#I’ve been able to have him all to myself

[zomboivex]

Getting personal for a moment. But I feel it’s important to share, anyways.

When I was married, everyone in my life gaslit me to believe I was terrible with managing my money. Any personal expensive was noted as frivolous and wasteful. Bought some fabric for my hobby of dress-making with money I earned from a bonus?

That could have been used for the water bill next month!

Had a $1000 bonus? No. That’s for the house mortgage that he didn’t let my name exist on even though I paid for majority of the renovations because he was content letting the kitchen sit in disarray with thick dust in the air. Causing me to have severe allergy attacks every day.

Called off sick?

How could you? We have bills to pay!!!!

Go through extreme harassment at work?

No. You’re making it up. It’s an excuse to take a day off and relax.

Ignore the fact that he called off regularly because he had headaches while I was shamed into going to work despite having the flu.

Set up a joint account where only I contributed to put money in for bills to pay. Because he would pay from his account. Then he’d constantly drain the joint account for ‘bills’ and then spend his money on who even knows. We had 2 maxed out credit cards in his name.

But this was so normal to me. Because I grew up like this. I grew up with my ‘support system’ telling me this is normal. Telling me that I am the problem.

And I believed it.

I believed that everything that was wrong was me.

I didn’t know he was $7,000 in debt until our divorce where he was demanding I pay it off.

I never did find out what he used that money on. I suspect it was on his gaming addiction and my alleged ‘best friend’ he was sleeping with.

When I finally got out of that relationship, I was in financial ruin. I had nothing in my name. At 30.

I lost everything. (Except for the car that I begged for him to let me take and 3 of my 4 cats).

I lost the house I lived in for years. It was all in his name. There was nothing I could do about it. Because we were ‘only married for 3 years’ despite being together for 10.

I had no furniture to take with me. Save for a couch. That I couldn’t actually take because I had no place to go. I was couch surfing or sleeping in my car at this time.

I lost my dream job because my ‘friend’ worked there as well. And while they were beyond accommodating to my situation, I could no longer mentally handle being there nor could I handle the hour drive once I did find a place to live.

$1000 down on a new apartment.

Car broke down a month later. $1000 down on a new car.

Said car was stolen twice. Can’t even begin to tell you how much money that leeched out of my savings.

$23,000 (with health insurance) for surgery due to appendicitis.

All in a year after divorce.

It was defeating. It was so fucking hard.

In a span of a year I went through multiple life crises events. I can feel how it physically changed my ability to process information. In a way, I’ve become ‘dumber’ because of it. I can’t hold onto information. I have a hard time reading and staying focused.

Only reason I was able to even financially get through all of that was because I had some money saved from a lawsuit at the job that was harassing me that I wound up winning after the divorce. That and I finally caved in and got a credit card (my credit score was good) and a couple of personal loans.

I’m still paying it all off. It has been so fucking hard.

And I’ve been going through waves of hating myself for being so naive to feeling terrible for what I’ve been through because I didn’t see anything wrong with what I experienced as it was happening. And I’m finally coming to my own form of peace with this. But it was hard.

I had been with him for 10 years.

I don’t love easily. But I did love him. Even if I showed it in odd ways. I wouldn’t have married him, otherwise.

And then when everyone around me said I was the problem, I believed them.

Even now, I have an incredibly hard time understanding when I am truly in the wrong with a situation or if my reaction to things are justified.

I didn’t realize I was being put through mental and financial abuse by so many people around me.

I wish I could hug me from a few years ago and let them know they are so strong for going through all of this. But that they shouldn’t have had to be so strong for so long.

I wish I could hug every woman on the planet that has been through anything where they had to ‘be strong’ to survive while thinking it’s normal.

Baby, it’s not normal. You deserve so much more in this world.

You deserve your own freedom and a support system that values you and lets you know when you’re going through actual bullshit instead of painting you as the villain.

