liar to know a liar" and Virgil says "Don't" and the response was "What? I'm only talking about your name" I think his name could be Acanthus

Ya know, Patton probably has an indirect role in how the other sides look. Not like "But you're anxiety, you wear the hoodie" but closer to Thomas beliefs of stuff like lying is bad and the fact that Janus often plays devils advocate, so he has a snake face

Random thoughts:

Virgil has the most ace/demi aesthetic and I love that

SvS: Multi part episode, "bad/evil/dark" side gets accepted, the FEELS, angst. Hmmm…

The twins getting along and just like sitting at a table causing minor chaos.

Patton randomly hugs everyone. He just does.

Janus and Patton: animal bros

[elamae56]

How'bout 3 asks of your own choosing for 'The End of the Year'?? 😘😘

Oooh Alona ... the choice ... *rubs hands* 

I’m putting this behind a cut because apparently, giving me a choice of which ones to answer resulted in an absolute tidal wave of information and sharing! 

Read at your own risk! 

15. What’s a bad habit you picked this year?

Lol. I think that I probably picked up a few this year. I’m quite bad at succumbing to poor habits but I think the worst one this year is my diet. Not all of it as to a certain degree a big part of my diet has actually improved. I cook a varied number of meals, including vegetables, fruit and salad due to doing shopping in a much altered way.

However, I’ve always had a sweet tooth and very low will power to sweets and chocolate and when I first went out shopping at the start of our lockdown I justified buying chocolate and treats as well, a treat to myself. A comfort during what was a pretty stressful first few weeks not knowing what was going to happen or how things would pan out. I had quite a bit of stress coming from my parents where my Mum was trying to cope with a lot and basically I ended up treating myself a bit *too* much 😬 I live on my own so there is no one to guilt you or judge you and I got into the habit of having chocolate bars or blocks or toffees etc as a daily treat rather than an every so often treat. *winces*

Amazingly I didn’t put on too much weight over the first few months but I was managing to get out for walks at the start of lockdown which of course fizzled out by mid summer. But coming into the winter months and with dark nights, no opportunity for walks as I was working back in the office more for our office move I basically have turned into a potato. 

I kid you not. I measured myself when Mum and I were ordering some new jeans for her and I have gone up two sizes. Conversely my Mum has dropped two sizes due to the stress thus showing you two different coping mechanisms/reactions. 

20. What’s something you learned this year?

I feel this question is probably relating to a learned skill. I know a lot of people used the lockdown time this year to learn something new, or at least tried to. I didn’t. I planned to use whatever extra time I had to read, write fic and catch up on some dvd watching (this was before TOG and Netflix). I even *gasp* had thoughts about using the time to clear out stuff in my flat which I did do to a certain degree. I cleaned and cleared out my bathroom and my pantry, although mostly it was cleaning and reordering stuff. Which leads me onto what I learned, and that was something about myself.

I’ve always considered myself to be someone who had issues with getting rid of stuff. I get easily, sentimentally attached to things, particularly stuff from my childhood or University years. Things that remind me of good times. I also don’t like to chuck out anything that I feel I can use/wear again. I have clothes that are ancient and which are the wrong size (even before this years weight gain) but I don’t like to get rid because they are perfectly good and will be when I get back down to the size I should be *pauses* *side eyes herself*

So, although I’ve always thought I was probably edging towards being a hoarder it was only this year, whilst I’ve had to spent much more time in my flat than before that I’ve been faced with the realisation that I am indeed very much on the hoarding spectrum and possibly worse than I had originally thought. 

Having to work from home really brought it to, well home, that trying to find a space to work from was very difficult, not just finding an appropriate seat and table but making room to have that work space. Shifting the boxes and bags and crap became a mammoth task and was really draining. Having to work with the mess around me was uncomfortable (particularly as my table area was physically uncomfortable) and made me realise just how much I have that other normal people just do not. I watched some of the eps of the US series Hoarders in the autumn and it made me realise some of the thought processes that I have are not actually normal.

I have to just say that I don’t live in dirt or mess! Just in case anyone is picturing those extreme cases from Hoarders! I vacuum and clean and do the washing up and nothing that I use daily lives on the floor like clothes, food etc. I just have a lot of stuff which means that things live in boxes and stacked up on the floor more than they should be. I have a lot of crap!

For someone with OCD and issues with exhaustion it doesn’t make for a good combination. 

21. What’s something new about your place of residence now vs the start of the year?

Definitely my work desk. I started off working from home on my tiny old PC table which I had to remove the top shelf from and balance sideways as I have a Surface Pro as my work machine and it wouldn’t fit on the keyboard shelf and the top shelf which would have been for the monitor was much too high for me to work from (my office chair which luckily I had didn’t go high enough). IIt also meant I couldn’t attach a mouse very easily or have anyway to put notebooks/papers etc. I managed with that for about 4 months or so before I managed to get a cheap £16 table from Ikea (this was after the more expensive one I ordered first arrived damaged). A much better work space and I have somewhere where I can sit with comfort and use my separate monitor (my personal one) and keyboard and mouse. It means that I can concentrate on my work better and is much better for posture and eyes. 

It has rather taken over my small lounge and with the boxes and crap I have it did force things out further into spaces they shouldn’t be. However, I wouldn’t change it at all as it has made working from home much much better.

Thank you for the ask and the choice! 😘

And apologies for the slightly over enthusiastic response 😂 

[afoolforatook]

A RWBY V7 Ep12 rant.....When I say this is long..... Legit was fucking 37 pages double spaced at one point. Sorry....

Before this gets started I want to warn you, this is long (even longer than I thought it’d be going in). It’s probably too long ... actually it is definitely too long but if I agonize over editing it down again and again I won’t get it up before the finale. It’s probably repetitive at times, and most certainly not anything I’ll be showing off as an example of my top essay writing. And I want to be able to say that the length pays off because I have some grand hopeful insight at the end. I want to say I know things will be okay. But the fact that I can’t is exactly why I’m writing this, and why it’s so long. So if you need this to have a hopeful ending, I’m sorry, I don’t have one for you currently. I want to, so badly. But to me false hope would be even worse.  So if you can’t handle another long post that doesn’t end with a way to fix things, it’s okay, take care of yourself. But maybe the most hopeful thing I can tell you, and tell you up front, is that you aren’t alone in your pain. 

I want to preface this all with one more thing: I don’t hate CRWBY. I respect them, support them. I’ve wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt as much as I could.  That doesn’t mean I can’t criticize them or expect more from them or just be plain angry with them. I can be vocal about all of that without harassing them, without hating them. I don’t think they’re just plain evil or homophobic. I still want to believe that they can do things that will allow me to trust them again. Maybe it’s naive, but I want to, at the very least, still have hope that this wasn’t malicious, just very poorly conceived and executed. 

And I know that other people who are hurting like me are lashing out towards CRWBY. And while I don’t at all condone that kind of reaction, I can understand it to an extent. Because I’m very, very hurt and angry and it would be so easy to let loose and say all the awful stuff I want to in my anger. To yell and call people out and not care how I come across. It would definitely be a lot easier than spending all week writing this long thing and agonizing over making it perfect. There is nothing wrong with venting and being raw and open and angry, but just as we want CRWBY to be aware that their actions can truly hurt people, we need to be conscious of the fact that so can ours.  Many people are very hurt right now. And whether or not you think it was queerbaiting/BYG or not, or even whether or not you just think it was bad writing, no one has the right to invalidate the people who are hurting right now, many of whom are queer people dealing with personal traumas and mental illness. 

The few people who are attacking CRWBY and other fans (and there is a difference between being angry and vocal about that anger and just attacking them) do not invalidate the hurt people are feeling. If you are hurt or angry you have every right to be. You have every right to stop watching the show or leave the fandom, or communicate your hurt to CRWBY. But communicate means just that; communicate. Talk. You can be as angry as you are, you don’t have to temper your pain to be more tolerable to the people who caused that pain. But there is a difference between being harsh and honest about how hurt you are, and harassing real people. And I won’t say “harassing real people over a fictional character/show” because I know it’s more complicated than that. My hurt this past week isn’t over a fictional character or a ship. It’s about me and what I’ve been through and the fact that the very thing that gave me strength in hard times was turned into something that confirmed my biggest fears and hurt me immensely. 

The world always gets so sentimental when we see things about fictional stories giving people some comfort, and we celebrate that. But as soon as people say they can be hurt just as much by media, we lash out, say they’re overreacting, that they’re just getting upset over fictional characters. But you can’t have it both ways. We can’t want fiction to be important and inspiring to people and then belittle people who are negatively impacted by the same material, especially when often that vulnerability comes from a history of trauma and/or being neurodivergent. I am extremely hurt. I feel betrayed and abandoned and angry. And it will take time for me to process all of that and move past it. But I can be all of those things without attacking CRWBY or the people who might disagree with me. 

To me, this isn’t about disagreeing. We can argue forever about whether or not this was queerbaiting or bury your gays or poor writing (and I honestly at this moment don’t even know what I think about all of that because I’m not in that headspace currently) but the fact is that there are many, many people who feel it was, and who are hurting because of that, and whether you believe it was or not does not give you the right to invalidate the real pain that they are feeling.  Who is right is less important than the fact that people, people who were already vulnerable, have been hurt. So, please. Respect each other. Respect those who are hurting. Respect those who aren’t and don’t understand, and respect CRWBY. You can still be angry and speak out without attacking others. 

With that said, to fully understand why this has affected me so much, and why it’s going to take a long time for me to get back to where I was, regardless of how the volume ends, there are things you need to know about my history. It’s a lot of background and this is already going to be a longer post than I’d really like, but it’s important to understanding why RWBY is so important to me, and thus able to have such a negative effect on me. So please, bear with me. Also, fair warning, though at this point it’s probably obvious, but my story isn’t happy. I still haven’t found my own positive ending to it. If it’s too much for you to read right now, please, like I said before, take care of yourself. 

