#again. my social life being in the negatives probably contributes to this a bit cause i cant really practice talking with..no one to talk

[microwavetoaster-selfships]

//Slight vent..? Not really anything deep or dark, just me being kinda mopey over something. Putting it under a read more just in case. I get a little lengthy with it. I might delete this later depending on how I feel about it

Cars is really important to me partly cause it helped get me through such a rough spot in my life, but part of that rough spot in my life was feeling like there's no point in me talking, like I'm there to listen to people and respond to them, my turn to talk wasn't a thing that happened. Truthfully it still kinda lingers with me and I've been working on trying to openly speak more and not freeze up and quit when I think there's an 'opening' for me to talk. Though I don't have many people to talk with so it's slightly a hard thing to practice.

But, the main thing I wanted to get to, is lately I've realized that BECAUSE I was into Cars during the peak of that problem, I'm really really really bad at gushing about Cars. And that upsets me. I love to talk and yap and gush, but problem stated above has made me way more hesitant to do those things, and it's doubled worse when it comes to me talking about Cars. That's partly why I don't spam post every 5 minutes. I feel like I have so much to say about them but it upsets me cause there's just such a blockage to it.

I've been trying to work on talking when I'm only prompted to do so, cause if I waited for people to ask me questions to talk/gush then I'd probably never talk again! Which is maybe a second hand reason I enjoy ask games so much, cause it gives me a better way to gush and stuff.

I dunno. I'm not really headed anywhere with this. I just wanted to get this out of my system. I love them so much with my whole heart, they are weaved into my thoughts, I'm sure a day will come where I don't have so much trouble yapping about them. It's partly why this blog gets quiet at moments. I am so still here and in love with them and I get on Tumblr countless times, my brain is just having thoughts(/positive) that it can't put into words.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I try to keep a pretty.....not necessarily positive, but forward momentum based attitude on my blog about most things. This is less because of my actual beliefs on these subjects and more to do with the idea of limiting my exposure to spirals of content that I know would negatively impact my mental health.

This often means choosing posts to reblog very carefully to walk the line between what I consider to be realistic and informative content, and what I consider to be emotionally toxic framing. The difficulty there of course is that the toxicity can come from both sides. It is just as depressing for me to drown in toxic positivity and bootstrap-esque talking points as it is for me to drown in people wailing that nothing will ever be okay again.

Anger can be motivating, but it depends on the anger, it depends on how overwhelming the source of that anger is, it depends on the person and their ability to process that anger. Most importantly, the anger has to balance with the fear. When the anger comes, as it so often does with injustice, from the fear for our survival, sometimes the fear is great enough to paralyze us against anger based motivation.

For me this is where harm reduction as political praxis comes in. To ease the fear for our survival enough that the anger at our being abandoned or persecuted can be sufficiently motivating. This is very antithetical to the crowd who believe that "having nothing to lose" is a political tipping point requirement. I understand the conflict and don't necessarily disagree. But I also think that having nothing left to lose is easier reached than one might think if one can present people with what they have to gain as well. For many of us, our lives are actually pretty bleak once you get around to comparing them to reasonable standards of life quality. But living like that grinds you down and makes it harder to imagine "asking" for much beyond the bare minimum. Trust me, I've seen that process enough times in enough social movements/individuals to recognize it by now.

So my personal politics are not necessarily reflected in the way I talk about political action and praxis and vice versa. This is not because I' hiding them, but because my personal politics are not, in my opinion, helpful to the cause of change and progress outside of the way it drives my contributions as an individual. I still talk about that stuff! But not here. Not where I don't know who is listening and how they are likely to hear me.

This is all to say that I'm feeling.....pretty bleak right now about notions of change and progress and the future. I don't like feeling that way. I think those feelings influence me in ways that make me less of the person I want to be in life. But here I am, and for a lot of reasons. And the end result is that I am taking my own needs way more seriously than I ever have before. Politically, that feels subpar, because my work is largely very collectivist and I struggle with the idea that I am deserving of the disruption that shift in priorities will create for others I work with. Personally, it feels increasingly like if I do not make this choice, there is no one else considering my needs of their own will. Basically, if I don't prioritize my needs, no one will. And I think that's probably true. Which hurts a lot given everything I've given and done over a lifetime. I think I am now one of the people for whom harm reduction must exist in order to be capable of change making, and I don't see enough people making those resources available (to scale) to meet the current level of need, so I have to be able to obtain those resources myself. I hope that changes soon, but in the meantime, hopefully I am able to recuperate a bit.

[staysaneathome]

This Was Not A Dare, Reigen

Jon glares at each of the— the suspects traitors in front of him, tape recorder clutched tight in one hand.

Martin, wringing his hands uselessly, eyes wide and beseeching. Tim, fists clenched hard enough for his knuckles to go white and returning his gaze with a death stare of his own. Sasha, arms folded to form a barrier between Jon and herself, expression a perfect mask of concern. Reigen, radiating disappointment in every one of his gestures and quips. Elias, eyes weary, fingers rubbing the bridge of his nose.

Some intervention this is turning out to be.

Jon wants to scream. Wants to reach out and shake someone, anyone, until they admit he’s making sense and it’s the rest of the world that’s gone mad.

Every single one of them (except Martin) could’ve killed Gertrude. He knows he has no proof that they did, but he has no proof that they didn’t either, can’t they see that? If they don’t want him to suspect them, it should be easy for them to actually give him proof of their innocence (like Martin did), instead of just repeating platitudes of “you know this isn’t acceptable adult behavior, Jon” and “you’re better than this, Jon”.

Who cares about knowing better or acceptable behavior when it’s your very life on the line? He’s half tempted to throttle the con artist, see how dignified or adult he is when he’s the one with a murderer on his tail!

…Not that Jon is a murderer. It’s just the principle of the thing, is all.

