#I'd say trauma also played a huge part in who i am today but that's not unusual to hear in this lil corner of ours in the fandom
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ichore · 3 months ago
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hi bb! 1, 3, 15 & 17 for the ask game hehe
questions I think would be fun to be asked
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what are 3 things you’d say shaped you into who you are?
I'd say that books, anime and tv shows were all that shaped me. I always tried to self insert into the story that I loved the most at the time, and that improved image of self in this other worlds has been the thing that I've been chasing after my whole life.
3 films you could watch for the rest of your life and not get bored of?
Gone Girl - I love the director, love the music, the story, the writer. Literal masterpiece that I've already rewatched four times.
True Detective - not a film, but one thing about me is that I love nihilist dilfs and a good detective story
JJK 0 - already rewatched it three times and read the manga volume too. I don't know what to say, Satoru just looks extra delicious in that movie.
what do you think of when you hear the word “home”?
My pretty brain that I use for maladaptive daydreaming 🙂‍↕️
name 3 things that make you happy
You. Your writing. Your asks ❤️ ily
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unbornwhiskeyy · 7 months ago
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i listened to "fifteen" today and as usual i burst into tears while it was playing but not at any of the usual parts that make me cry ("when all you wanted was to be wanted" etc.), instead it was the last few lines that caused a huge sob to work its way out of me like a muscle spasm, like i had been hurt but hadn't yet worked out what happened to me:
i've found time can heal most anything and you just might find who you're supposed to be i didn't know who i was supposed to be at fifteen
i don't think i've ever written about what taylor swift's music meant to me as a repressed queer college student. i doubt i was conscious of any connection at the time. (my strategy for dealing with my many personal issues is to not think about them until they're all i can think about.) i did think that "fifteen" was one of the most crystalline portraits i'd encountered of having to survive the cruelty and existential doom of abortive high school romances, and most of the trauma i am still recovering from as an adult was inflicted on me at age fifteen and centered around that kind of fitful but terribly immersive relationship (can't tell you how often my then-girlfriend and her mother accused me of being gay, of acting like a girl), when i barely knew who i wanted to be, and then, later, still reeling in confusion from the experience, i would try really hard to be something i wasn't and every time it felt like hitting a wall at 100 mph. i didn't know who she was supposed to be.
it also got me thinking about how hearing "fifteen" made me interested in taylor swift as a writer and how the first time i really engaged with wider internet discourse was when every feminist website was running a piece about how unfeminist the song was and how it was part of the greater cultural regression that taylor swift obviously represented because she wasn't pj harvey, it was a very deranged and stupid time on the internet, and that is the reason i started posting on tumblr a lot which means it's also why i ended up having sort of a career in music writing, and whenever i think back to that time i just remember feeling like i was screaming from a place that was too deep inside of myself to know, and she was saying you hate this song because you think you've always known who you're supposed to be. i didn't know who i was supposed to be.
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the-void-and-the-mirror · 1 year ago
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The past that tries to define my future
So, I have a community that's been a hobby for eight years now. I've loved this community and being a part of it. It's a lot of fun to keep playing in it, and meeting new people, and bringing fun stories together in interactions. I used to thrive on it, and I was always great at returning responses, and getting involved.
One year, I decided that I should stand my ground for something I believe in. I didn't agree with the things someone was saying in their forum. And I pushed back. Admittedly, I did not do this in a very good way. And it really, really blew up in my face. I lost a lot of people in the community that day. And every time I thought it was finally over, I'd lose another. People blocked me. And I lost a lot of faith in myself then.
Nowadays, staying in the community I still love is even still more of a challenge than I wish it would be. I push myself forward, and meet plenty of people who have no idea what happened that day. But still, it feels like I have a reputation wherever I go, and that it's a matter of time before I'm rejected all the same. Most days I can get through it, but some days, it hits me so hard that I want to start over with a brand new name, where no one would know it was me, and I could resume without fear. That would be the hope, at least.
And it aches to feel this way. I've been struggling to pull myself up by my bootstraps for years to try and feel the way I did before I made that decision. Even though I grew from it, even though everyone sees me as kind and wonderful, even though the fear is only in my head.