I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Farley. I’m 24, nonbinary (they/them), biromantic, demisexual. I have MDD, GAD, ADHD, Panic Disorder, OCD, Comorbid PTSD, and am trying to get an official autism diagnosis. I’m a full on alphabet soup. I struggle with imposter syndrome, intrusive thoughts, self-isolation, dermatillomania, and multiple trauma related phobias. My queer and neurodivergent identities are huge parts of my life and I try to be as open as possible about them, in the hopes of helping end the stigma around them. One of the main ways I cope with my mental health issues on a day to day basis is through hyperfixations. While it might not technically be the healthiest method, it’s what I’ve found to work for me when I’m in a really bad place and unable to practice more active coping skills. Through stories and characters that I relate to, I can separate my problems from myself a little and both escape from them for a while when needed, and view them a little more clearly from a new perspective.  

That’s some important info about me, but what really matters here is the past five years of my life and the trauma within them. 

In October of 2015, a few months into my sophomore year of college, I went into a deep depression, mostly brought on by multiple family deaths and stresses over the past summer that I had not properly had time to process and recover from. I quit my job as an RA and withdrew from school and moved back home with my parents.  While this was the right decision at the time, it wasn’t easy. I left a very close group of friends at school, and didn’t really have a strong support system at home aside from my parents. My friends from high school had all gone off to college themselves, and the few that still lived in town were often busy with work or school. And because I have an intense fear of driving and needed time to get myself in a better place before starting a job, I ended up spending most of my time home alone. I became more and more isolated, to the point of verging on agoraphobic, and my parents and I started thinking about ways I could basically get my life started again. 

 But isolation messes with your head, and makes you want to just isolate more and more. In mid February of 2016 I started to really work on being social again. Mostly because I started talking to my best friend from high school, Emma, regularly again. She knew I was struggling, and while I’ve always had a hard time keeping in touch with people, Emma has always been the person I never felt self conscious about going to. We talked everyday. After high school, Emma’s mom and younger brother had moved to Ohio (I live in NC) and Emma had gone to school in Oregon. Her father lives in Germany. So between visiting her family in Ohio and Germany she didn’t have a lot of time during breaks to come back to NC to visit friends. Since we graduated I’d only seen her once for about 12 hours during that awful summer. But now we were skyping and chatting everyday. And slowly I started to be less and less scared of being more social. I wanted to hang out with friends. I was excited about going back to school in the fall. 

Something important to understand about me and Emma is how close we’ve always been. We’d been best friends since 8th grade. We told each other we were soulmates, soulfriends, when we were 15. Nearly everyone in our small high school thought we were dating at one time or another. I always knew I loved her. I was fine with our relationship being “only” platonic. Because platonic wasn’t “only”. It was absolutely perfect. It was having her as one of the most important people in my life, and me in hers, and that’s all I wanted. But I also knew that if she ever wanted to try a romantic relationship, I’d be open. 

Around the time I left school Emma had been going through a lot herself. She was finally getting help for her own mental health issues and she was, for the first time, really thinking about her identity and sexuality. On May 4th 2016 she texted me like always, but this time she was nervous. She wanted to tell me something. She said she was still confused about her sexuality and didn’t know where she fell. But when she tried to think of being with someone, the only person she pictured was me. And I told her basically what I just told you. So we started talking about testing out us being a couple. She had already been planning to come to NC to visit after she went to Ohio later that month for her brother’s high school graduation. And my parents were going on a two week vacation around that time as well. So we decided that she would come and stay with me for two weeks. We would keep this to ourselves until then, so that we could see if this was really the best thing for us. And if so, then we’d tell people. We’d always talked about living together after school, but now we wanted to see exactly what we wanted our relationship to be. She bought a bus ticket for May 26th and would stay through June 10th or so, which would mean she’d be there for her 20th birthday on June 5th. We talked everyday about our plans for her visit. How excited we were, how we could cook dinner together and dance around the house in our underwear, and just get to be Us again. We talked to friends, planning to visit friends from high school and maybe even my friends from college.

On May 18th I texted Emma around 11 pm. I hadn’t heard from her all day which was unusual but she was in Ohio celebrating her mom’s birthday and getting ready for her brother’s graduation that weekend, so she was probably just busy. We’d told each other goodnight every night for months at that point. So I told her I loved her and was so excited to see her in just over a week.

The next morning it was a bit odd that she still hadn’t texted me back but again, I just assumed she was busy with family. And then the mail came, and the last part of a birthday present I was making for her arrived. So I got to work, giddy. 

Around 2 pm my other best friend from high school, Juli, called me. For some reason I decided I’d just call her back later, I was too engrossed in making Emma’s present. About 20 minutes later I heard a knock on my door and turned to see my parents standing in the doorway to my room. I vividly remember spinning around happily and saying “Hey! Everything okay?” even as I noticed the tears on my dad’s face and how pale my mom was. My stomach knotted and I stood as my mom said “N-no. Honey…..” and walked towards me. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for her to say that a grandparent or aunt or uncle had died. But as she got closer and put a shaking hand on my shoulder, I got a little more confused, a different kind of scared. One of my cousins? One of my baby cousins?  

Nothing could have prepared me for her telling me that there’d been an accident in Ohio. That Emma, and her mom, and her brother, and her aunt had been in a crash…. And that all four of them had been killed on impact. The only thing I remember about the rest of the night is the pain of continuously screaming, punching the wall until my dad stopped me, and calling my friends from college, trying to have someone to talk to, someone who I could call who wouldn’t also be mourning. I couldn’t handle my own grief, let alone anyone else’s at that moment. 

There’s a lot more to that story. There’s the memorial service in Ohio and meeting her dad and stepmom for the first time. There’s the service we put together at our high school and seeing our friend group all together again, except not. There’s the panic attacks every time I saw a garbage truck, or my parents drove off to work. 

But most importantly for what you need to know right now, is my sliding back into isolation. I barely ever saw my friends from home and every time I did for the next two years it had something to do with mourning Emma. I saw my college friends a few times; them coming to visit or me taking a bus to stay the weekend. But eventually they went back to school and I stayed at home. I drifted away from high school friends because I didn’t know how to handle being with them when everything we did together reminded me of what I’d lost. I didn’t know how to talk to them because I needed their support but knew I didn’t have it in me to be supportive of them, and that wasn’t fair. I drifted away from my college friends for the same reasons, and even more so as the group dynamic that I had left slowly changed and faded until I didn’t know who was talking to who anymore and I again felt bad for dumping my shit on them when I couldn’t do the same. I began to think that all I brought to any social interaction was my pain and hopelessness. I would just bring everyone else down. They shouldn’t have to deal with my pain. So a year after I left school I was even more alone. I’d lost or pushed away all the people in my life that I’d expected to be lifelong friends, family. And I didn’t know how to begin to fix that. I didn’t know if I wanted to. I didn’t know if I deserved to. 

The only reason I was even still alive was because anytime I even got close to thinking about hurting myself, I could just sense Emma glaring at me, yelling at me, telling me that I couldn’t let this stop me from living out all those dreams we’d talked about. And I knew that my life wasn’t just mine anymore, that all those dreams, that bond, the parts of my favorite person that only I knew, would be lost if I died. 

But I didn't have my friends to vent to, and as supportive as my parents were (I’d told them and a few close friends about me and Emma that first terrible week) I needed friends. But I didn’t know how to reconnect and I was too scared to go out and meet new people, especially knowing that at some point I’d have to drop the “dead girlfriend” bomb on them, and who’d want to stick around after that?  So I tried to use media and hyperfixations to pull myself out of spirals, like I always had. But it was hard. Because most of the things that had been comforting before were all things I’d shared with Emma, and so now they were just more reminders of her absence. And even new things I found soon turned rotten because I couldn’t help but think about how I wish I could show it to Emma. Everything that made me happy for even a moment would pretty soon make me sad. 

Eventually I found things that comforted me and helped me be creative again and that led me to starting school again, nearly three years after I’d left, at SCAD.  I loved the classes. I wanted to be there. I’ve always been a fiction writer but now there was so much in my head that I needed to get out, to process, and to share with people, especially people like me dealing with an unimaginable grief. Those past few years had been made even more difficult by the lack of representation I found in grief material. Everything was either about grieving the elderly, not someone who’d barely even gotten to live. Or if it was about someone young it was due to suicide or disease or violence; in other words things that at the very least, left the grieving with some cause to care about, or something to be angry at, some real world outlet. I didn’t have that. I didn’t relate to that. And even harder was finding anything I could relate to that included the complexities that my queer identity put on my grief; there were people I could and couldn’t tell about our relationship. Did I say I lost my best friend or my girlfriend? What if her family didn’t approve and wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t let me have any of her things, wouldn’t want me around? And one of the biggest things I kept thinking those first few months; why had my life become a ‘bury your gays’ soap opera plot line. Was Emma supposed to just be my tragic backstory now? Was I just supposed to use this as angsty fodder for the rest of my life? What about her? What about her dreams, her potential? What about her progress? She’d just gotten to a place where she was accepting herself. Where she was overcoming her mental health issues, where she was proud of who she was. Why was I allowed to keep going and she wasn’t?  I couldn’t find any support for these feelings. Not books or groups or forums. So I decided to make them myself. I started writing and drawing, putting together what I called my Grief Scrapbook. I was working towards the thing that mattered to me more than anything; telling our story. I was getting the chance to create the content I’d so desperately needed. 

But I was still alone, even at school. I was 23 living with mostly 18/19 year olds. And while there wasn’t anything wrong with them, I was struggling with a strong sense of dissociation. Everywhere I looked I saw Emma, forever 19. And there I was, continuing to age and getting further and further away from her. 

My first year at SCAD I made two friends, and while I love them, they didn’t fulfill the hole left by the large close knit groups of friends I’d lost. I tried to get back in touch with my best friend from college, only to find that she was no longer talking to me. And I don’t blame her really. Yes I’d been going through things, but so had she, and I hadn’t been able to be a good friend for her. So if she needed to move on for her own good, no matter how sad that made me, she had every right to do what was best for her, just as I had been trying to do. 