“Jon,” Elias says, tone soothing in all the ways he doesn’t want it to be. “This is absurd. This goes far beyond an unhealthy work environment. I’ll admit it’s partly my fault for letting it get this bad, I should have intervened earlier.”

Reigen cuts in with a hand gesture that is as effusive as it is dismissive. “That doesn’t make his behavior okay, Bouchard-san. It may be bad here, but Jon chose to follow me, Tim and Sasha, and yell at Martin, rather than going to the police or paying a detective, like Herlock Sholmes or something.”

Jon sputters. “Wh- It’s Sherlock Holmes, not—and he’s fictional!”

Reigen blinks sleepily, one eyebrow raised. “Oh? That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure?”

“Yes!” Jon all but shouts, rapidly reconsidering his stance on braining the sardonic little git with his tape recorder. “Don’t you even—an-and you’re deflecting again! Just like with your ridiculous ‘haunted gun’ nonsense!”

“I’m not!” Reigen says, clearly deflecting. “I’ve seen this kind of thing loads of times as the number one psychic. When a weapon kills lots of people over 100 years, the bad energy gets bigger and bigger until the gun grows an evil spirit and is hungry—”

“I refuse to believe Gertrude Robinson was murdered by a sentient blunderbuss!!”

“Be that as it may,” Elias interrupts, shooting them both a stern frown. “This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, Jon. Given how badly it’s affected your work ethic, I will be taking direct action to ensure it does not continue.”

Jon can feel his shoulders hunch almost against his will, dread pooling in his stomach at the thought of whatever punishment is about to be unjustly inflicted on him.

Only Martin looks half as worried as he feels, glancing between him and Elias nervously. By contrast, Tim looks downright triumphant, smirk nasty and vindictive. Sasha’s somewhere between those two, not openly celebrating his soon-to-be-downfall, but not acting like she’d lift a finger on his behalf either, though he’s unsure why that feels like it should surprise him. She’s always been as neutral as Switzerland.

Reigen, oddly enough, has more in common with Martin than with Tim. He’s staring at Elias like he’s waiting for a bit of news he knows he won’t like.

Jon thinks he’d appreciate that more if he wasn’t about to be unfairly lambasted simply for trying to stop a murderer and bring justice for an old woman who probably died frightened and alone. Much like Jon probably will once he’s been hobbled by whatever Elias is about to say next.

“Such as by restricting access to the archives from members of the public who are ultimately doing you more harm than good.”

…Wait.

What?

“What?!” Tim, Martin, and Sasha echo.

Reigen glances between them all, blinking in confusion.

Jon shares the sentiment entirely. His punishment is…for someone else to be removed from the archives? Someone he doesn’t employ or even like that much, no less?

He must have misheard, surely.

Though maybe not, given how Tim looks aghast, glancing between Elias and Reigen. “Okay, no, Reigen’s clearly not the problem here—”

“I’m very sorry, Tim, but Jon has made several remarks about the disruptive nature of Mr. Arataka’s presence in the archives.” Elias sighs. “From the arguments like the one we just witnessed to the nonsensical purchases of oddities inspired by his presence, such as Duolingo subscriptions,” Meaningful glare at Jon who resists the urge to clutch his phone guiltily, “That are now billed on the Archives’ expenses, it unfortunately seems as though he is dragging down productivity for all of you as an active stressor.”

“But we’re much better equipped to take statements from people who don’t speak English because of that!” Martin protests, stepping forward. “Isn’t it an advantage to have a more, more international perspective for our work?”

“One positive in a sea of negatives does not an advantage make.” Elias says, sounding infuriatingly like he’s misquoting something. “And really Martin, how realistic is it that this would help in more than a few isolated cases? I expected better from you.”

Martin’s face crumples, and his shoulders hunch, making himself smaller.

Jon finds his own mouth opening to—what? Say something? What would he even say?

Luckily, Sasha intervenes before he can dig his own grave further. “That’s as may be, but he’s a wonder for morale. He and Jon are funny, not anything serious, and I don’t think we’d have come to you about Jon‘s behavior unless he encouraged us to—”

“Which only fits into the delusion where Jon feels an outsider is rallying his subordinates against him, which is not good for his paranoid outlook.” Elias replies calmly. “And it’s never a healthy work environment when one employee feels the others are making them the butt of a joke.”

“I’d say that’s not as bad as when the boss feels he has the right to violate everyone’s privacy whenever he wants to just ’cause he’s feeling sad!” Tim growls.

Elias begins to answer, before Reigen finally speaks up.

“Sorry,” The con artist says carefully. “But you are…«I know this one…» banning me from the Archives? Yes?”

“That is the long and short of it, yes.” Elias says, grudgingly

“Why?” Reigen challenges, eyes hard and searching. “What have I, personally, done that’s wrong here? What behavior do I need to correct?”

There’s a moment of silence. The whirring of the tape recorder sounds uncomfortably loud.

“Mr. Arataka, are you currently under the employ of the Magnus Institute?” Elias asks, brow furrowed.

“Ah, no, no, but—”

“Are you looking to become employed by the Institute at this point in time, as a prospective member of the Archival Staff?” He fires off rapidly.

“Su-Sorry, but if you could just go a little slower—”

“Then I am afraid that unless you’re looking to fill out an employment contract or a Statement form, we cannot help you, Mr. Arataka.” Elias spreads his hands wide. “We are an academic institution, a place of research and learning. The Institute cannot allow for social dalliances on company time, especially not when those visits are negatively contributing to the work environment and the wellbeing of our staff.”

Tim throws up his hands, “I-I cannot believe this!”

Reigen’s mouth works soundlessly for a moment.

“Arataka is my…what do you call it? First name?” He says, at last. “Using it in this context is…inappropriate. Please call me Reigen, if you would, Bouchard-san.”

“Of course. My mistake, Mr. Reigen.” Elias does have the decency to look somewhat abashed. “Though, regrettably, I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises within the next twenty minutes, or I will be forced to call security.”