Living in my own shadow... kind of sucks. There was a way things were. And if I would stop getting in my own way, I could be that way again. I could get along, and thrive, and no one would bat an eye. My own feeling of failure is the only one there. No one else even thinks about it.
So, how do I get out of my own way? A dear friend of mine listened to me while I cried about this to them. How I want to start over, how I just want relief from what once was. And I was so close to doing just that. And she was trying to talk me through, and show me that my badbrain was being just that. That I don't have to start over. That the community had led to us meeting each other, and how far we've come. Then she shared with me this very clarifying post: https://knucklestheenchilada.tumblr.com/post/722379890309136384/oldmanyellsatcloud-tenderwear-found-this It goes on to explain that depression pretty much fucks with your ability to see reality for what it is. That depression seeks to make you stagnate. And that when you're depressed for too long, it cripples you into feeling the negatives of the world. But, that this is also reversible, with self-care. This made me admit that I've been struggling to see the positive and get better, despite my efforts. I still have huge fears, despite my growth, that people will hurt me when I let my guard down. And I know that also stems so strongly from my traumas. And I thought this would be so much easier a battle, but it hasn't been.
And that was the turning point. It wasn't until that clicked, that I realised I still have much to heal, that finally made me realise perhaps I shouldn't just throw it all away in the name of rebirth and relief.
I'm still struggling, just a little less. My friend strongly recommended to me positivity journaling. Which is, admittedly, something I've fought against since my traumas started. Because "positivity" came back to bite me in the ass back then. But, I also so desperately want to get better, and see the nicer things in life. So maybe it's time to hang up that dread and try this out. I don't think I could truly lose anything to this. Not anymore, thanks to a recent realisation with boundaries (which is another story for another day).
Today, I am grateful to continue my journey, and to learn a little more. And I hope that this entry finds you a safe place to realise that maybe the badbrain you feel is only that. I hope you find someone who cheers you on. And know that I'm cheering for you, as well. I believe in you.
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annerbhp · 6 years ago
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If you have time, I'd love more insight into Harry's thought process related to these lines in "pick it up": "Is that as bad as it looks? he wants to ask. Only the truth is, a large part of him just doesn’t want to know." "He hasn’t really thought about what she meant by everything. Hasn’t particularly wanted to." Do you think his not wanting to know was related to what was going on at that point in time or that it's more on an ongoing thing?
One of the things that has been interesting to play with in the ArmisticeSeries is the ways people approach and react to trauma–both their own and thatof the people around them. Harry and Ginny in particular make a really starkpoint of contrast when it comes to this.
First, when it comes to trauma that they themselves have experienced, theypretty much have the exact opposite reaction. Take, for example, Harry at theForbidden Forest. Just weeks after having to walk into that forest and faceVoldemort, after dying and having one of the most traumatic experiences of hislife, what does he do? He volunteers to help Hagrid go back in there andpossibly track down a giant.
On the edge of the Forest, Harry feels a trickle of coldsweat work its way down his neck, and has to wonder if partly he just wanted toprove that he could. 
–pick it up, chapter 5
That very same chapter, Ginny is faced with going back into the castle whereshe suffered an entire year of trauma, all capped off by losing a brother andfriends and watching people die and nearly dying herself. She tries, but shejust can’t.
“Keep going,” she whispers to herself, thinking of her family in there. Thepeople who need her. Need her to be stronger than this. But, Merlin, there isalso this sharp, hot panic swelling in her chest, the feeling that the stonesthemselves are closing on her and she knows she can’t do it.
She can’t walk in there.
–pick it up, chapter 5
Harry reacts to his personal trauma by almost immediately throwing himselfback into those places and situations, almost as if to prove to himself thathe’s not scared, that he is still brave. Think about the Boggarts, how horriblythey affected him. But his first reaction was to get training to be able todefeat them or hold them off and not let them affect him anymore. This is a guywho runs towards danger. Ginny, on the other hand, is more likely to avoid thethings that have traumatized her. She takes space and time and has to processeverything before she can possibly face the castle again, and even then, ittakes her months to reconcile with it—or just find a way to cope.
Even their job choices in Armistice reflects this. Harry decides on theDepartment of Mysteries—a place that is home to arguably some of his mosttraumatic experiences—fighting Death Eaters, nearly getting his friends killed,and watching Sirius dying.