I’m now in my second year at SCAD and recently started hanging out with a new group. And they’re great and I’m slowly feeling more confident and secure around them, but I still struggle. I still miss the relationships I held so dear, the relationships I let dissolve. I still worry I’ll never have that kind of connection with people again, and that if I do somehow manage to find it, I’ll mess it up again.  Some days are particularly rough, when I sit with my thoughts too long, or see something that reminds me of any one of the many people I miss, and I ache for the happiness I had. And it’s those moments when I turn to hyperfixations (I do promise this is getting to RWBY). 

This past February the final How To Train Your Dragon movie came out. The HTTYD franchise holds a very dear place in my heart, as it was my main hyperfixation during high school, and something I shared with Emma and other friends. The second film came out the day of my graduation. It was the last movie Emma and I saw together before she moved to Ohio and then went to school in Oregon. It was the last movie we saw together at all. I knew it was going to be very emotional for me to see the final movie, alone now. But I had to see it opening night. And (spoilers for The Hidden World I guess) the movie ended up being about the reality of having to let go of the important people from your childhood as you grow up. About dealing with the fact that sometimes the people you expected to always be a part of your life, aren’t. I loved the movie, but it destroyed me. A few months later I had to get through May, the 3rd anniversary, away from home for the first time. And it was extremely difficult. I’d had to take a break from HTTYD and process things. 

So my main hyperfixations weren’t helping me get through a really difficult time. But around the time HTTYD 3 came out I happened to get back into RWBY. I’d watched the first season or so when it first came out, but then had just kind of forgotten about it. And so, in the absence of HTTYD, I got caught up. And I can’t say there weren’t things that hurt, that made me have to take a moment and collect myself.  Watching the end of volume three, watching Pyrrha and Jaune finally kiss, and then watch their relationship die with her before they even had a chance to be together, hit way too close to home. Logically I should have projected on Jaune more than I did but I think I couldn’t, because it wasn’t just similar, it felt like I was literally watching the worst moment of my life play out. He was too much like me to handle. But there was Qrow. And at first I just kind of latched onto him because I liked him. I like his characterization, his design, and I was a fan of V*c ( I hate to even mention him here for fear of causing a totally different discourse, but Emma and I were big fans of his and high school and met him and when everything happened with him it was just another thing that felt like a good memory of Emma had been tainted.)  

And so I was watching while the last half of volume six was airing. And I was watching Qrow slip further and further into his depression. I watched as he felt betrayed by Oz after grieving him and then getting him back. I thought more about how he’d basically lost his sister, about how he’d grieved for Summer (regardless of whether it was platonic or romantic), how he lost hope in having strong relationships ever again. How he felt cursed and how he pushed people away to protect them and himself from more pain. I saw how the Apathy affected him and how close he was to giving in before Ruby and Weiss snapped him out of it. I saw him struggle to get himself back together for Ruby and the rest of the kids, but not know how. I saw every single fear I’d struggled with those past few years in him. I related to Qrow more than I’d ever expected to. And so my hyperfixation on RWBY grew. His addiction was my isolation. His insecurities of hurting others and thus pushing them away was my fear that for the rest of my life, I would be alone because I was always going to be too broken to be worthy of friends and love. 

And then everything happened with V*c and for a bit everything hurt again and I had to get away from RWBY and the toxicity within parts of the fandom. And when I was able to come back I was excited but worried. I hoped that Qrow would continue to develop, continue to progress alongside me, that I would like his new actor enough to finish healing the sting I’d felt over V*c.  I just wanted Qrow back, I wanted this character to be there to help me again.

Because Qrow Branwen gave me hope. He gave me hope that I could get better. He gave me hope that even with my insecurities and trauma, something I’ll never be fully free from, I can deserve people who care about me, and that there are actually people who will care about me. He gave me hope that good things can still happen to broken people. And not just people who were once broken and have healed, but people who are still figuring out how to heal, who know they will never fully heal, but also know they still are worthy of support and care. And then volume 7 started and I got more than I’d ever dreamed. 

There was the hug with Ironwood. And even though I shipped Ironqrow, the idea of there being a romantic aspect to that hug wasn’t what made it important. It was the fact that we got Qrow connecting with an old ally (and an adult), finding that he even still had an old ally. That despite everything that had happened with Oz and Lionheart, despite all the trust he’d had broken, maybe he wasn’t actually alone yet. And then we got Clover. I’ll admit I was wary of him at first. I was worried about the traitor theories, the death theories, and then the theories that he’d negatively affect Qrow, making him feel worse about his semblance. But then he grew on me so quickly. Because he smiled at Qrow. He got him to talk about himself, called him out when he was putting himself down, told him how well he was doing. And while it’s wasn’t because of Clover, he was sober, and Clover had to at the very least help him stay that way. Qrow was hunching less when he walked, opening up, being more vulnerable and social. He was smiling, laughing, making jokes. He had a steady partner that he trusted and worked well with, likely for the first time since team STRQ. And yes, I shipped them, but honestly while I would have still been disappointed if it was never canon, given how blatant it really seemed like it could be, it would ultimately have been okay. Because again, it was less about Qrow finding love and more about him finding support.   And then I saw Qrow and Clover and Robyn team up, and whether it was canon or just fandom I felt represented. Not just in the way I had with Qrow about my mental health, but as a queer person struggling with complicated grief; the exact thing I had never been able to find and had taken upon myself to create for others. I saw Qrow being loved (again, whether platonic or romantic isn’t as important) and healing. Even if Fairgame never actually happened, I could still see them as queer characters helping each other process trauma. And maybe I set myself up in a bubble part of the fandom that fully convinced me that Fairgame was possible, but at the very least I truly, undoubtedly thought that Clover would side with Qrow. 

And as I watched episode 12, I could feel my stomach sinking. Okay Clover didn’t side with Qrow at first, but maybe he’ll come around. Okay maybe he won’t come around, but maybe he’ll take Qrow in and they’ll have time to talk, maybe even with Ironwood. But then Clover abandons the ship, abandons Qrow and I was scrambling even more for hope that things would be okay.  Maybe he’s trying to get away to diffuse things. But then “Never pegged you for the manipulative type” the first sign of Qrow doubting their entire relationship, of feeling betrayed again. And then Clover calls Qrow cynical? Maybe I’m forgetting something, cause I haven’t gone back and analyzed every scene with them, but I can’t remember Qrow ever being cynical around Clover this volume that we’ve seen. Self-deprecating yes, but this is legitimately the happiest and most secure we’ve ever seen Qrow. But okay maybe they’ll reason and Clover will come around. But then “We don’t have to fight, friend.” and it’s friend not Qrow. And then “You don’t know my friends. That’s how it always goes.” and I broke. I almost stopped there, a part of me wishes I had. Because it was already so broken, this thing that had even in the past few weeks, been a main pillar of hope for me. But maybe they’ll come together to fight Tyrian. And then Qrow goes after Tyrian and Clover keeps attacking Qrow. Well maybe he’s really trying to protect him, or has some plan. But then they continue to fight each other. And they don’t have even a moment of “who’s the bigger threat here? Us or the serial killer?” And then Qrow works with Tyrian?! Tyrian the serial killer? Tyrian the unstable maniac? Tyrian who tried to take Ruby? Tyrian who nearly killed Qrow? Tyrian who fucking worships Salem, who Qrow has spent most of his life fighting, has lost Summer to, and countless other traumas? (and I get the possible reasons, realizing that Clover won’t lay off of him so Tyrian is his best bet and then he can take care of Tyrian, but I still don’t like it. But this isn’t even about whether or not I think it’s good writing or characterization and it’s too long already to get into that.) And then Tyrian and Qrow fight so well together and I honestly felt sick. We haven’t seen Qrow work that well with anyone. Not RWBY, not Ironwood, not Clover.  And now we see it with fucking Tyrian? And maybe it’s a stretch but it honestly felt like another nail in the “Qrow attracts bad” coffin that is his insecurities. Qrow and Tyrian fight nearly perfectly together and it felt so damn wrong. Clover’s wrong here, Qrow’s wrong here, and it all feels so very very wrong based on the entire progression of their relationship throughout the volume. And then Qrow takes down Clover’s aura and I’m just empty.  There’s no hint of him trying to just beat Clover and not kill him. He has no reason to think that Tyrian won’t actually go for the kill during this fight. But they continue to have these snippets of “We don’t have to fight” or “I want to trust you” while showing no signs of holding back and still caring about the other’s well being. And then Qrow’s voice breaking during “Why couldn’t you just do the right thing…”. We’ve literally never seen Qrow this emotionally compromised, let alone during a fight. He’s crumbling because he finally had someone who made him think he could get better, that he could have close relationships, that he could be good for the people around him. And now he’s losing it. 

I was broken here, I was already spiraling. I knew Clover would get hit. I knew I would be struggling to deal with this episode because I had so fully expected a different course. But I thought there could still be hope. There had to still be hope. CRWBY wouldn’t give us all that development, wouldn’t show Qrow finally happy without leaving some hope for things turning around in the finale. He’d get hit by Tyrian’s stinger and Qrow would have to work to save him and they’d work things out. But then “I trust James with my life… and I wanted to trust you.” And I’m sobbing. Because I get it, Clover’s loyal, but when Qrow’s face hardens I know what he’s thinking. What he’s trying not to think but it’s so hard to fight: “Maybe it is me. Maybe I can’t be trusted. Maybe I’ve ruined things again”. Even though he knows what James is doing is wrong. But he trusted James, he trusted Clover. And he thought they trusted, cared for him. And now they’ve both turned against him and no matter how much he knows he’s doing the right thing, he can’t help but worry that he’s still the thing broken here, that he still messed up somewhere and ruined the relationships he needed so much. I was breaking more and more as I watched this source of my own hope lose all hope. 