Reigen nods, jerkily, hands stuffed in his pockets.

Jon almost wants to call out to the fraud as he turns to go, grab him by the shoulder, pick another argument, something. He knows he should be happy, be glad that this thorn in his side will finally stop bothering him, but instead he just feels—befuddled. Off-kilter.

What happened to the man who once spent three hours arguing for the “spiritual effectiveness” of entirely performative and useless rituals, saying that ensuring his clients left his office fooled and contented was better than actually uncovering genuine supernatural forces and learning all there was to know about them? Why is he going so-so easily now, when he’s made Jon fight tooth and nail in every debate he’s had with the so-called psychic?

At the door, the con man pauses.

“Bouchard-san. You said I could come back if I had a statement to give?”

Elias shifts in his seat, looking bemused. “W-well, yes. That is a service we do provide. Of course, the statement would have to be genuine, and verifiable as such before we let you back into the Archives.”

“We don’t even do that for most of the rubbish we do take,” Tim mutters under his breath, and though Jon is glad he’s not the one being shot a quelling look, he does have to agree.

The con man turns back.

He’s got that smirk on his face that immediately puts Jon’s hackles up on instinct, prepared to argue against whatever inane point he’s come up with now to defend his phony psychic title.

“Gotcha.” Reigen says, far too cheerfully. «Ja ne.»

Then he strolls out of the office, as cool as a cucumber.

Jon could even swear he hears him whistling as he makes his way down the stairs.

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

“I’d do him.” Sasha pipes up, unhelpfully.

“Sasha!” Martin hisses, scandalized. “D-don’t you have a, a—”

“Oh, I don’t have to worry about that.” She remarks, far too blasé for someone in a newly committed relationship. “Tom’s heard about him too, and he agreed he’s just our type.”

“And I’m not?” Tim jokes, but there’s a hard edge to it that Jon’s found himself increasingly familiar with in the past few weeks.

Sasha shrugs with a mischievous little smile, as if that mattered very little to her.

Elias coughs. “Right. Well. Whatever your relations to Mr. Reigen are, please try to limit them to outside the workplace in future.”

The rest of the intervention is surprisingly subdued. Elias gives Jon access to the footage from the cameras in the rest of the Institute, and Tim bodychecks him on the way out of the office, muttering about how nice it must be to never face any consequences for his actions. Sasha follows, the way she won’t meet his eyes a condemnation in its own right.

Even Martin doesn’t say anything to him, just bites his lip and hurries past back down to the Archives. It doesn’t sting. It doesn’t.

Even as he settles in to watch and rewatch the CCTV records of Gertrude’s last week alive, Jon can’t shake the ridiculous feeling of foreboding that’s dogged him since Reigen left.

Most of him wants to say it comes from the fact that despite the fact that Reigen has not appeared in any of the camera records for the Magnus Institute before he started his term as Head Archivist in 2016, isn’t banning him from the Archives just letting the con man run around London with impunity, with no way for Jon to ascertain his movements or motives? That instead of solving a problem, Elias has just given a potential murderer free reign to escape?

But a small part of Jon, one that never could deny the sensation of being watched, that is frozen in second-hand terror whenever he reads a Statement, knows, Knows that it this stems more from the idea that the fraud will actually accomplish what Elias has unwittingly challenged him to do.

The illogical but pervasive surety that he will do so.

Jon’s not sure if he’s more afraid that Reigen Arataka will vanish entirely, another unfortunate victim become an unsolved mystery.

Or that he’ll come back, and bring whatever he’s managed to unearth on his insane quest with him.

[littlejanesilver]

The Human Experience (now with paragraph breaks!)

I know it’s not a popular ideology to have right now, because so much we see in the news appears to speak against it, but I think humans are basically an altruistic, cooperative species— with a few caveats. So many of our problems arise out of the fundamental mismatch between the world our species evolved to live in and the world we live in today. Empathy is a natural feature of the human experience. We teach our children positive prosocial behaviours like sharing their food and caring for others who are sick or hurt. We survive and build through cooperative behaviour. Kindness is instinctual and the instinct is reinforced through proper socialization. I’ve seen it in my children before they could even speak, trying to offer a pat on the back or comfort to a crying sibling. Normal, socialized humans feel physical and mental distress in ourselves when we see others in distress and are eager to alleviate it. The thing is human altruism, like that of other primates who live and hunt in groups is usually predicated on face to face personal relationships. It makes sense to share with others in your group when you have more than enough, because someday when they have more than enough they will be more likely to share with your. In humanity the ability to cooperate has been positively selected for through million of years of evolution. It makes sense that over the comparatively long human life span, where you might live in a tribe of 60 people, you would encounter the same members of your tribe over and over again and your prosocial actions would be remembered and influence their prosocial actions towards you further down the line. Our big brains are good for remembering and keeping score. Not to mention in such an environment, you would also probably be somewhat genetically related to your tribe-mates so helping your family members and tribe-mates survive also enhances the survival of your own genes. Among surviving hunter gatherer tribes it would be consider insane for one member to horde all the food while other members of the tribe starve. A person could be excluded from the group for behaviour like that and a human without other humans in nature does not survive for long. Being exiled from one’s tribe is a fate most will do anything to prevent. Also, in the hunter gatherer world, where people are nomadic, having a huge amount of one substance doesn’t make a lot of sense, because you can only own what you can carry with you. There are also no refrigerators, so if you have more food than you need, whatever you don’t eat will rot quickly. Human life in the prehistoric world could be extremely harsh. Few infants survived and giving birth was highly precarious. But when a member of your tribe was in distress, even without modern medicines you still had something you could do and that was offer comfort, through a hug, or helping with a task or offering food. In the world we live in now the instinct to share is sometimes short-circuited. Holding resources has been facilitated by inventions like fridges and silos to keep grain. People decide to keep resources to themselves and their families, because they often don’t see or can’t relate to the people their greed is harming. Executives of large companies never have to see their employees face to face, they don’t grow up with the people they employ (who nowadays may live in another country entirely), and there is no consequence to them for causing others to experience distress. Also there are so many thousands of employees that they become theoretical to the executives, rather than real flesh and blood people they have to live with on a day to day basis who will confront you if you treat themselves shitty and treat you badly right back. Also, if say a factory in another country is mistreating its workers and the factory makes clothes for your company (as well as other companies), there are so many culprits in the problem, front he managers of the factory itself, to the country it is in that allows lax labour laws, to the many companies that have this

