#Personal garbage

[the-mighty-neckbeard]

Is it really Sunday night if you don’t go down a depressive spiral?

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

Recently I realized that I don't wear my (small, silver, rather plain) magen David necklace as part of my formal wear for work, and considering the state of the world, I think it's more important than ever to be visible. I will not be silenced. I will not be cowed, or made afraid. I will not hide myself. At least, not now. I think now there is still time, and so it's more important than ever.

And at the same time as I've been wearing it more in public and on more casual work days, I still wouldn't wear it as part of my formal attire. And I realized this recently and actually interrogated that instinct more, and realized it was because I hadn't been considering it to be "professional."

Now why wouldn't it be professional?

Other similarly situated people wear small crosses or crucifixes all the time, and no one says anything. Heck, I've even see people wear similarly tasteful pentacles, Buddhist jewelry, etc. So why wouldn't my understated magen David be similarly fine? Because it might draw unnecessary attention? Because it might be considered "too political"?

Anyway I've started wearing it. I don't accept that line of thinking, in myself or anyone else who might direct it at me.

[woelfin-sheeps-clothing]

Art vs the Artist 2024

Dumb Facts About the Artist:

I quite like the taste of Kraft cheese and Oscar Meyer baloney.

Not a better grilled cheese than Wonderbread with Kraft cheese.

Espresso martini is my favorite mixed drink.

If my socks get wet because there’s water on the floor I can and will make it everyone else’s problem.

I wrecked my drawing arm doing push-ups.

My piercings that I received with a shitty piercing gun are still fine. My piercings that I received in a piercing parlor with proper needles and everything had to be removed eventually.

I received a certification in pastry arts and now don’t really enjoy baking or cooking anymore unless I’m giving the food away.

[bill-gates-hate-blog]

2024 was a ...challenging year, to say the least. To be frank, I experienced some of the worst things that can happen to anybody, at least insofar as interpersonal relationships. I've been on the receiving end of unbelievable amounts of misogyny and victim blaming from people I trusted, or had assumed were good people, to put it very lightly. People I had known for almost 12 years, at this point. I'm 24. That's half my life.

I'm not a person who generally likes to post things in a sincere way, at least not when it comes to stuff like this. I tend to joke about my own abuse a lot, and I've also made some angry vent posts on here when everything first started going down. I'm all about the art of Posting, even though I'm not very good at it. Sincerity is something I reserve for my friends.

Why share this at all? It's mostly for me, as a capstone to the old year. Symbolic, in a way. Talking about it brings me peace. But it could also help somebody else.

Trigger warnings for SA, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation... all that good stuff.

Earlier this year, in April, I was sexually assaulted by a close friend. We had been flirting on and off for about a year at that point, but I had rapidly grown uncomfortable with it.

He had a girlfriend. A girlfriend who I didn't want to harm, even though I would never have described us as good friends.

She was asexual, you see. And this guy...obviously could not handle it well. I think some ace/allo couples can make it work. This guy was obviously not capable of that.

You see, unbeknownst to me at the time, long before he started hitting on me, I had been a dumping ground for his abuse. Whenever his girlfriend didn't live up to the insane pedestal he had put her on, He would take it out on me. Not in romantic contexts, mind you.

I joined this website in 2015, at the age of 15. Fun fact, I didn't have consistent access to the internet, then or before. My parents would shut off the wifi whenever they saw fit, to punish us--even if we needed if for school projects. Overly restrictive at best.

Tumblr was my first real social media presence, and I had irl friends on the site (love you soph). It was also the first time I could talk to or contact anybody outside of school or orchestra rehearsals or whatnot. I had no phone, no way to plan hangouts with my friends, and to be frank, I couldn't spend time with anybody unless they invited me somewhere. My family's house is so desperately messy that we couldn't invite people over. Even now, I come home for Christmas and I have to pick one room to clean before I get exhausted. I come back three weeks later and it's messy again.

