#Now that I'm weaker and sicker I feel so trapped

[cottoncandysecretlair]

Just rediscovered the fact that slime shops are still a huge thing and that people are still buying lots of slime.

Can't help but think about when I was in high school and spent like all my lunch money every week on ingredients trying to perfect slime. I ended up giving up because I kept failing (there weren't real recipes or even ingredient proportions I could find anywhere yet, just a handful of ASMR YouTube channels).

But man. If only I'd kept at it. These slime people are running whole ass businesses and selling out every week!

I mean I guess with my strict parents I wouldn't have been able to ship anything or even post to social media but like... I can dream.

Saw this one shop like "I started my business when I was 13" like fuck you man. I know mom and dad were willing to help you with your business and didn't call you a freak.

That's not an insult to the person BTW, I think it's awesome that someone that's still just a teenager has a bright future and business to look forward to, this is just my bitter vent lol.

Like sometimes all I can think of all of the trends and such I tried to get in on when I was younger, only to be shut down by my parents, and the thing inevitably becomes something that could have literally changed my life.

I found out about bitcoin and tried to get permission to mine it in like 2010, like within a year of it existing. I was told no. Can you fucking imagine??? That was when you didn't need a specialized setup to mine, if I'd even accumulated 1 BTC I could've been SET FOR LIFE

Or how when Kizuna AI was just starting out, I started getting stuff together to try and be a vtuber before that was even a term. Like imagine being in the first wave of that! But of course, wasn't allowed.

Man kids nowadays can plaster their whole ass face on tiktok on a daily basis nowadays, yet I was in deep trouble for the crime of posting fucking G rated fanfiction. Like I always thought that was dumb but holy shit looking back it's so absurd.

I remember getting grounded because I tried to record video game walk throughs that were purely informative with no personal info when I was 16. They smashed the capture card I'd ordered with a Christmas gift card lmao

For God's sake I wanted to learn to code and was banned from doing so because "You'll learn to hack my computer and get around the rules" like good fuck I was trying to learning fucking JavaScript with an in-browser program *via his outdated windows XP laptop* like what the fuck was I gonna manage?

Like if I get an extra half hour aside from my homework allotment, suddenly I'm gonna fucking commandeer your laptop? That doesn't do shit for me, he physically would just take it away, even mid school project, when he arbitrarily decided "too long" was shorter than yesterday.

I just. Idk. I wish I could have built something for myself when I still had the free time and the energy. I wish I'd developed a skill instead of jumping from interest to interest because when my parents realized I liked something, it was over.

I couldn't make anything mine. Not even myself, I was just his pawn, and a lousy one at that

[sylvaridreams]

Mostly I reblogged the palliative fic because I'm thinking about Bourbon and how badly he blames himself for Auruim’s injury and everything that came after... his guilt and his rage.

- Auruim wasn't necessarily his responsibility with Alba gone, he was Canach's; but Bourbon has basically always kind of been subservient and taken on shit jobs that no one really wants. So anytime Canach isn't immediately present he considers Auruim HIS responsibility anyway.

- plus he loves the reformed mordrem a lot. He associates with them by choice, defends them, helps them, tries to be there for them because those three are intensely vulnerable* and need protecting. And he loves them. Those are his kiddos. He'd kill or die for them.

*because none of them have any type of safety net, no one is taking care of them, looking out for them, standing up to defend them; with Alba gone they're being treated like absolute rock bottom scum for the most part. The three of them are forcibly excluded from society and personhood and Bourbon knows what that feels like, and it's unacceptable to him.

- so he went into the rift after Auruim because he loves him like family, and it's his duty (his words) to protect this sweet vulnerable boy from anything that wants to hurt him.

- and then being in nayos for 3 minutes is so disgusting and horrid and scary that he can't bring himself to come out of hiding and do his duty to protect. He stands by and watches Auruim be brutalized and dismembered before he can force himself to step in.