factory make clothes for them, to the country the company is located in that makes it more worthwhile for them to hire foreign companies to make their clothes— that the individual executive sitting in an office somewhere is so far removed and their contribution is so diffuse among the many others in the process that he or she feels no shame. More importantly, that executives social group is unlikely to include members of the exploited class, so they will never be publicly shamed or held accountable in a social setting, which, let’s face it, is what keeps most of us honest, when the temptation to take more than our share is strong. The instinct to display compassion and show care for others, is also challenged in certain ways in a modern context. The instinct to display empathy and compassion is strongest for family members and extends to other tribe-mates in a healthy human being, across all cultures and settings. If you saw a loved one crying, you would naturally go up to them and put an arm around their shoulder and ask how you could help. The distress you feel at seeing another person in distress, would reduce, once you could offer them comfort. Feeling an arm around their shoulders, experiencing comforting touch also would help elevate your loved ones feelings of distress. As much as we hate feeling pain or distress, in us and seeing it in others, experiences like this help bond us to those we love. When a friend supports you through a tough time it can cause your friendship to deepen. It feels like a blessing to be able to offer them the same strength they offered you in return at a latter date. When I a can offer a listening ear to a friend’s complaint or be able to offer a pair of arms to hold a loved one who is crying, I feel the most human. Being together in this way with others, knowing that they are feeling what you are feeling and sharing in a moment, whether listening to music or experiencing a film together is so special and so inherently human. It is hard to explain, but there is a positive feeling that comes from when one is acting in accordance with one’s animal nature. The naturalness and lack of push-back your brain is giving you— like when you have really good sex or do a refreshing (not exhausting) physical workout that pushes you a bit, or stare in wonder at something in nature— this sense of doing what you were made for— what is most natural and human feels so wonderful and liberating. I feel that when I am concocting stories sometimes, this ability to be in the moment and intensely aware of what I am doing, fully experiencing it without being distracted by other worries or things going on in my mind. The problem as I see it is that we see so much distress around us that is taking place far away, across the globe and we can see the people’s faces in pain, but we have no ability to take that pain away or even offer the basic comfort our ape ancestors could, such as an arm around the shoulder or the offer of half a fruit. We can’t give them anything. Maybe we can donate money to an earthquake fund or something, but who knows if that money will even reach them and it won’t effect that specific person you see right now, on your screen. Maybe we don’t even have enough money to give a dollar to an earthquake fund and maybe the government of the country that suffering person is living in, is causing their suffering because it refuses offers from the international community to help (see North Korea). What do people do when they are constantly faced with the reality of thousands of people suffering who we can’t do anything to help? We evolved to deal with one or two people in our tribe suffering every once and a while. We evolved to feel pain ourselves at the suffering of someone and to be able to stop that pain by offering the other person comfort. But when you can’t offer meaningful, immediate comfort to another person in a personal way either through physical means or through helpful speech, what are you left with? For some people I feel like the result is a constant low-grade

(or sometimes high grade) anxiety, traumatic stress and depression. The tidal wave of suffering feels so great you are mentally drowning in it if you are the kind of person who experiences empathy for others very strongly. You might be motivated to participate in charities and social justice causes, but all the time, the satisfaction that should come from helping people is out of reach, the anxiety and sadness at other’s distress is still there because no matter what you do, with so many people in the world now, and with news from all corners of the globe constantly in our faces at every moment of the day, you just can’t help everyone. It isn’t possible. Long ago you would only be cognizant of the problems of people in your own little tribe. Dealing with their problems would be mentally manageable and might even benefit you and the other person and strengthen your relationships. Dealing with this tidal wave of billions of people’s problems is unmanageable and hugely distressing. We were not born with the mental equipment to deal with this and it is a huge problem. Avoiding it, in certain societies, to help lessen your stress is not even possible. Everywhere you look, TV screens, radios and newspapers are blaring the death tolls of the most recent atrocity. This media diet distorts your perception, because when all you hear about are huge horrific events, the regular day to day repetitive actions that occupy most of what people are doing all over the world, like today Soorya milked a goat or Bob picked his toddler up from daycare don’t make the news. Some day, I think the world will have to reckon with the mental health problems that this constant media diet of negative and fearful imagery causes humans who have no means to influence the distressing things that are mentioned. Obviously, it is important to know what is happening in the world in some sense, to hold governments accountable when they act in ways that harm people. However part of the problem is even when we see that unfairness is happening we don’t have the tools to help stop it or a deeper understanding of why problems are occurring and how we can help is left out of the reporting. This makes people feel helpless and out of control and it doesn’t help the people who are suffering in the end. Some people are able to deal with this constant exposure to suffering that we can’t help, through selectively turning their compassion and empathy faculties on and off. As someone who can’t do this on my own, I am constantly astounded to witness other people do this. Part of me is slightly jealous of this ability while part of me is highly suspicious of it. People who can do this, I’ve noticed can also be very reckless with others emotions if they believe a relationship with that other person doesn’t forward their own goals. There is something that feels lacking to me about a human that can operate in such a ruthless capacity, but these are also people who seem able to have a lot of success because their mental processes are so efficient with regards to empathy. People can often show great love and compassion for their family and friends, but have little to no compassion for people outside the group they qualify as their “tribe.” How modern people define tribe, as people who share the same religion, community, fan base, sexuality, ethnicity or even as narrowly as their own nuclear family can vary. But I would say the majority of humans display this ability to switch their empathy on and off depending on whether someone is considered part of their tribe or not. This is also, sad to say, a very human quality. In a world where your tribe was your survival, outside tribes who might steal your resources, or kill or steal members of your tribe were far more dangerous than wild beasts you might encounter. I was bullied pretty harshly as a kid and I still maintain that the whole in-group/out-group dialectic that is such a part of human experience is one of the ugliest facets of human nature there is. Most disturbing of all, it is not contrary to human