Tumblr was also the first platform on which he abused me. Mind you, he wasn't here as a Blogger or anything. He made his Tumblr just to communicate with me, because I was so isolated from my friends by my lack of a phone.

You see, my friend had horrendous depression when we were in high school. It was, I now realize, something that was comorbid with his EXTREMELY undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder (as well as unmedicated ADHD.) Part of the reason he had acquired a girlfriend at this time, he'd tell me a few years later, was that he was looking desperately, for any reason to live. Whenever he started getting suicidal, he'd text this girlfriend.

When she told him she could no longer handle it, he'd go to me.

And that's how it started. He'd get on this website,he'd talk about how depressed he was--then he'd start random arguments, subtly devalue me, and accuse me of lacking empathy for his pain. There was one particularly egregious example where he sent me a several paragraph long text about how I should french kiss a woodchipper. I could not for the life of me tell you what provoked that. Something completely innocuous, i think. He revealed later that it was all something he did on purpose to make himself feel worse, because by provoking me i would hurt him, and he's the real victim here, right?

I'd try everything to help, because I loved my friend, but it's obviously not a task any teenage girl should be taking on. Ultimately, I just ended up taking on the brunt of his abuse because I was so scared he'd hurt himself, and I made excuses whenever he mistreated me. It will not escape the astute reader that I probably had an abusive upbringing, too.

I started getting an addictive rush every time an interaction went well. I loved talking to him. I couldn't possibly explain why, back then. I thought we must have simply had a very strong friendship, one where we made up quickly after every argument. Of course, I forgave him after every apology he never meant.

This, my friends, is something called a trauma bond.

It's a coping mechanism for being trapped in the cycle of abuse, and it's often the thing that keeps you trapped, if it's not financial ties or having children with someone.

In junior year, on the second day of school, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing. He told me. Not only that, he told me it was all my fault, and that I wouldn't even care. I didn't notice, because I was too busy hyperventilating and calling 911. There was a terrifying moment where I couldn't remember his address.

But he's here. Alive. On this planet. Because of my actions. I don't pretend it makes me a good person or anything, I think anybody would have done it. I'm not special.

He got diagnosed with ADHD after that, and managed to get on medication for his depression. I'm not sure he stopped abusing me, but the instances where he'd pretend my feelings didn't matter or that he'd have an outrageous outburst of cruelty slowed down. Became more sporadic. By the time we were in college, things were pretty good.

In 2021, I moved to Pittsburgh full-time. I had decided to work for the same university where I had acquired my degree. He had come to Duquesne univesity in 2020, after taking his gen eds at a community college in my hometown. Predictably, we started spending time and drinking together. He had a girlfriend, so I never considered him available and for the first time, his relationship actually seemed to be based on love and mutual trust--not the looming threat of suicide lest his girlfriend ever leave him.

Still, one night September of 2022, when we were both really drunk, he started pestering me asking if he could put his face in my tits. I took it as a joke at first, but he kept asking. Eventually I did it just to shut him up (and he did a right shoddy job of it) but I felt uncomfortable around him for months. I have... never been in a relationship, nor had I anything remotely resembling a sexual encounter at this point.

I think my hypersexuality started here. I dreaded seeing him again, until it was suddenly fine, we talked about the tit incident, and I'd forgiven him. I did notice a significant uptick in my libido, but I still considered him off limits. Instead, I found myself randomly crushing on a different male friend seemingly out of nowhere. I obsessively started to crave physical touch and had no idea how to get it, and i couldn't make my brain work the way dating apps wanted me to. On my birthday in march of 2023, the other male friend and I cuddled a bunch -- I realized this was one of the first times I had acted on my hypersexuality with another person, mild though it was.

When my roommate had to leave the city due to the rising costs of student loans and studying at the university I worked at, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment. My other "friend" who went to Carnegie Mellon had graduated earlier that year. My abuser and I were alone. His girlfriend was graduated and gone home to eastern PA.

Now there was nobody to watch us. And he took advantage of it.