And then Harbinger. The weapon Qrow built himself. That he modeled after his hero. The literal extension of his soul. And only moments before, Qrow destroyed the one thing that might have protected Clover. Clover’s emblem falls. Tyrian with “Like you killed Clover”. And yeah yeah Qrow being framed is heartbreaking. But it’s more that he’ll believe it. He did. He fucked everything up again. He tried so hard to do the right thing and still managed to hurt the person he cared about. And if Clover, the foil to his bad luck, could be destroyed by his semblance, how does anyone else stand a chance? And then blaming James. Swearing to make him pay (I honestly don’t remember if he says make him pay or kill him but I physically can’t rewatch that scene to see which it was). And yes he blames James. He hates James. It was the last straw breaking on someone he wanted to trust so much, wanted to have as a friend. But he still blames himself. He still knows he’s cursed and all the progress he’d made with Clover’s help is ripped away. 

And then “Good luck”. I’ve seen people saying it’s sweet, that it’s a moment of reconciliation, of Clover showing he still cares. And I don’t necessarily disagree. But I hate it. Because Qrow won’t take it that way. It’s just another reminder that good luck is out of his reach. And then the goddamn sky and the bi flag colors. And then we see Qrow cry for the first time. And then…. The scream…. I literally nearly vomited and that was the thing that sent me over the edge into full blown panic attack. Because I know that fucking scream. I know how it feels. I hear it ringing in my ears, I feel my throat getting raw. I could hear and see and feel myself in the same position. The nightmare I’d fought off for years; kneeling over Emma’s body and there being nothing I can do but scream and scream as the last of the hope I was clutching to faded with her… with Clover’s eyes.

It wasn’t that Clover died. It wasn’t that my ship won’t happen. It was how traumatizing it was. It was that Harbinger was now defiled. It was that Qrow set it up to happen. It was the sky. It was seeing the light go out of Clover’s eyes. It was Qrow’s scream. We’ve never seen a death like this on RWBY before. Yes we watched Pyrrha’s death. But there was no blood. We didn’t see her bleed out. We didn’t see the exact moment the light left her eyes. We saw Adam stabbed and some bleeding and then hitting the rocks, but we weren’t right there, seeing the exact moment of his death close up. If Clover had been stung by Tyrian and died I’d be upset still, and many of the issues I have would still be relevant. But using Harbinger like that, playing directly into Qrow’s own insecurities like that, after having him do things that felt extremely out of character in order to set things up for Tyrian to kill Clover like that and blame Qrow? It felt vile. 

It didn’t just feel like bad writing or different narrative choices. Hell, it didn’t even just feel OOC. It felt malicious. It felt like twisting established plot and characterisation completely in order to make it fit some tragic climax that was only chosen because it would have the biggest emotional impact, not because it was the best way to continue the plot. And they can’t say that they didn’t expect people to be so attached to Clover. Because if they didn’t expect that to be so emotional for viewers, then why do it like that in the first place? Why put in the climatic cinematic shot that mirrors when Yang lost her arm? Why have Qrow screaming over Clover’s body be the final shot?  If Clover was never meant to have significance to both Qrow and fans, why make his death so painful? They can’t say that they didn’t know fans would get so invested at the same time that they say that it was necessary to make it that traumatic. It’s not that you can’t kill off beloved characters, no matter how long they’ve been in the show. But if you do, it’s got to feel important, it’s got to feel necessary, and it’s got to make sense for those characters, or else it just feels like you’re playing with peoples’ emotions for no reason other than shock factor. 

I’ve seen a bunch of theories and discourse. Arguments over whether or not it’s queerbaiting or bury your gays. Over whether or not it’s bad writing or out of character. And I’m sure I’ll eventually have a stronger, more thought out opinion on that, but right now I can’t even get there. 

I’ve seen theories as to why CRWBY did this, why it’s important to the plot. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ll be just as surprised in a good way next week as I was in a traumatic way this week. But it will take a lot, and I will still need time to recover and dig myself back out of my own intrusive thoughts that saw this episode and rejoiced because “See!? See, good things can’t happen! You’ll always lose whatever good you find. You’ll always ruin whatever good you find.” And none of the theories I’ve seen make that better. Maybe they’ll bring Clover back with the Staff of Creation or some other method: doesn’t matter, the damage is still done. Qrow still is betrayed and traumatized. And even if Clover came back and Ironwood realized he was wrong and stopped, even if everything went back to exactly what it was, Qrow still would have lost all the progress he made this season. Because even if everything was fixed, Qrow would still have to fight down the newly boosted fear that everything will fall apart again. And similarly even if I come back to RWBY and things are good, I will still have a hard time trusting the show, and will still have to climb my way out of a hole I had just gotten out of, except this time I won’t have the comfort of RWBY to help me. 

Or maybe Clover won’t come back and Qrow will relapse and try to kill Ironwood and lose his mind like the scarecrow he is. And what will that do but reinforce the fear and idea that “broken” people can’t escape their vices? That they’ll always come back to pain. Yes, it’s important to show that people can relapse and still get better, that relapse doesn’t mean all hope is lost. But there’s a difference between a relapse and new trauma that directly undercuts all the progress you’ve made. That’s not inspirational, it’s exhausting. Yes, you can come back again, but what about the next time and the next and the next? When will you just get to be secure in your happiness without worrying that at any moment you’ll thrown back to square one?

If it turns out there’s some great plot point this creates, some big revelation that fixes things, I still think it wasn’t done properly. Fine, have that, have that pain. But don’t end on that and leave people for a week. It’s not about it being a cliffhanger. It’s about people who are traumatized being abandoned. (Again, I’m not even getting into how, if this did happen, how episode 12 would still feel off from a characterization standpoint and whether or not it was poor writing. It’s an analysis I can’t currently do.)

And maybe my least favorite theory and the one that I might see as most likely; that Qrow won’t relapse. That he won’t completely lose it and instead Clover’s death and influence will be what keeps him going. Because yeah, that sounds great, that sounds heroic and strong and like the progress that came from knowing Clover did make a difference. But it feels wrong in this instance. Qrow’s had that. He’s had loss that hurt him but he kept going to finish something or honor them. He kept going after Summer died. He kept going for Ruby and Yang and Tai. If he didn’t have that, why would he have kept going when things were so bad? But Qrow doesn’t need that again. He doesn’t need another pain to spur him on. He needs support. He needs proof that his hard work, his struggle, has been worth it and that he still has allies. And not just the kids. Because as much as he respects them, as much as he believes in them and their abilities as hunters, he’s still protective of them, they still aren’t on an equal level. He still feels responsible for them. And that’s good for him, but he needs adults too. He needs people who aren’t his responsibility. He needs adults who can call him out on his shit. He needs adults he can lean on, who can take care of him. And now who does he have? Summer is gone. Raven is gone. Tai is back at home. Oz is gone. Lionheart betrayed him. James has now betrayed him. Winter has sided with James and might not be alive much longer? Robyn is there, but also hurt, and we haven’t seen anything to suggest that they are particularly close. And now Clover is dead. Clover, the only person we have ever seen Qrow let his guard down around like we did this season.

And it’s not that the “Staying alive for the person you’ve lost” is a bad plot line, and if I’d trust any show to do it I would’ve thought it’d be RWBY. But I can tell you from fucking experience, forcing yourself to keep going in honor of someone? Yeah, it might keep you alive. It might give you meaning and even lead you to do great things. But when it’s just you and your head? When you’re alone because you’ve lost everyone who kept you going and now you have to keep going without them, for them? It fucking sucks. It’s not poetic. It’s not this heroic strength that lifts you up. It’s a crushing weight of fear that you will fail again, that you’re the only one who can carry this burden, but this time you’ll let down the person most important to you.  And then not only will you have fucked up your life but you’d have made their suffering and loss meaningless. 

And I can see why CRWBY might take this route, what their message might be, and maybe for them and for some people it’s good, but personally it’s crushing. Because it can be a good thing to have the desire to honor someone spur you on, that’s literally why we still have RWBY. But if that’s the only thing you have? It’s toxic. You have to have other support and motivations of your own to keep you going without becoming hollow inside. And right now, Qrow doesn’t have that. Right now, if Qrow uses this to push him forward, it’s not recovery, it’s not avoiding a relapse; it’s falling into a new, much harder to spot, addiction.

Yes, shitty things happen regardless of whether or not you’ve recovered from previous shitty things. Yes, life isn’t fair and sometimes it feels like you just get hit down over and over. And yes, people die in war and it’s ruthless and unfair. But RWBY is still a show. It’s still a show about hope. It’s still fiction, an escape from the cruelty of reality. And to me there were multiple other options for the plot to create conflict and sacrifice without doing it in a way that seems so needlessly cruel.  

This is complicated and layered and I think there have been mistakes made on multiple sides, and in the end, we still don’t know what CRWBY has planned and how things will go from here and why they chose this. Because everything has a meaning in RWBY. At least I want to believe that. But right now it’s very hard to think that all the meaning that was what made this my favorite volume, was anything more than a trap to make the end that much more painful. And that hurts. I want to believe that’s not the case. But it’s very, very hard. And like I said before, even if they pull it off amazingly and everything makes sense after next week, damage has still been done. No matter what happens, there were ways things could have been handled either throughout the volume or in this episode that, while still having emotional significance and sacrifice, could have been less traumatizing to a large portion of the fandom who supports CRWBY specifically because they trust them not to do something like that to them. 

In the end I’m hurt because right now it feels like the entirety of this volume was just a build up for the shock value of tearing Qrow down again. And I’m just tired of it. I’m biased I know, and maybe for some people it’s an important narrative. But to me it just feels like angst just for the sake of being cruel to a character who can’t catch a break. Since Emma’s death I understandably haven’t been a big fan of really angsty fanfiction. At first seeing fics where a character lost their partner made me irrationally angry. Because why can’t good things happen in fictional worlds? Why do characters I care about have to suffer like I do just for the sake of being angsty? Why would someone do that to a character they love? Why inflict that absolute agony onto a character when you could just, let them be happy? Yes conflict and sacrifice are crucial to good storytelling, but you still have to leave a character some hope, or else what’s the point of just watching them linger in misery? This kind of pain isn’t just a plot point that gets addressed for one or two episodes and then is fully dealt with. It’s a part of who you are now and will be for the rest of your life. 