To all the women out there who go through these things; I love you. I see you.

maybe i’m a joyless bitch but i actually do NOT think it’s funny to see women being like “the house is just in my husbands name” or “my husband makes all the money” or “i don’t even know who our mortgage is with” or “the only bank account/credit card is his and i get an allowance” like i do NOT find that cute or romantic and i am begging these women to Stand Up. you should at least be named on the deed to your house and the title to your car and the bank accounts even if you don’t pay for them/earn all the money. you can’t stop existing in the eyes of the law and the credit unions simply because you have a husband. if you’re raising his children and washing his socks half of everything he’s got is yours and it needs to be yours LEGALLY BY NAME. "he takes such good care of me :)" girl you are a PRISONER!! that’s all

[cleolinda]

SILENT HILL 2 UPDATE: At this point, I'm recording gameplay for my own reference while muttering softly to myself, because my voice is still weak from that sore throat. I'm now in Toluca Prison, which has four sections that you access through a puzzle involving weights that you have to hunt down and THEN a scale puzzle and THEN a gallows puzzle and I am going to be here for A While.

The thing about the prison is that it's got timed lights—you switch one on, you try to run as far as you can in like, idk, thirty seconds? And then it flips off and you're in the dark in this giant prison hoping you reach another switch soon and monsters are gurgling all around you and also NOW there are some crawling down the walls. And I just went, you know what? Fuck this. I'm a new gamer. I don't do well with panic, and I don't do well with light-reactive monsters swarming me. I'm doing this whole-ass prison in the dark.

And so help me, it's working? I'm able to move through it slowly, using my tiny but trusty flashlight, shoot things from half a block a way, and get everyone else before they get me. Apparently I have a very cautious, thorough play style? But also I would rather methodically take down all the monsters and know they’re dead (for now) than run away from them. So I am just… stalking all these gurgling, croaky, leggy motherfuckers through the dark. (I keep telling James I’m gonna get him through this, but he still makes scared breathing sounds a lot.) If you listened to me taunt lying figures in a parking lot, it’s a lot like that, just a bit hoarser.

And it's delightful to me that I’ve developed a play style. I've only been able to play the game an hour or two at a time a few days a week, which is why it's taking me so long (and I'm still nowhere near done yet), and that’s fun in its own way. But I've played it enough that an actual gaming personality is emerging, and I enjoy that.

[scalene-4]

for somebody that didn’t really use a cellphone until age 12 and didn’t own an iphone until senior year of high school, i’ve certainly made up for lost time. unless i make a conscious effort to face reality on its own terms for the first 10min of being alive on a given day, i usually roll over and grab this stupid thing to look at what other people are up to on instagram or scroll twitter and bear witness to the terminal polarization of society itself play out in real time.

i have to admit, if it were anyone other than elon musk (a nasty petulant man child of a person who seems to have obsessively dedicated his energy and platform to making life miserable for people like myself after his famous pop star ex left him for a trans woman) who had done it, i would genuinely think that buying twitter and changing its name to “X” was a hilarious and ascended move. like anything else elon does, it comes off as the bloated and out of touch result of never being told “no” in your life.

having unfiltered access to social media fundamentally altered me as a person in a really weird and kafka-esque manner. before senior year i was shy and watched the social dynamics of people in my class play out from the sidelines, disappearing into worlds of my own creation with my siblings and close friends once the school bell rang. i was a quiet kid and felt like nobody liked me or saw me, so why would i want to engage socially with the greater Point Loma High School Bubble once i wasn’t physically forced to? of course, these feelings were largely cope as like any other human being i just wanted to feel part of it all and i hadn’t yet realized that channeling this feeling of alienation into art was my greatest superpower. i saw the feeling as a personal failing of sorts, empirical evidence that i didn’t belong because something in me was broken and fundamentally unlikeable. secretly, i wanted really badly to be seen as popular and regarded by my peers, something i probably have never fully reckoned with as my adult life has largely been defined by the pursuit of becoming a famous musician. the roots of that go further back though and that will be a post on here for another time — at this point i’m an angsty 17-year-old completely cut off from the various social dealings of my classmates once school is out and i’m home with my guitar or a pen and paper or a lump of clay.