Down on the ninth floor, Harry steps out into the dark hall. He eyes thestairwell that he knows from far too much personal experience leads down to thedungeon courtrooms used by the Wizengamot.
But he isn’t going to think about that today.
Unfortunately the long dark hallway ahead of him holds more troublingmemories. His throat is thick with it for a moment, that frantic night runningdown the hallways, rushing off to save Sirius, wondering if he’s managed todamn his friends with his stupid mistake. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and the otherswith Death Eater wands at their throats.
It’s possible this was a really terrible idea.
–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 5
Yet, Harry still does it. And part of that is proving that he can. He’s bigger than his traumas. (And,yes, the discussion of healthy processing of trauma is an entirely differentcan of worms.)
Ginny, despite having a highly developed set of skills that might set her upwith a lot of varying careers where she could make real impact, chooses insteadto distance herself from those things she associated with her personal trauma.She chooses Quidditch. Specifically because it’s safe.
Ginny catches her fingers, squeezing tight. “It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s allbehind me now. It’s over.” The DA, the things she learned and did. It’s alldone. Over. And she doesn’t have to find some way to use all that.
She can just be safe.
–in my head we do everything right, chapter 5
Now what is interesting is the flip side of this, how the two of them dealwith the trauma of others around them. The books spend a lot of time on thefact that in many ways love is Harry’s greatest strength, both the love peoplehave felt for him (Lily) and the general goodness and protectiveness he feelsfor people around him, what a good heart he has. Not to mention his willingnessto sacrifice himself for others—which Dumbledore might call an act of love,just like Lily’s. What is interesting though, is that Harry is not anempathetic person. That is not to say that he doesn’t care about people. He iswilling to throw down for them without hesitation. But he has a hard timeconnecting with people, particularly on a deep, emotional level. With hisbackground and experiences, that’s really not all that surprising. Emotionalliteracy is a real thing, y’all, and you have to learn it. Most people get thatby experiencing the empathy of people around them, but Harry had no role modelfor this. Not really. So he’s not great at empathy. Other people’s strongemotions can make him feel really uncomfortable as we see over and over againin the books, and not just his inability to understand Cho. He hates emotional conflict. (And I willargue until I am blue in the face that this is not simply ‘boys don’t doemotional empathy.’ Bullshit. It in no way has to be like that, and I willargue that RON of all of them, is the most empathetic and he develops this overthe course of the books so very clearly. So miss me with that girls are just inherently more empathetic thing.)
So in the context of that, we see the quotes you have from Harry’s internalthoughts in pick it up. Which come up again in later chapters.
Ron leans into Harry, voice low as their friends once again start laughingand talking. “Do you ever feel like we’re missing something? When they get totalking about that year?”
“Yeah,” Harry says. But maybe, he considers, noticing the way Dean iswatching Seamus, they’re better off not knowing.
–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 6
Harry shies away from hearing about other people’s trauma. Part of this ishis struggle to deal with other people’s emotions and personal traumas,especially when he is already so heavily burdened with his own like in pick it up. But also, I have to thinkthe experience of reading Skeeter’s book about Dumbledore has really impactedhim. Having everything he thought he knew about Dumbledore undermined andchallenged really threw him for a huge loop, and even though he reconciled withit in the end, I think part of him still thinks he would have been better offnever knowing any of that. (He struggles with moral ambiguity, as we haveseen.)
Now, compare that to Ginny. She is in a very different place, not justbecause she is more empathetic but because being empathetic becomes her armor.It becomes the one thing that keeps her from feeling like a monster. When sheis training as a Legilimens, Snape over and over again encourages her to remove empathy from the equation. Shefeels herself slipping towards very dangerous places when she does that, andgets pulled back by people like Hannah who reminds her that she needs people, she needs to care. So Ginny finally perseveres by humanizing the verypeople Snape declares she needs to objectify. It’s horribly painful for her,and I think she probably doesn’t see it as salvation as much as the painfulpunishment she deserves for wielding this skill, the cost of the thing. As muchas Ginny runs from her own trauma, she is continually opening herself to theexperiences and feelings of others—both through the things she takes frompeople through Legilimens and the emotional labor she does as a leader invarious spaces.