In late july of 2023, once my beloved roommate had taken all the skeletons in the divorce, my abuser confessed to me that he'd always fantasized about me. I dismissed it, once again, as drunken antics. But suddenly I felt so vindicated! It felt nice, as a girl who had never been approached like that, who had been "one of the guys," to be validated as a woman, as a sexual being. I told him "As long as you don't act on it, it's probably fine." He later told me his plan that night had been to sleep with me so he could break up with his girlfriend and kill himself. Awesome, right? What a normal thing to be told.

Things started to escalate with a slow boil after that, though never very far. We'd start talking about our fantasies, and I liked to gather physical touch from him in ways i thought were innocent enough. He revealed to me his girlfriend was asexual--something she'd actually previously told me, and had me really confused when he first revealed that they'd had sex. I figured she just might have been demisexual like me, but it seemed she had told him she'd never wanted to have sex with him again. He took it immaturely, as a straight man might.

That relationship wasn't long for this world, I knew. Even then, I didn't want to be the thing that broke them up, despite my growing uncontrollable attraction to him. None of my friends would ever forgive me. I just hoped that he'd have the sense to see they were incompatible, and break up amicably.

Lol. Lmao.

Eventually, I got sick of him slowly pushing my boundaries more and more, and I told him I didn't want to hurt his girlfriend, and we needed to stop. I minimized contact, I refused to drink with him anymore, I just wanted to spend time together as friends. He started guilt tripping me, but that was that.

In January, after holiday break, we had a mutual friend come to my apartment. I figured he wouldn't be stupid to bring up our drama when I had considered it over and done with in November. I was comically wrong, and the friend overheard everything. He said that I was "starting to catch feelings too strongly" and that I was "playing the game" (He was very upset I had mentioned our affair to two of our mutual friends, and he wanted to make sure I was swiftly punished for it.) I had also tried to be sincere with him about how I was feeling the last time we had seen each other, though I hadn't called it love at that point. I just liked being with him.

Trauma bond will do some fuckshit to you, but I was trying my best to be a good person despite that-- be honest about my feelings--all of them, even the ones that were wrong, in the hopes that all of this could be solved in a way that wasn't completely catastrophic.

Well, I do realize now he was doing some comical levels of blameshifting, but he told me we shouldn't see each other for a solid two months--fine. But he didn't have to drag this up in front of our poor, unrelated friend. I was furious.

The next time we spent time together, he sexually assaulted me. I use that term because neither 'groping' nor 'rape' is accurate. He jumped on top of me, shoved his face in my breasts, started massaging my waist, told me how pretty I was, and when he went in to kiss my neck. I pushed his jaw away with the heel of my palm. Obviously not the most traumatic thing anybody ever experienced, but enough to make me lose 10 pounds in a week. I had no appetite. He started wallowing in my DMs after that. I told him I understood why he drew the conclusions he drew, and that we both had shit to work on. I could tell he wanted to see me so badly... things were going wrong with his girlfriend again. Well, he was graduating in a month. Now I didn't need to feel sorry at all when he'd leave me alone in Pittsburgh.

I only told my best friend. I didn't want to shatter the friend group and I suspected no one would believe me. (Edit: Also important: The Fear of him killing himself if his girlfriend broke up with him.) Said best friend would be coming over in a few weeks for his birthday. Then he would be driving me home in late may, in tow with all the furniture he was taking from the apartment he'd be vacating. That was it.

I felt horrible for a few days. Then it set my blood on fire.

I told my best friend "I need to remember how Saturday felt," because I could feel my libido rapidly rising. Every second he wasn't there felt like there were razor blades in my veins.

I figured I hadn't been affected by the assault, because i wasn't sex-averse or touch averse like many assault victims. It was something I craved more than ever. I wasn't ever going to approach him, but I knew I wasn't going to stop him if he tried something.