that all changed once i got an iphone 4S in the fall of my senior year. i immediately downloaded instagram and twitter and snapchat, wasting no breath in making up for lost time. i found that many of my classmates were quick to follow me back and engage with me on those sites, and i quickly became addicted to twitter in particular. the refreshing of the interface and pace of conversation and the way all of our adolescent drama played out for all to see in real time was basically kerosene for synapses yet to be fried on various psychoactive substances. i started making new friends at school from twitter, popular and attractive friends. i didn’t notice it at the time, but my previously regimented and passionate pursuit of excellence in songwriting and my instrument began to fade into the background as i was going to more parties and snapchatting girls and generally becoming a bit more full of myself with each passing day.

i like to joke that if i’d found tumblr at that age and had used soundcloud for discovery instead of just posting half baked acoustic demos to impress my classmates, i probably would have realized i was trans a lot earlier than i did. i tell myself that things play out the way they’re supposed to.

as time went on and the people from my phone began to see who i was in real life, i think whatever charm i was somehow able to conjure initially faded as i grew ever more confident in behaving like the exact kind of person i hated. i got too drunk at every party, i acted snide towards friends of mine i deemed to somehow be lower than me on my imaginary social ladder, i checked twitter every 45 seconds and i treated anybody foolish enough to date me like a disposable accessory. and the thing is, i wasn’t even really popular by any means. i think people kind of just put up with me because i was around.

i can’t blame my phone for this shift because it was simply the catalyst for igniting teenage insecurity into an unstoppable inferno of cringe behavior and self-centeredness. the nature of a tool depends entirely on the hands making use of it, and unfortunately those hands happened to also belong to a tool. thankfully about a week into college i fell in with a wonderful group of friends who immediately put me in my place and to this day we’re all still pretty close. they saw the lonely girl behind the toolish exterior and something about her was worth loving, even if she said dumb shit sometimes.

like i said just now, i don’t blame technology in principle for amplifying the worst parts of human psychology and behavior. i think those traits are things we need to reckon with in an existential sense, and we’ll always be inventing new things that enable our worst selves. however, i think right now in particular that dynamic is functioning at its most sinister in terms of our greater society.

we have just elected a convicted felon slash rapist slash racist slash wannabe dictator, someone who by any objective account had a messy and disastrous first attempt at the presidency and has wasted no time in round 2 sowing fear and hatred and platforming bigotry. so many people agree this man and his underlings should be taken down, but thanks to social media being the forum for these conversations most if not all attempts at collectivizing and strategizing seem to devolve into a mushy goo. no one can agree on who’s leftist enough or what constitutes bulletproof moral standing — my own community can’t even agree on who’s trans enough. no one wants to say it but i feel like all of this is largely due to the way these platforms incentivize negative engagement, and shrink our scope by addicting us to instant gratification. it’s a far quicker serotonin boost to dunk on some teenager with therian lesbian (it/she) in bio than to dismantle oppressive institutions over time collectively. we’re all hooked on feeling like we’re right and more importantly, like someone else is wrong.

i love the one meme where the left is arguing about whether or not a dog is allowed to play basketball or not, while a dog runs around the court dunking on all of them.

rich people will always have access to healthcare and abortion and be free to express their sexuality however they’d like (just look at how grindr activity spikes at any given RNC event), their decadent lifestyle directly subsidized by us peasants and our phone addictions. i think it is absolutely fucking insane that so many of us regularly acknowledge and joke about the fact that we’re being watched and our activities online are recorded and farmed and sold to advertisers. our going back and forth on x dot com about which pronouns are real actively and materially makes money for these people. our attention spans are so short that they can just keep introducing new events to milk our stupidity for capital and widen the gap as the world around us literally burns to death.

i think the whole luigi thing was a psyop sometimes.