nature, as most anti-social behaviours seem to be coded as, but is often seen as positive with no social costs in-group. A person who shows altruism and fealty to their own group can show the worst sadism and cruelty to out-group members without the corresponding social penalties they would face if they were to behave the same way in their own group. There is a reason in the Torah there are numerous directives “to love the stranger as yourself” and to “be kind to the stranger” and other lessons about hospitality to people who aren’t from your town because they might be (in Abraham’s case) angelic messengers. If everybody treated strangers and out group members the same as they treated their family members there wouldn’t be so much advice about showing hospitality to those unlike ourselves. The instinct of “stranger danger” is high in human beings and starts before we can talk. Studies done with pre-verbal human infants show that when confronted with two different strangers, one who speaks their own language and one who talks a different language, the infants shunned the foreign language speaking individual more than the person who talked their own language, even if they couldn’t talk or even fully understand that language yet themselves! The corresponding instinct of curiosity in some of us and eagerness to find out and know about something outside our own experience is thankfully, a good check to the stranger-danger feeling in some of us. Sadly, the stranger-danger instinct can get stronger as people get older and lose some of their mental flexibility and the world also changes a lot from the world they grew up in. If you aren’t mindful of that tendency of the human brain, then you can get caught up in thinking that all the changes are bad and threatening and feel fearful and angry at the world as you get older. Also, the more adverse experiences you have with other people, the more they seem to trail after you as you get older, colouring your ability to trust others and harming your interpersonal relationships if you’re not careful. While it may be more mentally healthy to only extend your empathy to members of your own group, feel like society as a whole suffers tremendously when we do this. We don’t live in isolated tribes anymore. Even if the effects are not apparent to us, our actions do effect the lives of other people, sometimes far away. We need new ways and new transparency laws to let us understand what the costs to others of the goods we purchase are, where they come from and what sort of labour conditions those goods are sourced under. We also need more alternatives to buy ethically, that are within most people’s budgets. Having the choice between ethically sourced goods that cost way more than a normal family can afford and goods sold in stores that only offer part-time jobs and starvation wages to their employees that utilize slave labour in other countries for manufacturing doesn’t really offer a choice. If you don’t have a lot of money you can’t afford to be ethical, which seems wrong. How come I can get a food item at the store and every single ingredient that went into it is listed on the back of the package, but how the item was made, where and with what sort of labour is left out? As a consumer we should be afforded the ability to make ethical purchases. There should be some sort of international independent organization with actual teeth that oversees labour practices across the world and gives companies letter grades and provides this information to the consumer with every purchase. It should be a reliable independent source for the consumer that tells us whether a purchase is helping to perpetuate positive or negative work conditions around the world. Companies that have the best conditions should be rewarded and companies that have the worst should be shut down. Getting everyone on board with the philosophy that humans are all part of one tribe is crucial to improving all our lives. If all children can be taught, from the earliest days that we are all one tribe and that

we are all deserving of love and compassion and the means of survival things will probably improve. As long as people continue to believe in in-group/out-group philosophies that see their own group as some sort of master race or chosen people and everyone else as inferior or misguided and not worthy of the same kind of empathy reserved for members of one’s own tribe— humanity will not grow. Accepting the fact that we are all animals, members of the same species and the same planet, which we have to take care of together is crucial. I’ve lived on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario for most of my life. For those who don’t know both these lakes are partially in the U.S. and partially in Canada and proved most of the water and electricity for the communities around the lakes like Toronto and Hamilton in Canada and Buffalo and Rochester in the U.S and Niagara Falls in both countries. Canada and the U.S. in the past have had different laws governing heavy industry on the lakes. But this is ridiculous, because if a company pollutes on one side of the lake, it automatically causes pollution on the other side as well. Right now countries are acting like the laws they make regarding pollution, labour, immigration and countless other things only affect their own country, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. We don’t live in isolated tribes anymore. Every human community is touching countless other communities. We didn’t evolve to live or think this way, but if there’s one thing we humans have mastered, it’s how to adapt. We can adapt to this new world and thinking in a new way about each other and our planet— but we have to stop seeing ourselves as isolated groups and start thinking of the big picture. In this world where our edges all touch each other, we have to be especially cognizant to live peacefully and try to do everything in our power to avoid violence wherever possible. To use a metaphor, you never know how the pollution you dump one one side of the lake will effect a baby yet to be born on the other side of the lake. If there is another choice, even if that choice is just to pause and consider what this action might achieve or to really grapple seriously with the harm it might cause, regardless of whether it is “right” or “deserved.” Make the choice to think before you act. Listen to what other people are feeling who aren’t from your in-group. Even if you don’t agree with them, how can you ever convince them, if you don’t try to understand where they are coming from? More than anything right now I think we need dialogue, not knee jerk reactions. We need nuance, deeper understanding than 150 character soundbites and the ability to listen to each other and the skill of trying to slow down our minds. It is easy to act on anger, greed or fear if you don’t see the people who your actions effect. But we have many tools in our communication arsenal for communicating how we feel to other people and trying to get them to make change. Violence should be very last resort of all the last resorts, not the go-to option. We have to act in accordance with the world we want to live in, in the future, a world that has room for all people. There is no shortage of money, food or land on this planet if we all only take what we need and share with each other. The withholding of these things from others and obscene accumulation of resources for oneself and ones family is not admirable. It is a demonstration of selfish antisocial behaviour and should be seen as such by our society. How our words and actions serve ourselves, our loved ones and the human tribe as a whole and its future existence on this Earth is worth considering.