Ginny moves furtherinto the room, moving from person to person, hearing about their experiences,their losses. Collects them all up and stitches them together like a cloakshe’ll never really be able to take off.
–The Changeling, chapter 10
She does this because she cares, but also because, in many ways, she feelslike it’s her job to carry it all. She’s being necessary. And without it, she might wonder just how much humanity she has left.
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trickstercaptain-archive · 7 years ago
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hi! so your understanding of Jack's character is flawless, and i had a question: how would you describe cutler's feelings for jack in tpof, and could they sometimes verge on physical attraction? i understand that cutler wants to own or control jack ('my sparrow has discovered the limits of his cage, i fear', and let's not forget the shirtless power play) but cutler wants to own everything. i feel his relationship with jack is more complex than that, and i'd appreciate your thoughts :)
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       ‘the shirtless power play’ asdfgkdf I caNNOT and will never forget that scene anon. but gosh thank you!! okay so I guess the first thing is that I don’t write nor understand Cutler Beckett nearly so well as I do Jack, but from my own experience of writing with @lordiism who is actually Cutler in disguise, as well as what I personally inferred from reading TPOF, I don’t think there’s any physical attraction there on Cutler’s side. personally, I don’t even see Cutler as a sexual person, and I have my reasons for that which I’ll detail in a sec, but the biggest piece of evidence I have to suggest that he isn’t attracted to Jack in a sexual way comes from Crispin herself, the author of TPOF, who states:
I also decided, from watching that scene in CB’s cabin in AWE many times, plus reading the deleted lines from that scene (it was at one point much longer and more detailed) that CB was obsessed with Jack, and controlling him. He wanted Jack to be HIS minion. I didn’t see CB as being particularly sexual in his desires. He struck me as someone who got off on gaining power for himself. And he wanted Jack to be HIS – the way Mercer was his. [x]
        and to add to what Crispin said, I think controlling Jack could have been more appealing to Cutler than most because he is so resisting of control. even while he’s working in the EITC, one of the first things Cutler observes is that there was an air of the wild and untamed about him, and that could have easily fed into the obsession he has about trying to tame and own him – essentially, the idea that to tame someone who is apparently untameable is more satisfying than trying to control someone who wouldn’t put up such a fight.
       so it wasn’t her intention for Cutler to be obsessed with Jack in a sexual way – but of course, as an ex literature student, I’m compelled to point out that the theory of the death of the author means you can infer from the text any way you wish, and there are certainly strange undertones in that scene where Cutler asks Jack to remove his shirt ( although it’s clearly a power play designed to put Jack in his place ). but I would argue that Cutler isn’t interested in sex whatsoever, regardless of Jack, and for evidence on that I’d look no further than Cutler’s own father, who was a notorious philanderer and infected Cutler’s mother with what today would be known as an STD. with Cutler’s hatred for his father, along with the trauma he experiences in his early life at the hands of Christophe, I would argue that, as Crispin says, he channels all of his energy into the acquisition of power and wealth and “objects,” which includes individuals, and therefore takes no interest in baser things like sex.
        also, it’s important to point out how useful Jack is to Cutler – he’s very intelligent, possesses the right amount of cunning and quick-thinking, is competent and a good captain, and also has spades of charm that Cutler doesn’t have. Cutler uses Jack throughout TPOF to butter up and even seduce other individuals, if you consider Ayisha – he even says to Jack:
“I fear I am not—and Mercer certainly is not—charming. But you are, Jack. You have charm in spades. People like you, when you exert yourself to be likeable.”
       so Jack has a huge amount of worth to Cutler even without a physical aspect to their relationship. but more important still, regardless of Cutler’s own feelings, nothing would ever be reciprocated by Jack, and this is where part of the fandom’s view on these two ( and also Jack and Salazar tbqh ) bothers me. yes, Jack may well be bisexual, and yes, he is undoubtedly a sexual individual, but there is absolutely nothing in his dynamic with Cutler to suggest that he wants to be the object of this obsession, sexual or otherwise, much less that he would passively accept it or even instigate it ( knowingly, at least ). you only really have to look at that power play scene to see how extremely uncomfortable it makes Jack tbh.
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