think about it: wouldn’t it be in the ruling class’ best interest to knock off a mid tier ceo in a time of growing social unrest and awareness of the evils of that class? tiktok made it impossible to ignore the genocide israel has been committing on palestine for the better half of a century. even if we don’t always use them responsibly, we have open forums from which to commiserate and collectively realize that life doesn’t have to be this unfair. if i were a billionaire oligarch and could afford to do any insidious thing i wanted, my billionaire oligarch friends and i would absolutely sacrifice a lower tier one of our own in a staged event to placate the masses. when brian thompson was executed like a dog in the street we all pretended that it was this massive instant of social awakening and class consciousness, but really what happened is it gave us all means to sit on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back because Someone Else Had Done It For Us. notice there wasn’t a copycat killer! nothing happened! there was a highly publicized chase (the evidence every step of the way looking extremely convenient and staged) and then it turned out they found a guy and he was hot, and once he was imprisoned that was kind of the end of it. CEOs continue to leech off of us and destroy the planet with no fear of retribution, while the rest of us go online and tell ourselves good job.

tools are what we make of them. i think in this crucial time we’re experiencing, this rapid fall to fascism that is ALREADY TAKING PLACE, we either need to learn how to use the tools we have responsibly and intentionally, or perhaps make use of new or different ones. i feel every day like true class consciousness and organized uprising is within our grasp, yet we keep shooting ourselves in the foot while they laugh. i hope with all of my heart that the next brian thompson (would be awesome if it was elon) faces justice at the hands of the people, truly. no frills or discourse or fancam edits, just cold lead karma and an awkward gmod ragdoll pose on the ground.

regardless, it’s about to keep getting uglier and while i reserve no love for these disgusting rich pigs i’m trying to have a greater sense of patience and empathy for everyone else and even for myself. no one’s looking out for us anymore and it’s clear they never were; now that us faggots and trannies have lost our value as a photo op the democrats aren’t coming to save us. i have faith in and love for the people around me and hold a firm belief that we will have each others’ back once the chips are down.

i also wonder how much of my data has been sold in the time it took to type all this.

[theloveinc]

I have never felt this strongly abt any one else before but if Enjin ends up with anyone aside from ME im gonna jump off a cliff

[lesbiansanemi]

Was doing so good holding it together today but now that I’m laying down and trying to sleep I’m tearing up and I can feel that I’m about to burst into tears any second now

[overcaffeinated-aro]

I got an email from my grandpa today and all the draft responses I’ve been working on in my head sound like an 18th century letter that’s going to have to travel for months to reach him.

pandemic year 5 really has me feeling like me and a very small handful of people I know are living on an entirely different plane of existence than everyone else

[questionably-audhd-oracle]

Okay from personal experience having a crush on a girl is an all consuming and somewhat harrowing experience. Having said that I’ve also never felt more enveloped in romance before or since

[rapidhighway]

I didn’t go to sculpture again……

[rawbin-hsr]

Jesus Christ bro just received the most aggressive ask in my inbox confronting me about how I write Aventurine and demanding proof for why I interpret him the way I do 😭😭 I’m not good at making straight up analytical content but ig I’m gonna have to try to do it so I can support my own ideas because ig it’s not fair of me to say things about him without backing myself up. I wouldn’t mind if they hadn’t been so hostile like pls I like to think I’m pretty reasonable you don’t need to yell at me 😞

[floral-hex]

ayyyyyyy I set up an appointment for medication this Friday (telemedicine but whatever) and I get to see my former therapist again later this month. I’m kind of excited. More than kind of. Little sad, but I’m lonely and want to talk to someone. He’s a real cool dude. I’m a little worried to trauma dump the last 6 months on him, but whatever, it beats sitting there for an hour feeling like I’m wasting his time and struggling to think of things to say. dang dang dang, I’m excited.

[milkstoner]

I don't have an insta 😔

I do have to respect that honestly.