I’ve been sad over shows before. I’ve thought plot lines were bad and like I’d lost a character that deserved better. But I’ve never had something take me from a (relatively) stable mindset to a truly frightening spiral like I’ve been in this week. If this had happened when I was younger (granted if it had happened before Emma’s death it wouldn’t have had the same meaning), if it had been during that first year? It really might have been a breaking point for me. The final straw. The only reason I’m able to know that as truly devastating as this has been for me this week, I’m not in actual danger of getting to a critically low space, is because I’ve learned how to deal with those low places these past four years. I’m still in a dangerous headspace but I know how to handle it.  I know to reach out, to vent, to ask friends to keep an eye on me, to keep an eye out for critical signs that I’m getting worse and I need more professional help. But if I’d had this trauma as a teen and saw this, or if I’d seen it before I’d built up this method of keeping myself safe even when in the worst headspaces?  I don’t know that I would have been able to deal with it. 

There’s a loud part of my head that is berating me for letting this affect me so much. For letting a show and fictional characters be the catalyst for me having to actively ask my friends to keep sharp instruments away from me for the first time in years. I’ll have a moment of clarity of “It’s not that bad, you’ll get past it” before being swallowed back up by the hopelessness. I have moments of “How could you let a fictional character’s death put you in this place, but not Emma? How is he more important?” 

But it’s not about RWBY or Clover or Qrow. It’s about my brain, and how I as a neurodivergent person deal with things. It’s about this how thing that I use to filter parts of my life through so that I can handle them in more reasonable chunks, is now a trigger itself. I currently don’t have any other hyperfixations, which means every time I have a moment of silence, or start to get feeling down again, my brain goes to RWBY, because usually that’s how I pull myself out. But that just reminds me of the loss RWBY currently represents. Not just the trauma this has brought up, but the fact that I’ve lost this source of comfort. And then I’m left scrambling for anything as I spiral further and further. I’m at the point where unless I am having constant outside stimulus to keep my brain occupied I go right back into a nosedive. And there’s nothing I can do on my own to stop it. So I just have to ride it out, fight back dozens of overwhelming intrusive thoughts, and try to think that I won’t always be this miserable, even though the current thing that was helping me believe that has just shown me the opposite is true. 

And no, creators can’t be held responsible for the mental states of fans of their work. But when things are done that directly hurt so many people, that even if not intended to, feel so calculated and malicious, they have to acknowledge the part they played in that trauma. 

The point of whether there was queer baiting/byg, and mlm representation and how its handled, is very important, but it is also something I just can’t even begin to look at right now from an analytical viewpoint. I can’t begin to come at this from an activist place right now. And I know there are plenty of other people who can speak on it better than I could currently.  My queer identity is largely wrapped up in my grief and how it affects me, but that also means that when I’m spiraling, it is very hard to focus and make good points about things that are not issues I’ve directly experienced. The only reason I can write this at all is because these are really just emotions I’ve dealt with for years that were dragged back up.

RWBY has always been about finding hope when it feels impossible. But this feels like it’s becoming “keep finding new hope but know you’ll lose it too and have to start over”.

RWBY has been what gave me hope that even when bad thing after bad thing happened, there was a reason to keep going, that eventually something good would come your way and you don’t have to live in fear of losing it. That you can still be broken and be worthy of good things. But this episode ripped that all away and told me that sometimes a person is never meant to be happy no matter how hard they try. 

A big reason I have clung to RWBY so much, and admired CRWBY so much, and in turn been so forgiving of plotlines or details that I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of, was because I see myself in them. They lost Monty so suddenly and tragically and I understand that as much as anyone who isn’t them can. I understand the drive of keeping the show going. When I’m working on my own writing and art about my story and my loss, they are a huge inspiration to me to keep going even when it feels impossible. I can barely listen to Indomitable because, much like Jaune losing Pyrrha, it is uncanny how close to home it hits. They have been through more than we as fans can or should ever expect to know. Because even as someone very open about their grief, who wants to get rid of the stigma of expressing grief, I know that everyone deserves to keep as much of their grief and pain private as they need. And I can't even begin to imagine how hard it is to work on a show that is literally a feat of love and honor to a person you’ve lost, and then have people attack it and you, and make huge accusations, even try to use your loved one’s memory against you. It’s my biggest fear in creating something so incredibly personal but so important. 

And I know that everyone handles grief differently, and no matter how many people you have to support you it can be an extremely isolating thing. I know that no one has the right to tell someone else they are grieving wrong, and I would never dare do that to them. Because I know that the ways I grieve and the things that piss me off about grief and people’s reactions to it, will not line up with everyone else’s, and that’s okay. So the exact things that hurt me so much may be the things that CRWBY find cathartic. 

But I still think it’s important to talk about something that hurts you. To help people understand a facet of grief that might not be what they’ve experienced. Because even people who want to help, who want to provide representation to those hurting, can never please everyone, and even can even hurt people. I want to trust CRWBY. I want to believe they care about the queer community (even if they don’t always succeed in providing good representation), I want to believe they wouldn’t purposefully try to hurt queer fans with queerbaiting or byg. I want to believe they don’t actually hate mlm. 

Narrative is complicated and sometimes things are done that will unknowingly cause harm, or that were topics that the writers didn’t understand enough to properly execute. Things that may seem so obvious to the people who were hurt could truly be things that hadn’t occurred to the writers. And that’s not to excuse those writers from acknowledging their mistake, but to give them a chance to learn and improve. I think a great example is The Adventure Zone (slight spoilers ahead), and how Griffin McElroy handled the fans’ reaction after Sloane and Hurley died in Petals to the Metal. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone but he made a decision that was very upsetting for many people and that wasn’t okay. But he listened and apologized and from there on not only tried to provide better representation, but asked about how he could do so, consulted the people he was trying to represent in order to do everything he could to not cause that kind of pain again. Creators are human and deserve second chances, as long as they show they are actively trying to improve.

Things will be learning experiences, but the people who are hurt in those learning experiences, and who are often the ones hurt in such things over and over, are still allowed to be hurt and upset. Intent is not effect. And for creators who want to be inclusive and supportive, it is their responsibility to accept criticism and work to avoid making the same mistakes. Like I said at the start of this, criticism is not harassment and harassment helps no one. Be as angry as you are, be as open as you need, but cruelty to people who are honestly trying to do good but will still make human mistakes just creates more pain and conflict. You don’t have to like it or forgive it but you can’t invalidate the people who are hurt, who do. 

I love RWBY. I want to love CRWBY. I want to keep watching. I want to keep supporting and trusting them. And maybe I’m letting a show have too much influence over me. Maybe it’s unhealthy to project so much on a character. Maybe things will prove to be necessary to tell the story they want to tell. But speaking as a neurodivergent, traumatized, grieving, queer person, I still feel betrayed and hurt by something that I trusted enough to be vulnerable about and I don’t want to sugarcoat or hide that. 

I can’t say I hate CRWBY or I’ve lost all hope in or respect for them, because I’ve related to them so much and know how complicated things like this can be. And because I don’t think I personally can write someone off while still in such an emotionally raw space. I’ll have to take some time to see if I’m able to watch the finale this weekend, but I will most likely watch it, if not just a bit later than I usually would. And RWBY has thrown big surprises at us before, and I can’t know what will happen in the finale and how it will feed into or try to heal some of the pain we’re feeling. But regardless of what the narrative intent is in Clover’s death, it needs to be acknowledged that episode 12 alone, ending on such an intense scene that wouldn’t be resolved for at least a week, hurt people. And CRWBY needs to acknowledge and take responsibility for it. I can’t say that I’m the most up to date on social media and what each person involved with volume 7 has said in the past few months. But I know that numerous official twitter accounts posted things that led people to put more credibility in Fairgame, myself included. And that even after seeing how big the ship had gotten, and knowing what the outcome was, some of CRWBY continued to seemingly feed into the excitement, even teasing about how hard episode 12 would hit us. 

That’s honestly one of the reasons I think this feels not just like bad writing or something, but betrayal. Of course RT can’t control everything everyone involved with RWBY posts, but for a company that has tried to seem so supportive of lgbt and mentally ill fans, they should have, at the very least, not have fed the flame and given people hope and supposed credibility that they knew would crumble after this episode. It feels like, even if they hadn’t intended this entire plot point to come across the way it has, they saw us going down this path and egged us on for added shock factor. 

And even if somehow the finale fixes everything, it doesn’t undo that hurt. It makes me think of the trailers for Insatiable when it first came out. How toxic and fat shaming they seemed and how people reacted poorly to it, but then all the people involved responded with how positive the show was, and that people shouldn’t judge it before they saw it. Or those “joke” videos or posts of kids coming out and the parents getting angry but then it’s about some stupid other thing. It’s meant to trigger a very sensitive issue, that people who have gone through traumas related to those issues are all too familiar with seeing over and over. So why would they have faith that this wasn’t just another one of those times when everything they see points to the opposite? Why trigger people who have already been hurt, for the sake of shock factor? It’s poor and callous writing. 

And that’s what this feels like. It feels like we were exploited in order to make this hurt more. And maybe that was a very unfortunate accident. But CRWBY still needs to acknowledge that they made mistakes, and do what they can to prove to the fans that they still deserve our trust. And that’s not going to be an easy one and done thing. For some it may never be enough, and that is completely valid. 

Of course everyone has different histories and issues that can lead them to be drawn to a certain show or character. And creators can’t ever know for sure that they won’t bring up painful things for any of their fans, and often trying to do so can make the content and message suffer. But even though everyone might not have a story that is as “obviously” traumatic as mine, might not have things they so directly relate to in Qrow and in Clover’s death,  they’re all still valid in the pain they’re feeling. One of my least favorite things about living with grief is people thinking that their traumas and struggles aren’t as big or important as my own. 