And he tried. He tried many things. We only saw each other three times after that, and every time he took something more, went a little further. Very frequently without asking. Largely this stuff falls under the umbrella of sexual coercion-- I wouldn't have consented to it if he had asked-- but it was generally things I didn't want to say no to. I wanted it violently. I reasoned that I must have allowed it to happen because I was in love with him.

Every time he left, it brought more pain. I couldn't eat. I figured that was what heartbreak felt like. I kept trying to move on and reaffirm myself without him, and kept it secret because I didn't know what would happen if I snitched.

He came back an extra time in early july, with a group of my friends. I figured he wouldn't be stupid enough to try something with four of our other friends supervising us. I was, again, wrong.

I was extremely sleep deprived (44 hours). I'd had very little food because I couldn't bring myself to eat. (on reflection, these were trauma bond withdrawal symptoms.) He had demanded to drink. The friends, (none of whom I'd told anything about this-- or not anything more than "I think he needs to break up with his girlfriend because he likes me, and I don't know how to deal with it") had all gone to bed, given tomorrow'd be a long drive for them. Again, we were alone.

I had a chance to grill him about using me! And be sincere about my feelings. And deliver the ultimate truth: That he and his girlfriend were completely incompatible, and that all his actions over the past several months proved it.

At first I pushed him off me. When he started taking my clothes off, I was like "fuck it. he can do what he wants."

That whole night was him acting on me, and me lying there, pins and needles punctuating every movement because my skin was so sensitive from the sleep deprivation and sunburn--he put me in a headlock without warning, rammed my head into the bed...Now I'm a masochist, but It's never okay to do these things without prior warning or discussion. He could have hurt or killed me.

He gaslit me after that incident, said it was my fault for letting him drink, and that I had refused to let him go home (Our friend had called him, multiple times, asking if he needed a ride.) I believed him at first. It wasn't until I recorded everything in my diaries and started talking to my more supportive friends (I have a very detailed memory, especially when it comes to this stuff) that I realized he was full of shit.

The stress from everything caused me to faint in late july. In august, my mental health started rapidly deteriorating, and I ended up dumping a nice boy because he wasn't as abusive as I needed him to be, and because I needed sex now and wasn't sure how I was going to want it from him unless he violated me. Also he didn't want kids.

We started talking about telling the girlfriend. He was convinced that she wouldn't break up with him. After all, we'd never had sex--just fondling, he reasoned. I warned him that all I needed to do was be honest about the sexual assault.

I didn't know I was trauma bonded, I didn't know I was hypersexual, i didn't know I was anything other than a shitty person. When he started hitting on me over voice call again, I decided I was sick of waiting for him to grow a pair and that I'd tell her myself.

Well. The great news is that he was super wrong about his girlfriend not breaking up with him. The bad news is when we stopped talking to each other, he did the craziest blameshifting I'd ever seen, completely reversed victim and offender, and told the events of july 6th like I was a jealous infatuate who had assaulted and inebriated him to get what I wanted-- never mind that he had taken my clothes off first, and that I was too sleep deprived to stop him.

The most abusive part of a relationship like this is the end. Never forget that.

The only reason I knew I could qualify any of this as abuse wasn't the specifics of what he said to demean me, or the DARVO-ing me, or my hypersexual reaction to his assault. No, it was the breaking of the trauma bond after he refused to talk to me, as one final insane punishment.

Did you know trauma bonds have physical withdrawal symptoms? I sure do now :)

Easily the most painful experience out of all of this was those symptoms. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I lost 15 pounds in a month. (He's an excellent personal trainer! I do not recommend!) Tension headaches. I still have moments where I completely disassociate because I don't feel like any of this happened to me, because breaking trauma bonds ALSO give you PTSD on top of the residual bullshit from the actual assault.

It was catastrophic. I was grieving because I lost a lot of friends in very brutal ways, people blamed me or ignored the whole sexually-assaulted-me part, and I was withdrawing from everything and everyone because again, more fun trauma bond withdrawal symptoms.

But I pushed through that. He made it easy by throwing a tantrum and refusing to talk. He still doesn't believe he's done anything wrong.