[jemmo]

i can’t tell you how much i usually hate these ignoring, distancing plots in shows and how much i absolutely adore everything about these 2 episodes of the eighth sense. like im not having a good time, and it’s fantastic.

bc the thing is, in all of this, i can’t see the right way to go, i can’t find the person to blame, i can’t find the way to make it better. I can’t single out a single moment or a thing someone did and say “this is why everything went wrong”. it’s just this coming together and rise and swell of things happening and people feeling things that has us ending up here and it feels beautifully and horribly organic bc we can’t find that point where it all went wrong. was it on that rooftop? was it at the beach? was it when they first met? was it when his brother died? was it when he was born into this family? there is no single point. it’s all of them and it’s none of them. there is truly nothing and no one to blame. and there are bad characters in the show, people you can hate, eunji and taehyung, but neither of them are to blame for any of the bad stuff that happens in the show. you’re not waiting for them to be taken down bc that doesn’t solve anything. instead, it’s just two people hurting, and not knowing how to make it better.

bc you take jaewon, and after what he says at the end of ep 8, you want to hate him, you want to be so angry at him for what he says, for how he acts, how dismissive and hurtful he is, and yet you’ve been made to understand 100% why, and not just in a “i get it but that wasn’t the right thing to do” way, in a “that was horrible and yet i know he doesn’t see any other way to handle this” way. like you don’t see this as a misstep, or a step to far, bc you know for him, in his state of mind, it is completely justified, it’s necessary. bc it not only punishes the person he blames for all of this, himself, but he sees it as a way to protect jihyun. and not even in a cliche “bad things happen when people around me, the people I love always get hurt” kinda way, but more so in that he sees that he is a scared, messy, struggling person that doesn’t know how to handle himself, and doesn’t want to inflict that on anyone, let alone the person he cares about. so what’s worse, a quick, swift blow that hurts but cuts everything off cleanly, or this prolonged relationship where he inevitably continues to weigh jihyun down with the weight of his trauma, and take it out on him. what’s the point of having a place of refuge when you ruin it more and more every time you depend on it, until it eventually can’t offer you comfort. it’s a lesser of two evils, jaewon’s choice is obvious to him.

but then you take jihyun. and we talk about masks and fronts but we never once question whether jihyun wears a mask bc he appears so sweet and innocent and naive, what can this boy possibly be putting up a front for. but i see it, this almost fake it till you make it confidence front that yes is becoming more natural. but my god just think about what he’s gone through for a second. think about it. left home for the first time in his life, moved to an unfamiliar and intimidating city with only one other person he knows, started a new job, started university, tried to build relationships, met a man that intrigues him, and perused him only to be kissed and then ignored, then maybe establish something tentative, only to then see him spiral, go on a trip where he shared his trauma, you have an intimate night together only to almost die, and then be not only ignored, but plain and simple rejected and pushed away. like… you can say all you want about jihyun growing as a person and having more courage, but no amount of growth for however many months this has been going on for can prepare you for that. for the mixed messages on steroids. for the back and forth, not knowing. to give yourself to someone like that and go through something traumatic and then be abandoned by that person. we get it, bc we see all of jaewon’s story. but apart from what jaewon shared at the beach, jihyun doesn’t know any more than that. he doesn’t know about therapy, about how his father acts towards him, about the extent of his trauma and how it manifests and affects his mental health, and how he is struggling every single day. and you can’t expect him to know the depths of that no matter how empathetic and connected he is, how much he cares about jaewon, he can’t be superhuman. and so you get why he pushes and fights for jaewon. like… he is in love. it’s clear. he’s fallen in love with him. he is this wide-eyed, open kid that fell in love with a senior. and jaewon has just messed with his head, he’s never been clear, and you can’t expect jihyun to just get past that bc he knows something is up with jaewon. he can’t know the full story, but even if he did, that can’t be a reason or a justification to be treated the way jaewon treats him. bc we’re all about jaewon putting himself first and doing what he wants and respecting himself like that, but jihyun deserves that too. and it’s such a fine line to tread when you know someone is going through something, bc again you understand why, but you’re still the one being treated that way. like we talk about jaewon’s trauma, but here jihyun was part of it, he went through that traumatic experience. he’s the one that nearly lost his life. and yes, he appears to handle it well, and no matter to what extent that’s true or not, you can’t not look at jaewon struggling and understand it and then not look at jihyun with that same understanding. it’s not about comparing trauma and pain and deciding who is suffering more, it’s seeing that there are two people in this, and they’ve both been affected, so we should give them the same level of understanding.