This week I’ve told people how hard a time I’m having, and why. And the people who know my backstory understood. The people who didn’t know though, brushed it off as crazy fangirl, tumblr discourse drivel. Even to my face after I told them how much I was hurting, they would groan about people getting so obsessed with fictional characters. You shouldn’t have to know why something negatively affects someone the way it does in order to respect the fact that it does. And I’m not more valid in my pain than people with “smaller” reasons. The fact is that a lot of people are hurting. A lot of queer and mentally ill people are reliving trauma. And like me, many of these people trusted CRWBY to be supportive, to be a comfort in a world where it’s hard to find sometimes. And that makes it hurt all the more.

I wasn’t in the fandom when Monty died, so I don’t know a lot about how CRWBY handled it, what they said publicly, what inevitable fandom discourse there was about how to navigate things. The only reason I bring him up at all, (because I’ve seen people mention him in discourse posts before and it’s usually hurtful and out of line and I truly hate it) is because he, and how CRWBY continues to honor him by keeping his creation going, is a huge part of why I feel so attached to it. My creative focus is on talking about Emma, about honoring her, telling her story, about sharing my grief with people. And while it’s extremely important to me, it’s also terrifying to think about people one day saying I let her down, or that because I made certain decisions I ruined the work or anything like that. And whether or not I am currently happy with every member of CRWBY doesn’t affect the fact that I will always keep in mind that RWBY is something directly tied to someone they’ve lost and it can be extremely difficult to have that kind of work criticized and not get defensive or angry (that’s not to say we can’t criticize things that are made in honor of someone, but that we need to remember there are still people dealing with grief on the other end of what we say). They’ll react poorly to certain things, they’ll say the wrong things, they’ll but heads with opinionated fans. And that’s not to excuse them for that, or to say we shouldn’t hold them accountable and communicate our problems with them and expect them to learn from past mistakes. But they aren’t faceless monsters in some big corporation who just make this for the money. They have real emotional investment in their work and I honestly believe they are well intentioned and want to support lgbt and mentally ill fans. But good intentions don’t ensure there won’t be negative impact, and if they truly want to keep, or regain fans’ trust and support they need to show they understand that. 

It may be naive and there may be things I don’t know that might have changed my view but until now, even with some writing choices I didn’t love, I've really liked CRWBY and trusted them. I personally can’t say I hate them and write them off right now. I understand if you can, if this was the last straw or just proving your view, and that’s all valid. But I want to, as much as possible, believe that they’re well intentioned. RWBY is far from perfect. CRWBY is far from perfect. But that’s ok. As long as there’s effort to improve and acknowledge mistakes and try to make amends

It’s possible that things I’ve said here may anger some people, and unfortunately, as much as I tried to avoid it, may hurt CRWBY. Because as hurt and angry with them as I might be right now, I don’t want to hate them or hurt them.  I’m human as well, and I’m very passionate about this and have a very personal attachment to it. So I acknowledge that it is totally possible that I have said something here that I could have handled better. If so, please, let me know. Constructively. If you need to, privately. Don’t attack me for it. I know when a conversation is toxic to me and I will not put myself in that position and will block people. But I want to be open to criticism, just as I want CRWBY to be. I want to know what I did wrong and how I can work to do better in the future. There are also certain things that I firmly believe that I know not everyone will like. And that’s okay. I have my own ways of dealing with grief and pain that will inevitably conflict with others. In those cases, while I won’t apologize for being honest about how I feel, I will understand and listen to how I may have hurt you. Different opinions and ways of coping will always be a part of grief conversations and it is less about making others agree with you and more about giving people a place to express their pain. 

This is ridiculously, stupidly, long and honestly I’m not sure there’s a clear point and if you read through it all the way, you’re a saint. But I just needed to get this out, and I hope that maybe, somehow, through the ranting, it might help someone feel less alone in their pain, or feel validated. I started writing this on Sunday and wanted to post it before the finale. It’s now Friday and who knows if there’s really any point to posting it now, but still. 

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know how I will handle it. I’ve seen discourse that made me anxious all over again all week. I’ve seen jokes or edits or trolls that made me sick. But there are people out here for you. There are people to talk to who will just listen. You aren’t alone. And while I can’t promise you that everything will be okay, I can promise you that there will be people here to help you get through it. There are ways to get through it. They’re not always fun or ideal, but they’re there. And eventually you’ll be able to feel okay again. The pain might not be gone for good, but you’ll have good moments again. You’ll learn how to create good moments. I still want to believe that “broken” people can be happy again, even though the world may try to show me otherwise over and over. It’s not easy, and sometimes I honestly just don’t see how it can possibly be true. But I keep trying to get back to those good places and appreciate them, for as long as I can. 

[virmillion]

Masterpost

of all of my sanders sides fics (under a cut because there is. Quite A Few More than i thought)

Chaptered

As Above, So Below - AO3 - 35,700 words

Warnings: cursing, blood, knives, fighting, OCD

Ships: platonic moxiety, platonic logince, platonic LAMP

Summary: Roman is a prince and Logan is his advisor-not-quite-friend. Virgil is a street rat runaway and Patton is his friend-not-quite-advisor. Unfortunately for Virgil, staying out of the castle is going to be his biggest struggle.

Arbitrary (choose your own ending) - AO3 - 4,007

Warnings: none

Ships: platonic LAMP

Summary: It’s Patton’s birthday! Who’s ready for a birthday party surprise? ...Guys?

Some Kind of Magical - AO3 - 45,113

Warnings: fighting, fire and burns, blood, deceit as a character

Ships: platonic LAMP

Summary: Senior year can kind of suck. A lot. Toss in some deadly oversized creatures and a final project that literally determines the rest of your life, and some problems are bound to get tangled up in there somewhere. Just keep your head down, finish your project, and everything should be just fine. Right?

I’ll Bring You the Moon - AO3 - 94,659

Warnings: Major character death, cursing, arguments, unhappy ending

Ships: romantic analogical, platonic LAMP

Summary: Logan has had his life planned out since, well, forever. Get through college, get an internship at NASA, rise through the ranks, get into space, something, something, happy ending and he’s set for life. The first couple steps were easy, out of the way in a snap. Meeting Virgil, however, kind of threw a wrench into those plans. But it’s fine. Logan can navigate a job at NASA, flirt with a cute museum tour guide, and deal with everyone’s inexplicable hatred of Neptune at the same time. It shouldn’t be too hard—after all, it’s not like it’s rocket science. ...Well, okay, so it is kind of like rocket science.

Abandoned Chaptered

Can’t Fake What I’ve Never Felt - AO3 - 3,826

Warnings: panic attack, sensory overload, cursing

Ships: platonic royality, background romantic prinxiety

Summary: “AU where everyone is emotionless until they meet their soulmate and upon meeting them they slowly gain one emotion at a time as the soulmate does something that triggers the emotion into existence” - me, oil on canvas in a discord chat, 2018

Kintsugi - AO3 - 3,021

Warnings: fire (a candle)

Ships: none

Summary: Virgil is just about fed up with this fancy little school, so he takes advantage of a quiet night outside. Difficulties ensue.

The Hypothetical Lower Bounds of the Glass - AO3 - 3,946

Warnings: food mention

Ships: platonic (or at least vaguely civil) analogical

Summary: Logan has multiple ways of working through frustrating emotions, on the rare occasion that they do arise. One such method is taking a long drive to an unplanned destination.

One-Shots

Taxi Cab - AO3 - 8,050

Warnings: none

Ships: platonic moxiety

Summary: Virgil needs a ride somewhere, anywhere, so of course, the nearest person with a car obliges

What Was Missing - AO3 - 3,983

Warnings: blood, major character death (kind of)

Ships: none

Summary: Something is missing in the mindscape. You don’t know what. Just... something.

Waves - AO3 - 4,241

Warnings: smoking cigarettes

Ships: platonic moxiety, royality, and logicality

Summary: People outgrow each other all the time. It’s perfectly normal. So why should Patton be so unhappy about it? He’s not technically a person, after all.

Bleeding Out - AO3 - 5,008

Warnings: blood and injury, intrusive thoughts, cursing, unhappy ending

Ships: platonic prinxiety

Summary: Roman takes Virgil on an adventure through the creative corner of the mindscape.

Purple - AO3 - 1,111

Warnings: really abstract writing

Ships: none

Summary: spiritual successor to Bleeding Out

Monster Under the Bed - AO3 - 1,207

Warnings: none

Ships: platonic Roman & Patton & Logan

Summary: When Roman is afraid of something, he goes to Patton, and Patton always knows just what to do.

Exoskeleton - AO3 - 3,850

Warnings: OCD, derealization, fighting (verbal and physical), food mention

Ships: platonic LAMP (mostly)

Summary: an honors zoology-inspired fic about Logan struggling to be A Person.

Lying From You - AO3 - 4,666

Warnings: blood, manipulation, deceit as a character (kind of)

Ships: none

Summary:  As the core of Thomas’ feelings, it had always been Patton’s responsibility to care for his emotional wellbeing. Whether this was done in the healthiest ways remained to be seen, but he was trying, and that’s what was important. Keep Thomas happy as best he could.

Colorful - AO3 - 2,371

Warnings: blood, swearing, character death, unhappy ending

Ships: platonic Virgil & Roman & Patton, romantic analogical, background romantic royality

Summary: you know the au where everything is black and white until you meet your soulmate? yeah this is that but less happy

Detention - AO3 - 1,800

Warnings: light bullying

Ships: platonic moxiety

Summary: Virgil meets a kid named Patton in detention and decides to investigate further.

Come Back Home - AO3 - 3,540

Warnings: alcohol abuse (written poorly because I didn’t know how to write drunk people)

Ships: past romantic logince

Summary: Logan and Roman broke up and went their separate ways, coping as they could. So why are they both still thinking about the other?