I have given up faith that he can be a better person, although that pains me greatly. Too many moronic idiot males reinforcing his behavior, because men like this find other men like them.

And my life is so much better. I have a renewed interest in life, in the things I want to research and create-- and even better, someone actually worth my time will fuck me. (Eventually. getting into a relationship while recovering from a trauma bond is dangerous. I've been relapsing as of late, in part due to ill-advised whispers from a friend that he is willing to apologize. For that to happen, he has to understand what he did to me first. He doesn't, and he's still too busy thinking none of this is his fault, actually.)

Here's to the New Year. If it can be broken by the truth, it must be.

[hopepilledstrugglemaxxer]

even though i am not super open about radfeminism to most people irl i still do talk about it a lot (because i think about it a lot lol) and i get a lot of people saying they're like parallel to incels because they're people who have been hurt irrationally taking it out through rage against the opposite sex. i feel like they're covertly proving the importance of radfeminism like.... you're saying to me a massive amount of women have been hurt by men and patriarchy and sexual violence? maybe we should do something about that

[xwhitenoise]

i'm so glad i discovered baekhyun's "pineapple slice" so late in the year

it has no power to affect my spotify wrapped. i'm going to seem SO sane and put together

[sopranoentravesti]

They aren’t quite as comfy as Rosie the Rollator, but they are much more supportive than Kate Cane, for places where wheels no go

[julytodaytomorrow]

Do I love the romance in Jane Eyre and want it for my own? YES!!?? But is that my favourite part of the book??? No!!! (Sometimes)!!! Because hell, there are SO many absolute garbage romances about a broody grumpy old man and a young free-spirited woman, and quite honestly this trope grosses me out but it’s only okay here because it’s the 19th century (modern age-gap romances nine times outta ten will make me want to rip my eyeballs out), BUT what makes Jane Eyre so close to my heart is just how relatable she is to me (and probably everyone who loves it too).

I relate so well to Jane’s “restlessness” as she calls it. When she looks out at the skyline of Thornfield, she longs “for a power of vision which might overpass that limit.” “I could not help it” she writes, “this restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.” This sticks with me in such a deep way because I’ve never been able to articulate just how I feel, but this is it. I’ve always been incredibly restless and I hate that I can’t feel content in one place and time. While most people are probably excited to go back home for winter break, I always have this nagging feeling that while i’m here at home i’m simultaneously missing out on something else, somewhere else. I am never happy where I am, if I am doing one thing that means I am not doing another which gives me so much anxiety. I don’t know how to explain it, I just wish I could do everything all at once, i’m an incredibly indecisive person. Not only that, but yeah, Jane’s desire for “a new servitude” and action in her life (akin to men, as she says), is also something that brings me closer to her: in my wanting to do everything at once, I’ve ended up doing absolutely nothing at all. I just want to pack up and move away somewhere far, or like, live in a van and drive everywhere and see everything. I guess it’s okay if i’m thirty when I end up doing it, I’ve probably got all the time in the world. But imagining me living alone in a big camper van thingy, with a little cat keeps me going lol. I have no idea how this went from Jane Eyre to my life-goal ramblings but it did and I ain’t changing it, ok bye. This definitely should be written on the journal in my room, locked up away from everyone but it’s not :-(.

[melonlthawne]

This is queued because I’m most likely studying rn but if you send some words of encouragement for my test / positive vibes I will give you useless internet points or a small doodle back. A lot relies on me passing this and I’ve been studying for multiple hours a week but still feel uncofident. In advance, thank you. And thank you guys for being a good source of positivity when I’m struggling. I hope I’m not being annoying 🙏

[xfilesinamajor]

In college, my economics professor referenced "A famous Homer" to the class (as some allusion to the surname "Simpson"). I was the only one to loudly blurt out "But he didn't HAVE a surname!" (thinking, naturally, of The Iliad and The Odyssey poet).

Today my husband referred to something as "going the Republican route" and my immediate interpretation was NOT a comparison to that asshole US political party, but to the government of Ancient Rome.