- and then Auruim spends over a year getting sicker and weaker and slowly dying. Before his eyes. Because he didn't stop Auruim from running into the rift, or jump in fast enough to save him and stop it happening.

- and this is (to him) just the most recent in a chain of people who he's loved so deeply and tried so hard to keep who have been torn away from him with violent force. Every time he finds home and comfort and safety in someone, the universe punishes him for it. He doesn't know what horrible thing he did, just that he did something to make himself deserve this punishment over and over. Being forced to leave his childhood home after Pyotr died defending him (and never allowed back.) Glaz dying in his arms (and he couldn't even bury the body.) Being forced out of the gang, (never to return) finding Chesha's body in Lion's Arch (leaving her to be burned with the other Aetherblade corpses) -- he'd been spared for so long since, he'd made the mistake of getting too comfortable, thinking it was over, and some cosmic motion had to remind him of his guilt, that he deserves to suffer. Now Auruim is going to die because Bourbon made the mistake of loving him.

- this is his fault for loving Auruim.

- he's so angry at the world and himself and at the rot creeping over Auruim’s comatose body. He loves Auruim but he resents the body, the way it keeps getting worse and worse and worse the longer he spends trapped with it. It is taunting him.

- he views the body as separate from Auruim. It looks like Auruim but Bourbon recognizes it as a corpse in a tomb, not as a sick sylvari in a bed. Is the psychosis taking over after over a year in near isolation playing caretaker to the body? Yessirrrrrr.

- he's furious, hates that Deidre stays. Not because he dislikes her, but he does not want her there. 1. This is Bourbon’s duty, because he's subservient to Alba, because he loves Auruim, because it's his fault. No one else should ever have to try to help. No one else can clean up his mistake. He's being punished and she is trying to take the catharsis of it from him. Whether Auruim recovers or dies, he started this and he has to atone. 2. He wants her to leave because he's so angry and close to the edge and he's afraid of what he's going to do when he reaches that brink. He knows his anger is misdirected and he tries not to show her that he's burning but he is Pissed that Deidre is even trying to take his duty.

- Part of this might be "she's a real medic and I've just kind of fumbled through figuring out how to take care of him" a sort of.... Jealousy, and a selfish fear that Deidre will be better at this. Deidre can save him where you can't.

- but also a feeling of "I have done this for over six months before you showed up and I DO know his needs and what I'm doing and I WON'T leave this to you, stop trying to correct me for xyz thing stop watching me like I'm doing it wrong." The frustration of a self taught caretaker vs a medical professional by trade.

- taking care of Auruim’s dying body makes him feel sick not because it's necessarily gross (although it is) but because it's a physical manifestation, proof of how he's ruined what he loves.

- but he's duty bound. If he stops going through the motions of atonement and crawling on his knees through a desert of broken glass then he'll never forgive himself. (Spoiler alert he doesn't intend to forgive himself anyway)

- he loves Auruim and would do anything for him that he needed, anything to help him, but he does have this internalized ableist belief that Auruim is "ruined" now, that his life is ruined and over because of him (due to his self hatred and guilt over the matter) / Auruim also sees himself as ruined and unloveable and unwanted now but without the non stop struggle for atonement and without blaming Bourbon. He's clueless to Bourbon’s self hatred over this.

- (with time as Auru is able to start healing and recovering Bourbon sees this less as the case; eventually he's able to see that Auru was very sick and injured and unwell but that no matter how bad it got he's not ruined, he's still himself and he bounced back.)

- but in the meantime it's almost funny how non-human human staunch atheist six-denier BOURBON managed to invent a near religious concept of guilt and sin out of his bad life experiences. Baby you can't be catholic in this world I'm sorry. You would've loved going to christian hell though I'm positive. And the stained glass too.

- anyone who finished reading palliative, if you're wondering if Auruim ever delivers Glaz's message to Bourbon: no cuz he woke up and forgot it. Heart hands.