Palindrome - AO3 - 6,006

Warnings: cheating in relationships, break ups

Ships: romantic prinxiety (for a minute), romantic royality (for two minutes), romantic moxiety (for three minutes), platonic analogical

Summary: Palindrome /ˈpalənˌdrōm/, n. - a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward

Just In Case - AO3 - 3,200

Warnings: (conceptual) major character deaths

Ships: none

Summary: A fail safe, for another term. Something to ensure that if the worst situation presented itself, they wouldn't be at a loss for how to function. Maybe Virgil ducking out the first time is what instigated it, but as problems continued to pop up, they came to realize that the absolute worst imaginable thing was well within the realm of possibility.

Bubble Tea - AO3 - 8,175

Warnings: none

Ships: romantic prinxiety, background romantic logicality, platonic royality, background platonic analogical

Summary: alternative title - i've never read nor written a coffee shop au, but here's some nonsense that's basically the same thing with a slightly different menu

And They Were Roommates - AO3 - 1,551

Warnings: some swears, sarcastic first person author

Ships: platonic logince

Summary: unedited nonsense that started out with having a point but eventually devolved into me lamenting my lack of inspiration and turning to spicy memes for comfort

Gone and Never Coming Back - AO3 - 4,453

Warnings: (Mentioned) major character death (it’s a plot point), nightmare describing a car crash, grief

Ships: platonic moxiety (sort of), platonic LAMP (sort of)

Summary: alternative title: patton learns how to cope with loss by being tossed directly into the deep end with three sets of ankle weights

The Sun Is Running Late - AO3 - 3,400

Warnings: death mention, implied suicide, the entire thing centers on the end of the world, first person POV (its roman)

Ships: (past) platonic LAMP

Summary: (to the tune of R.E.M.'s 1987 WENZ promo song that looped for twenty four hours) it's the end of the world as he knows it!

Creative Burnout - AO3 - 1,142

Warnings: major character not-quite-death, negative self talk

Ships: none

Summary: Roman is creativity, and he’s all out of ideas again.

Know Your Mark - AO3 - 2,514

Warnings: blood mention, stabbing, knife mention, negative self talk

Ships: none

Summary: Virgil has a target, so Virgil sets about to take them down. Should be perfectly simple, right? Right?

Of Royalty and Revelry - AO3 - 6,109

Warnings: blood mention, death mention, food mention, cursing

Ships: Romantic (one-sided?) Prinxiety, platonic Moxiety

Summary: Prince Roman fancies a newcomer, who isn’t too quick to speak up about their own opinion on the matter. Life lessons and begrudging companionships ensue.

Staying Up Late - AO3 - 3,292

Warnings: discussion of insomnia, nightmares, vague car crash (it’s a dream), spiraling thoughts

Ships: platonic analogical, maybe romantic if you squint

Summary: Virgil can’t fall asleep. Logan comes over to try to help. Everyone is tired.

Simulated Human Contact - AO3 - 1,195

Warnings: insomnia, medication mention

Ships: platonic analogical (romantic if you squint)

Summary: fluff and projecting onto analogical because i was incredibly tired

Coffee’s for Closers - AO3 - 22,222

Warnings: cursing, rude customers and coworkers

Ships: romantic analogical, romantic royality, platonic LAMP+Remy(Sleep)

Summary: Virgil is a barista. Logan is a barista. Everyone is gay—it’s just that this gayness only occurs at Logan’s cafe.

Love Is a Four Letter Word - AO3 - 12,758

Warnings: implied major character death, Less Than Happy backstories, some bullying, unhappy ending

Ships: platonic logince (more like acquaintances tbh)

Summary: Everyone has magic, and it’s really nothing special at all. Just another skill, sort of like a sixth sense. Roman is not particularly fond of his brand of magic, and sets off to find Thomas—the one person rumored to not have any magic at all.

[callioope]

Questions Meme!

Hello, yes, this HAS in fact been sitting in my drafts for ages and ages. Thank you to both @crazy-fruit and @ruby-red-inky-blue for tagging me and for waiting forever for me to answer (oops)! I’m sorry I took so long, but y’all ask really good questions and I had to think about some of them!

Question Set 1

1. How are you?

Oh, I’m doing alright! Thank you for asking. The earlier part of this year was rather rough, but therapy has been helping. I’ve been rather busy these past few weeks with traveling, and my schedule going forward is rather busy, too, so while I’m excited for those things, I’m also excited for the eventual moment I can just relax.

2. What would you say are your talents?

Writing. Making fancy color-coded spreadsheets. I’ve been told that my super power is getting random (annoying) songs stuck in other people’s heads. Does that count as a talent? 

3. If you had the chance to start your life again, would you take it?

NOPE. No thanks. I like where I am at right now, and I would not want to relive my awkward years. Er, at least, my more awkward, younger years. Cuz I’m totally still awkward. Just less awkward. I hope?

4. Which language would you like to speak instantly? 

HMM. ALL OF THEM. It’s really hard to choose! 

Language fascinates me, and in another life I feel like I would have devoted a lot more time to learning more of them. Unfortunately, I really hated German class in high school because of the teacher’s tendency to put people on the spot -- I think that is sort of inherent in a language class, but I get anxiety speaking in public. 

Anyways, I suppose I’ll answer Turkish to this question, since spouse and I keep saying we’re going to try to learn Turkish via Duolingo. For the record, my HS offered six languages, which was the most I’ve ever heard of an American school offering, and I was always quite happy with my choice of German. (The others were Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, and Latin.) I do wish I had maintained my German better, and I that I had more time to learn Spanish. 

5. Where would you like to be right now?

Honestly? I’m pretty happy when I’m at home. But if I had to answer where “else” would I like to be right now, out of the whole world? Being back on safari in Botswana is a top contender, as are a variety of places in Turkey, and also Munich. 

6. What name would you give yourself?

I’ve always liked my actual name (Elizabeth). I know I go by Liz; one of my HS friends was quite stubborn and I’m a bit stuck with it now, but I don’t mind it. There are worse nicknames that come from Elizabeth. I used to go by Fiona online; I’ve always been fond of that one. 

7. What is something you’re currently learning?

OOF, what a good question. I sorta blanked on this at first, and my first thought was uhhhh learning how to cope with my OCD??? I’m doing exposure therapy right now, ish. Emphasis on the ish. Also mindfulness. Does that really even count? I started a beginner’s knitting project several months ago that I never finished, does that count? (I just need to seam it, that’s what I’m putting off. I have knit plenty of scarves; however, this is my first hat.) I’m sort of teaching myself ukulele although I haven’t really learned any new chords or songs in awhile. I would very much like to take more photography classes with a focus on wildlife photography. That involves buying a new camera and... signing up for classes. 

Question Set 2

1. What is a detail in a piece of art/a text that you like that you really admire?

This was very difficult, at first because it was like looking at a bin full of loose things and just seeing an assortment of color and being overwhelmed by it all, and then because once I did start digging around, I kept finding different ideas and it was too hard too choose.

Character-building: In the A Song of Ice and Fire series, when Arya starts working for the House of Black and White, Martin stops using the name “Arya” as she dons different identities. For example, he uses “Cat” for a bit, among other names. It shows she’s trying to be someone else, but the caveat is that there are still little mannerisms and such that show she hasn’t really left Arya behind (I think maybe she bites her lip or something? I don’t remember specific examples because it’s been over 5 years since I read these books, but I do remember really appreciating the general technique at the time). 

Music: In The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” I love those repeated arpeggios, over and over, building, intensifying, as the white noise comes in and you can just feel the heaviness of desire, of want... (and then I love how it just breaks so suddenly! And I know it wouldn’t have been intended this way because that’s the end of side one, but since I listen to the whole album on spotify, then those bright chords of “Here Comes the Sun” come in and god Abbey Road is the best Beatles album)

Writing: the poetry of Florence + The Machine’s “All This and Heaven Too,” obviously, since literally the title of my blog comes from that. I’d quote that whole song honestly. There’s something that speaks to me about the incapability of language to fully encompass just... everything. I mean, love in specific here, but also just everything. Words are just these little boats we put meaning on and we hope they make it to the other side but everyone takes ‘em a little differently. 

Like, look at this: 

And the words are all escaping, and coming back all damaged And I would put them back in poetry if I only knew how 

And this: 

Words were never so useful So I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before

Anyways, there’s also something just incredibly soothing about the music, too, and how she sings the song. There’s another line, from Sara Bareilles’ “Miss Simone” that goes “How does she know what a heart sounds like?” which pretty much sums up how I feel about “All This and Heaven Too” (and also many of Sara Bareilles’ song, especially that particular album, but I digress).

Anyways I did have some art examples, but I think I’ve rambled long enough.

2. Is there an idea that you really liked but had to discard because you couldn’t get it to work?

If I really like an idea, I don’t really “discard” it so much as put it on the shelf to attempt later. Out of recent fic ideas, I’ve really struggled with “How to Lose a Spy in 10 Days.” I first thought of this in late spring 2017, and for awhile I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I was working on Whatever I Do at the time, and wanted to wait before starting another WIP. By the time I got to writing this, the inspiration well had sort of dried up. 

I really like the idea of a fun cat-and-mouse rom-com idea where Jyn and Cassian keep outsmarting each other, with a whole lot of competency kink, some “oh shit we actually work well together!” and maybe some battle couple. And I was really looking forward to both the moment when they both finally let their guards down around each other and the big confrontation when they actually find out each other’s identities. But it involved more mission writing than I was prepared for, and I really struggled with it. I think I need to start over but that involves a lot of working, so it’s unfortunately shelved for now, and I’m working on a “You’ve Got Mail” concept instead.

3. Is there something fandom-related you would like to be able to do (i.e. I’d like to be able to make gif sets but can’t)?

Oh, yes, absolutely! Really anything that’s not writing related, lol. Gif sets, art, etc. But most of all, I have a music video idea for the song “So Close” from Enchanted--like I have a whole story board plotted out in a google doc. But I don’t have any video editing software, don’t even know how you get the scenes for a music video, etc. I have made videos before, but not since high school, and I don’t even have the cheap, basic video editing program I used back then. Sometimes I think I should just attempt make a gif set instead, but there are so many lyrics! and scenes that go with the lyrics! that I don’t know how to consolidate it into that format anyways. 