I didn't major in Classics or anything. I'm just a dork.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

An incomplete list of unhinged things I want to create, mostly for the hell of it:

A flag

A coat of arms

A seal

A unique staff

A unique scarf, sash, &/or headcovering

A conlang, complete with its own alphabet

A name for my estate (small shitty house in a suburb)

Journals written, bound, and stored in such a way that they will be preserved long beyond my lifetime.

I used to want to create my own religion and pantheon of gods, and I even had a good start on it, but then I had an actual numinous religious experience and became a Jew.

So, now I just want to record my spiritual experiences, textual commentary, and theological ramblings in the same manner as my journals so that it can be found generations later and hopefully dissected and argued with/about by Jews well into the future.

[woelfin-sheeps-clothing]

The usual, feeling emotions when I don't want to feel them, might delete later, you know the spiel.

I still plan to keep making Jak & Daxter-centric pieces (literally have a bag of prompts I still need to finish like the clothing swaps, gender swaps, etc) but I'd like to expand into more things with monsters (be it Monster High, Monster Prom, my own OCs, etc). I'm so inspired every day by the cool monster art I see, but I also love Jak and Daxter, and it leads to me staring at a blank page flip flopping instead of creating.

So fear not, I'll still be making JnD content if that's what you follow me for, but it might not be quite as regularly as it used to be. I'm impressed at the speed at which I was pumping out pieces for a while, and can remember when even simple stuff might take me a while to complete.

But I don't want my Patreon to subsist on fan art inspired pieces forever.

I'd like to slowly start filling it with personal pieces, with paintings, with new things. While I've slowly been getting more commissions and business here and there, it's not the progress I'd hoped for after a year with work or my Patreon.

I might be just speaking to the void, and that's fine, I just needed to get it off my chest, but as I'm slowly cycling well into year two of living in my new home with more free time to focus on making art, it got me thinking about personal progress and where I am vs where I'd like to be.

[bill-gates-hate-blog]

You think you're so virtuous? Prove me wrong! Show me how easy it is to keep your moral compass after being traumatized! Go on! I'll wait.

[tetheredtoamast]

Giant Elden Ring DLC thoughts

Who is telling you to touch the withered arm and enter the dream? Because whoever it is has a Welsh accent like the Carians (Rennala, Ranni, Rykard, Radahn, Iji, Blaidd, and idk Pidia and Thops)

Who is this Messmer fucker

Because subsequent to that question: he has Empyrean looking traits like Radagon’s hair and gold eyes, but also dragon eyes and snake shit, and also his left eye is closed like Ranni and Melina

Because also, they’re pronouncing Messmer “Mesmer” which kind of implies something about sleep. And we all know Miquella and sleep already have a thing, and Miquella already has a sleep-associated alter ego, St. Trina.

And like he’s got some thorny blood incantation looking stuff which implies something about Mogh’s outer god, the Formless Mother.

And Miquella’s parents were two gods who were also the same god. One with blonde hair and one with red hair.

His twin sister is an enormous, immensely powerful red haired warrior, but he stayed a blond child. He basically formed a chrysalis to attempt to grow himself into an adult before being cocoon-napped by Mogh.

So I don’t know for sure what I’m getting at here, but there are a lot of ways via which I get the idea that Messmer could just… be Miquella in some way. A version of Miquella as he could be; a tall, red-haired, golden-eyed warrior Empyrean alter ego of a blond god, who lives inside a dream and has been influenced by Mogh.

Also I’ll take all the armor and the new crossbow please and thank you, also I wish it was June, let’s go Summer Solstice

PPS If anyone sees this, huge disclaimer that I’m a giant fan but don’t claim to know all the lore and symbolism perfectly well so I could easily be way way off base in some super foundational way, haha

[hopepilledstrugglemaxxer]

lowkey love having body hair just because it makes me feel like i am real. maybe this sounds weird but it reminds me that i physically exist and am a real human