[mirrinbelde-shitposts]

hey girl💐i’d luv a chance to guess ur Mercury sign.. my guess is Capricorn Mercury, ur writings are very organized n straight to the point, smart too. Whether or not I’m right, i wish u a nice day/nite👑

this my chart;) thank u, take care!

Hey! You got it right, congratulations! Have a good day too ^^

Welcome to your reading. Please remember to send feedback.

First impressions when looking at your chart: sea-saw chart shape; MC-IC axis at anaretic degree

SUN IN TAURUS

Your Sun sign is Taurus. You embody the Venusian energy well: you enjoy the finer things in life. This sign is best known for being stubborn; with this amount of Taurus energy, I’m sure you’re quite stubborn, which is a more negative way of saying determined. When you get an idea in your head, you won’t rest until you achieve it. You’re quite friendly and probably enjoy gossip. You’re reliable and hardworking. Being a fixed sign, I’d say you’re most likely not great at dealing with change; you prefer things staying the same. Comfort is important to you, be it literally or figuratively. You are very attached to your earthly possessions; furthermore, I’d say you have a bit of a radical mindset when it comes to money: you’re either too frugal or you spend too much money. Beware of possessiveness and laziness.

SUN IN THE 4TH HOUSE

This placement is somewhat similar to Cancer Sun. I'd say family life is very important to you, as is your home, emotional security and harmony. In order to grow as a person, you should take your time cultivating your positive traits. You may struggle to understand who you really are: the answer is inside, not outside. At the same time, there may be a tendency to emulate behaviours of those closest to you, which may contribute to the aforementioned lack of self-knowledge. Focus on yourself; practice mindfulness. There may also be some sort of conflict with your father or another father figure. Perhaps this person was overly dominating toward you, which may hinder your journey to self-discovery. You may, in time, develop those same characteristics. However, this placement may start to manifest more strongly later in life.

MOON IN TAURUS

The Moon is exalted in Taurus. Placed here, the Moon is quite happy, for this sign goes nicely with its characteristics: family-oriented, home, comfort, calm, familiar things, loving and caring. As with Taurus Sun, you may place a big importance on material things. With the Moon, however, it’s a bit different: you may develop an emotional attachment to some belongings of yours, perhaps because they provide you security. You’re the kind of person to stay home and enjoy a hearty meal, cuddle in front of the fireplace and enjoy sleeping in a comfy bed. You’re quite calm and caring; however, expressing your emotions may not be your strong suit. You should work on your deep attachment issues because they can destroy you if the object of that attachment abandons you.

MOON IN THE 4TH HOUSE

Once again, the Moon is quite happy here, which is the house it rules. This placement ensures that you have a strong connection to your roots: namely, family and home life; it could also be interpreted as your geographic location. Unlike the Sun, 4H Moon wants to feel like a part of the family structure. Your home is probably your refuge when things get difficult. You want harmony and safety in your everyday life. You are probably sensitive and caring and these traits make you someone appreciated both at home and in the workplace. Also, this is a good placement for parents. However, you may lack objectivity, often letting your feelings influence your opinions. You feel deeply.

MERCURY IN GEMINI

This is one of the two signs ruled by Mercury. Gemini embodies the more chatty, talkative side of Mercury. You are curious, intelligent and love to possess and acquire knowledge of every kind. You are good at both writing and speaking; however, speaking is probably the thing for which you are known. Gemini is known as the sign that never shuts up; this is particularly true in your case, with Mercury in this sign. However, since your mind is always racing, you may lack an attention span, always going from one thing to the other. Staying committed to tasks and goals may be a problem for you because you get tired of things quickly. You are good with words and love to socialize. Emotions may be rationalized.

MERCURY IN THE 5TH HOUSE

This is a great placement for artists, especially those whose fields are ruled by Mercury, such as writers. It allows you to pour all your creativity and originality into your craft. Your many ideas are expressed in fun ways and your show a jovial way of seeing things. You may enjoy puzzles or other activities that involve strategy, as well as sports (yes, because sports also require tactics). Basketball, for example, would be a good sport for someone with this placement. Additionally, it's a good Mercury position for someone who works with kids or teenagers, as well as parents. You are creative and fun and it shows.

VENUS IN GEMINI

As is the case of Air Venus, Gemini Venus requires a partner that will spend hours with them talking about anything. You seek a partner that is intelligent and educated and who can hold a conversation. If the other person cannot keep up with you intellectually, it will probably be a huge turn-off. You want someone who is as smart as you, someone who makes you laugh and accepts your quirky nature. However, it may be difficult to find such a partner. You are not great at expressing your emotions, so connecting head and heart is a way to help this. Also, you tend to not show you truly think and you're always joking, so people probably wonder about how you actually feel about them. You are probably quite indecisive when it comes to love and relationships.

VENUS IN THE 6TH HOUSE

Here, Venus gives great importance to things associated with Virgo: routine, health, job. It is important for you to have your routine and to plan things. Once you acquire a habit, it is difficult to let go of it ("Old habits die hard."). Similarly, it is important that you incorporate activities with your partner in your daily schedule. Funnily enough, it is routine that makes you miss things you no longer have: for example, if you lose a friend, you may miss them more because you used to talk every day. You enjoy working on projects that make you feel like you're doing something meaningful; your chosen profession must fulfil you. You want a harmonious workplace that makes you feel happy to work. Also, you have an eye for detail. There can be a need to obsess about your health, as well as your loved ones'.

MARS IN GEMINI

Gemini Mars, to me, indicates that your battlefield is words. Your “attack” is how you think, connect the dots and put your opinions into words. This placement makes me think that you have vast knowledge in almost everything and you’re willing to debate with anyone about anything. I’d say you’re also good at multitasking and bad at routines. You could do with a bit more determination; Gemini is a sign known for its indecisiveness, so you may struggle with carrying out your thoughts and ideas. You have many different interests and can change them up quite a lot, sort of similar to Gemini Mercury. You would do well to be a little more committed to your interests and ambitions.