4. What is a skill you’ve acquired through fandom work?

Hmm, this was tough. I’m going to say HTML. I’m not up-to-date on webdesign at all, but back in my early fandom days, I ran a few fansites. I still sometimes use HTML while leaving comments or to edit posts on dreamwidth or w/e. It’s super basic, but it has helped me at work at a variety of jobs. I take it for granted that people my age should know basic HTML, but a lot of them don’t, and then a lot of people I work with now are older and definitely not tech savvy. 

5. Do you think anyone can learn to create great art, or does it take talent?

Well, I’m going to cheat a little. I do think think that anyone can learn to create great art, but I also think that everyone has a talent at something, and part of learning to create great art is recognizing your skill sets and honing those. If that makes sense? I’ve sort of seen both sides to this. I’ve seen naturally talented people create great things, but I also think that they’re probably cheating themselves if they’re not learning and honing their craft and trying to get better. But I’ve also seen people who started out making things that maybe you wouldn’t call great, but they worked hard over and over again, and looking at their work now, you’d say they were talented without ever knowing the difference. Great art = talent + learning + passion. Did that even answer the question? ...moving on

6. Do you prefer AUs or in-universe? Why?

I prefer to write in-universe, for sure. I find modern AUs more challenging, mostly because--and I feel kinda bad saying this--it’s very difficult for me to tap into Jyn and Cassian’s characters without some kind of tragic background. Their experiences and how they coped with them shape their personalities, and it’s really hard to separate them from those. My WWII was easier because, hey, it’s war, not so different from in-verse. But I initially tried to write Learning Curve in a modern AU and I was just totally bored. Putting it in universe made it more interesting to me, especially having to finagle a happier plot inverse. IDK, it might even be that I generally struggle to make up any conflict in modern AUs that feels interesting.

THAT SAID, lol, I definitely read either. So it’s probably strange for me to be hung up on it because I’ve read nice fluffy modern AUs and found them perfectly engaging.

Tagging: @theputterer, @magalis, @allatariel, @mythologicalmango, @threadsketchier  MY USUAL DISCLAIMER APPLIES: no pressure if you just don’t wanna, AND if anyone sees this and was like “aw hey i wish she’d tagged ME” well guess what, I wish I did too! so go ahead and do it and let me know and then i’ll know to tag you next time, too :-) 

Questions:

When you suffer a setback or a series of setbacks when creating (writing, drawing, knitting, any kind of crafty project thing you work on... even work), what are some strategies you use to cope with that stress and move forward?

What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to create/make and what did you learn from it?

What part of a bicycle would you be?

What’s a helpful writing (art/crafting/work) technique you’ve learned?

What’s a piece of art that made you see things differently?

You’re a new addition to the crayon box. What color would you be and why?

What was the last board game you played and what did you like or not like about it?

*sorry these came out rather writer heavy!

[misophoniainternational]

When I first wrote Full of Sound and Fury I used the very words of this article in the book. I said that, "Misophonia is not a life sentence" and I will admit that I was a bit skeptical. I wanted to hope those words into existence and believe that misophonia wasn't going to take everything away from me. And, in fact, it didn't. It can be very easy to worry about our futures (or the future of your child or loved one with misophonia) but like other disabilities or neurological conditions, life is still meaningful for sufferers of misophonia. Once a balance has been achieved, life goes on and while it might not be easy, we all have our challenges to be met. I have a loving partner who supports me and accommodates my misophonia. When I go out in public I have ear plugs and my Bose headphones to ensure that I'm able to block noises if necessary. I will admit the visual triggers are harder to avoid, but with my stress levels lower (I've been treated for OCD, Depression, Anxiety), I am able to manage these symptoms. It was important for me to recognize symptoms that were not misophonia and get treatment for what I could. Lowering stress and over-all threat-levels is very important for long term management of misophonia. Dr. Brout's manual Regulate Reason Reassure is a great starting point for parents or clinicians who are interested in misophonia coping skills. Accepting misophonia can be hard, but it's an important part of moving forward and conquering misophonia as best we can before there is an available treatment. While I feel I'm ranting slightly, my point is that with life adjustments (it's okay to skip restaurant meals and not go to events that are super busy), we are able to enjoy our lives and have meaningful and engaging moments. For example, I work from home so that I am able to better control my environment. While I know this isn't possible for everyone, it can be very helpful in the long term to be able to avoid the hustle and bustle of the day. I know that I personally cannot work in an office, and I wouldn't be able to survive very long on a 9-5 lifestyle. As I learn my boundaries and come up with solutions (sleeping in separate beds, having headphones, listening to music at dinner), I become more adapted to my environment and then can cope easier with other scenarios because I'm not as on edge all the time. As somebody who has struggled with Misophonia for years, I can honestly say that it's not a life sentence, but a life adjustment.

[i-m-a-smol-bean]

Dependent Personality Disorder

Hey everyone! For those of y’all who don’t know, I have DPD. Since the media misconstrues everything, I’m going to tell you about DPD, from my personal experience. This is not everyone’s experience with it, just my own. But first, here’s some facts:

-Dependent personality disorder has the highest suicide rate of any mental health problem at 95% (for attempts)

- It is one of the least studied mental health problems because it is not as common (0.5% of people experience it)

- It is frequently comorbid/cooccuring with other personality disorders

- It was almost taken out of the DSM-V, but scientists decided to keep it in

- DPD is characterized by many “socially undesirable” traits and people without comorbid disorders are frequently “unpopular”

- People with DPD frequently have a low quality of life

- DPD is one of the biggest predicting factors for being a victim of abuse

- Most people with DPD are not violent. However, those who are usually are excessively violent and many men who murder their wives are diagnosed with DPD. Again, most people with DPD are not violent

- People 14-25 with DPD have some of the highest rates of suicide completion when compared to other age groups and mental health problems

- Eating disorders, self harm, agoraphobia, OCD, depression, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and substance use problems are frequently comorbid with DPD

- 67% of people with DPD have had a somatic disease of some sort

Here’s the DSM-V diagnostic criteria for DPD:

A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five or more of the following: 

Has difficulty making everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and reassurance from others. 

 Needs others to assume responsibility for most major areas of his life. 

 Has difficulty expressing disagreement with others because of fear of loss of support or approval. (Does not include realistic fears of retribution.) 

 Has difficulty initiating projects or doing things on his or her own (because of a lack of self-confidence in judgement or abilities rather than a lack of motivation or energy).

 Goes to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support from others, to the point of volunteering to do things that are unpleasant. 

 Feels uncomfortable or helpless when alone because of exaggerated fears of being unable to take care for himself/herself. 

 Urgently seeks another relationship as a source of care and support when a close relationship ends. 

 Is unrealistically preoccupied with fears of being left to take care of himself or herself.

Now that you have the facts, I’m going to tell you what it’s like for me to struggle with DPD. Most of the time, I feel fine. Even when exhibiting some of the symptoms of DPD, I don’t even notice that I’m showing them. What DPD usually looks like for me is when I find a person who treats me really well, I want to latch on to them. People haven’t treated me so great in my life, and so someone treating me well kind of makes me see them as a god. It’s really hard for me to pull those people off of that pedastool and see them as human with flaws. I can acknowledge and point out their flaws and still weight the fact that they’re nice to me WAY above that, even if said person is really unhealthy for me. Sometimes people think that I’m really cold or unfeeling for “moving on” quickly from a relationship or friends group, but it literally feels like I need people to survive. Maybe it makes me come off as attention seeking, but I have this constant need to know where I stand with the people in my life, because I have a constant fear that people will leave me. Sometimes it’s just a little whisper and other times it feels like this all-consuming paranoia that none of my friends actually like me. At the end of the day, I will never fit in with a group of people. I put so much focus on my “favorite person” (I know that phrase is used for BPD but I don’t have a better word for it), that I can’t give the same emotional support back to anyone else. Honestly, when I’m single and don’t have a crush on anyone, it’s the healthiest I ever am, even if I’m constantly feeling unlovable. When I don’t have an fp to focus on, I actually focus on myself sometimes. It didn’t used to be that way. Before I started DBT therapy (which saved my life), being single and not having an fp meant a lot of self harming or a suicide attempt (I’ve had six of those). Another thing that happens is something I call assimilating. When I meet a new fp, or even have a new group of friends, I sync my personality with theirs. I will pick up new hobbies, change my fashion, my hair, wear more or less makeup, learn everything about what they love, just to feel like I belong or like I am worthy of being there. That sounds kind of stalkerish, I know. But it isn’t really the same thing. Over time, in a long term relationship, if I’m not constantly checking myself and making the decision to keep my independence, I can lose who I actually am and what my personality is in the shadow of my fp. Codependency is so common with DPD. It always starts off with people thinking that I’m excessively nice or caring towards them. I will be the first to say that I am a total weenie. I know that my personality seems so pathetic and unlovable and undesirable, but those are the cards I was handed and that’s what I have to live with. I work hard every day practicing coping skills, quieting the part of me that wants to let go of the reins, going to weekly therapy, and constantly reminding myself of how other people act and what other people like. I feel like I’m constantly training myself to be a person, and you know what? I’m getting there. I’m closer to passing as neurotypical than I’ve ever been. I’m very open about my disorder, and it’s something that I’ve accepted that I have, but a part of me still wants to fit in and stop having to think about everything that I’m doing wrong; stuff that’s socially weird or awkward. I’m still working on being independent and finding out who I really am and how I can peacefully be with other people without codependency, but I’m getting there. Every day gets better. It’s been almost two years since I’ve attempted suicide and I feel damn good about that. My longest relationship has been a year and a half, and that’s a huge accomplishment for me. I even volunteered the idea of couples therapy, knowing that codependency was a risk and did self help books for it. I can do this. My disorder is still here, but I’m getting better at managing it. It gets better, it really does. Anyone who reads this can message me about it, I’m always here to listen. :)

Here’s my sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18517287

http://psychnerd101.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/dpd-what-is-it.html

http://psychnerd101.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/the-understudy-of-dpd.html

And myself, of course!