and that’s something jaewon has to see. that his self-preservation is selfish. that his destructive behavior doesn’t just affect jihyun, instead it feels pointed and directed, bc every way jaewon hurts himself hurts jihyun. and it comes bc jihyun was so much of what was good about jaewon’s life for a second, so attacking that is his only form of self-sabotage. he can’t mess up his relationship with his friends or parents bc they were broken in the first place, and he can’t sabotage his future bc it’s already been ruined the moment he didn’t pursue his photography major. him nearly getting kicked out of school affected him so little not just bc he wanted that punishment, but bc even that punishment meant so little to him. all these things are established and they already contribute to his suffering. removing jihyun from his life is the only active thing he can do to make himself feel worse, and he can veil it in an act of protection, and even feel like he’s doing the right thing, but that deceives them both into believing this is done from a good place, when no good can actually come of it. in trying to protect jihyun, you hurt him more. in trying to hurt yourself, you hurt him too. and when someone is in a headspace like jaewon is, you look for that thing that’ll break through. bc he is so distant, he’s trying to remove himself from reality, and jihyun needs to act as this person that can anchor him to it. when you’re trying to isolate and separate yourself, sometimes seeing that you still affect things, that there’s a persons that exists that is affected and hurt by your actions, and no matter how you try to cut yourself off, you cannot stop that, separating yourself still hurts them, maybe that’s a thing that can get through. but that’s something that depends on jaewon. ultimately, he’s the only one that can get himself out of this place, and that’s what makes it so hard, that no matter how much jihyun cares and how much he fights for him, nothing can come of that effort is jaewon doesn’t meet him there. and it’d be so easy for jihyun to give in, to take the hurt, but over the course of this show we’ve seen the strength jihyun has developed, which has only seemed to increase more so after the accident, call it a renewed vigor for life or something. he has the strength that jaewon doesn’t, to not let his pain consume him. and in a beautiful full-circle moment, it’s because of jaewon, bc when they first spoke he sparked in jihyun a want to be stronger, to be more than the country mouse, and he’s done it. and it’s that courage that means he can fight for jaewon, even in the face of rejection. he trusts himself and that he knows jaewon, the real jaewon, to see past words that are intended to hurt them both, and go after the person that’s still inside jaewon somewhere. no, he can’t do it for him, and no them being together is not some magical cure for jaewon, but it’s what can put him on a path of caring for himself again, and sometimes that has to start with caring about someone else (and suddenly I’m reminded of my beautiful man 2 and how kiyoi tries to break hira out of his worthless mindset by making him care about him, and how ultimately that can’t be enough, and that hira has to take those first steps of seeing his self worth by himself). what jihyun can do by fighting is again act as that tether to reality and try to be this representation of the good jaewon can be and do. bc look at jihyun, look at how confident and strong he has become, and look at how he got there, bc you saw that country mouse and gave him the time of day and helped him grow and gave him new experiences. you jaewon, you. and that shift in mindset, from jihyun representing hurt and the accident and the trauma of his brother and everything he can’t do, to being that light and refuge and everything he can do is again something that might breaks through. and the fact it has such narrative strength and satisfaction makes me hopeful that that’s what we might actually get.

[lovelyisadora]

it isn’t the end of the semester but i’m already having my end of the semester breakdown oh my GOD I am going to have a heart attack. sprite save me

[rosicheeks]

🤦🏽‍♀️

[gentlemanpiraate]

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[pastellmochi]