MARS IN THE 6TH HOUSE

The planet of action has its joy in this house, according to the principles of Hellenistic Astrology. Mars strongly wants to take action, but the 6th house forces it to be more methodical and less impulsive. Your workplace may become your figurative battlefield. You need to be active in everyday life, but you also want to feel that what you're doing is meaningful and makes you feel useful. Mars here acts strongly and concretely in areas of life that are related to work, mainly career, as I mentioned. This seems to be a good position for a leader in the workplace. Similar to Venus, 6H Mars may worry a lot about the body. A great deal of your energy may be directed into taking care of it, perhaps going to the gym is an activity you enjoy.

JUPITER IN CANCER

Jupiter is exalted in this sign. The planet of expansion and luck finds in Cancer a good means of expressing its energy, for the sign is a sensitive one. Whilst Cancer is already sweet and caring, Jupiter expands these traits even more. You are generally a calm person, who empathizes with people's feelings and has a need to both listen and talk to others. However, you can become very fierce when someone messes with those you love. You probably have a very motherly side to you that draws people in. Additionally, I have said that Cancer is the most intuitive sign: Jupiter in Cancer only makes this even more so. Listen to your intuition, which is quite accurate; learn to trust your gut feelings (for example, you guessed my Capricorn sign correctly :D).

JUPITER IN THE 7TH HOUSE

This placement is a highly auspicious one for relationships and partnerships of any kind. It elevates even more Cancer Jupiter because it allows you to fully connect with people on a deep level. You possess the ability to communicate with others and understand their feelings, which makes you someone quite great around which to be. It also favours the expansion of knowledge. All of this applies to romantic relationships as well. You may get into them easily and seem to usually enter the right ones (Jupiter grants you luck). You are quite a caring, sweet partner and bring a very good, calm energy to your relationships. However, this can be a paradoxical placement: on one side, you want that security with your partner and want them to be dedicated to you; on the other, you need your freedom. Balancing these two can be quite tricky, so your partner must understand both of these sides of you.

SATURN IN GEMINI

Saturn here may cause you to be unsure about the themes of Gemini: communication, thinking and expressing yourself. This can cause you to be afraid to speak in public or to withhold voicing your true opinions. You may delve into the study of every area of life or, on the contrary, avoid it at all costs. You probably ponder your words before you speak them. You may have a tendency to be introverted due to this. In a past life, you may have misused your voice, so your purpose in this life is to learn the power of your words. Also, you probably struggle with order, discipline and setting realistic goals. Saturns wants you to learn how to deal with these topics in this lifetime. You may have a lack of self-esteem due to the problems aforementioned. It is important that you work on these blockages.

SATURN IN THE 6TH HOUSE

You can feel responsible for other people, especially your coworkers, even if you struggle getting along with them. There’s a need to serve, to be of use to others; you may find it hard to relax. You are quite organized, so you’d do well to make use of it. You could also be the type to help others in the way to their goals. However, you should also understand that, sometimes, you should just let go and go with the flow. Not everything in life is about hard work, routines or responsibilities. Find something that excites you; try some meditation. There may also be some health issues, perhaps you had them in your childhood. ⬛

[mooglesorts]

man. it's weird, because there's a lot of things about me that are Very Badger Primary, to the point where i would probably pick it with a strong bird model over anything else at this point... except that i hate dehumanization. i saw primaries described recently as 'things you wouldn't be you anymore if you went against,' and more than just about anything else that's it. even when i think people are monsters, i can't see them as not human; i'd be hard put to define exactly what i consider a 'monster,' but it's more about like. good faith than personhood, i suppose?

it's not necessarily a permanent status to be one--people can change--but my deeply held instinct is that once you have done something monstrous you will always be a person who has been a monster by your own choices, and that it's your duty to learn how to accept that while still living your life, and act accordingly from thereon out. you have to reconcile that you are a person with the fact that some doors are closed to you now, and it's up to you to decide what you do from there.

just. like. even when i hate someone and as far as i'm concerned they can go fuck themself, even in the multiple Heavily Badger social environments i've been in over the course of my life--church, progressive circles, the way the structure of the internet kind of just affects you in general--even on occasions where i've gotten swept away and given in to the pressure to dehumanize (or perform it) for a minute, there's always, always been a voice in the back of my head saying this is a person. this is a person. this is a person. this isn't right.

unintentional dehumanization sets off my '...should we really be doing this? we are getting into not good territory here, it's time to pull up and start questioning' alarms. explicit, intentional, purposeful dehumanization sets off the whole ass tornado sirens. if people on my side are doing it it's enough to throw me into a system-destabilizing crisis, because NO NO NO I WANT TO GET OFF THIS RIDE, I WANT NO PART OF THESE PEOPLE'S MORAL SYSTEM, I FEEL UNCLEAN. it's a good way to make sure i will never, ever, ever trust someone again.

things that are Really Really Badger, off the top of my head (after the cut because Long and trauma talk):

[[MORE]]

---

-i've always loved playing adoptable games, pet simulators, etc? any game with randomly generated characters that are Yours Now and a Community, in a deeply badgery way. including games where they can die (the satisfying part is making sure they don't). except that, no matter how much fun the gameplay is, if it gets to the point where they start feeling disposable, and the only way to really keep playing is to stop humanizing them, i lose interest. it's super fucking depressing. it feels like part of me dying inside a little. i don't like it at all.

-i've always been drawn to fandoms and roleplaying communities. i was fiercely loyal to, and proud of, my first rp community on dragoncave as a 13-year-old. when my abusive mom found out about it and completely isolated me for half a year, the promise of being able to make it back to them--just sneakier this time--kept me going; when i finally got back and the group had drifted apart in my absence, it.... was absolutely devastating. i never really recovered from it. even then, i spent years trying to get the group back together every now and then, until i finally gave up.

-i am always keenly, painfully aware of the life cycle of a community. every time i hear the sentiment 'you guys are all great and i love this group' my stomach drops, because i know it's only a matter of time before things go sour or the group dissolves. rp groups, skype chats/discord servers, fandoms, you name it, i am always bracing myself or staying away entirely to avoid the inevitable and it hurts. and it hurts to see people taking part in a community i don't dare be part of, which makes lurking in fandoms... really rough. frankly, it takes me a lot of courage every time i express my appreciation for the shc community because i've been burned so many times.

-on that note: i went through some really traumatic stuff at the end of 2020 that completely turned my life upside down, and i was doing bad until i stumbled across the shc community. the moment i started engaging, it was a huge boost to my mental health, and my ability to cope with circumstances under which i was about to break down spectacularly. and it has been ever since! contributing to The Group Project and seeing other folks being friendly with each other gives me the happy feelings.

-i used to go out of my way to build and run spaces, mainly fandom and rp spaces, and took a lot of pride in engineering them so that they Functioned Well. unfortunately it wore me the hell down over the years for Burnt Badger Reasons, and now i'm too jaded, bitter, and exhausted to give a shit about being a mod/community leader anymore because of it lmao

-among those burnt badger things i relate HARD to the Red Ledger narrative. hoo boy.

-i wish i could find it again, but there was an mlp comic i saw once which went into luna's observations of what each element of harmony Means. with the element of friendship, she says that twilight has a massive amount of love to give; right now it's all focused on celestia, but when she learns to expand it outward she'll have grown into her full potential as a person, and she'll change the world. that struck a chord with how i used to feel, hard, and it's really stuck with me ever since. (hello, unhealthy snake model)

-emphasis on 'used to feel,' lmao

-got super invested in a really toxic '''mental health''' community at a low point in my life; exploded HARD trying to help everyone i could; got into vicious, protracted fights with the shitty mods for years about the harmful way they ran their community until i finally managed to go 'fuck this it's not getting better' and leave.

-had to numb myself emotionally to the people around me for a long time once i really started learning about mental health and trauma stuff, because now i was seeing signs of their pain and baggage everywhere i looked, and i couldn't handle not being able to help.

-the imagery with which i think about my bird primary is overwhelmingly negative. whether it's my actual primary or a model, i uh. i feel like a healthy relationship to one's primary doesn't involve associating it with gore.

-i saw a conversation recently about how birds think of morality in terms of 'if you can, you should,' and how that's scary for badgers because their definition of 'can' involves destroying yourself for the sake of that 'should,' and... yeah, that's a mood. that's a BIG mood. thinking about bird primary stuff is hard--and i had to pick up my lion model to deal with it--because it's so easy for me to spiral into a self-shredding spiral of other people are counting on you to do the right thing, how dare you pull back for your own health and sanity. how dare you turn your back for even a minute. how dare you rest. the work is never done.

which is... a very exploded badger approach to exploded bird morality. whoops.

-fix-it and time travel fiction in which Everything Went Right This Time and It's Going to Be Okay are one of my very favorite self-indulgent fantasies. i will enjoy putting characters through the wringer in all kinds of creatively horrific ways which may or may not end on a downer note, certainly, i love that shit, but i will also 90% of the time have a backup version of the arc or dynamic that's softer and lighter and Actually Healthy This Time. it's the dichotomy there that really gets me tbh, a story where Everything Ends Happily by default will mmmaybe pull me in? but stories where there's the constant shadow of this could end horribly, it's supposed to end horribly, and we got a happy fucking ending anyway are just... that shit will make me cry, man.

it's also why i kind of really hate stable time loop stories where it initially looks like this is going to be The Good Timeline this time around, but OOPSIE everything went to shit anyway! we're right back where we started, just like it was meant to be all along! it's a tired cliche by this point and an unsatisfying one for me, and it makes me roll my eyes every time.

-this is relevant to the bird vs. badger because like... my gut instinct is to prioritize people over systems. when shit hits the fan, when someone's fallen into the machinery and is about to get hurt, i don't feel right about it if i just let it happen. i'll break the machinery if i have to to keep it away from them; i won't feel great about that, and it might cause problems, but fuck it, we'll figure it out later. throwing people into the gears of a system when i'm convinced it's the only option makes me feel Awful.

-related to the above, another trope that really speaks to me in fiction is when a character defies the rules of reality through sheer force of will. no, this is not happening, i don't give a shit what the limits are supposed to be. i refuse to let this be the way things are. (there's that lion model.)

-i've just kind of... always wanted to be an Everyone Badger. it makes me sad how much of that i've lost over the years as i've gotten more cynical, but it's what i wish i could be.

---

doubtless i'll think of more the moment i hit send, and there are just as many things about me that are Super Bird Primary, but like... mamma mia that's some spicy badger. the main thing stopping me is the Can't and Refuse to Dehumanize bit. i also... hm. i think i can function okay without a community? they just help a lot, and it sucks when i'm confronted with one i don't have a (stable) place in. any thoughts? is it possible for a bird system's foundation to run so deep that eventually it overrides the bird?

[kjack89]

When All This is Over

For @adorablecrab, my very belated fill from the @bishopmyrielfundraiser. Sorry it’s taken me so long!!

The request was for Modern AU, getting together fluff, and, well, I’ve done my best :)

E/R, Modern AU. COVID-19 stay at home order related because I am nothing if not the most predictable of trash.

“Alright everyone,” Enjolras said, raising his voice to be heard over the din that signified the natural end of a Les Amis meeting, even if it sounded more than a little different through the speakers of his computer via Zoom than in the backroom of the Musain. “Let’s call it a night. We’ve all got our assignments, and I’ll be in touch with any follow-ups as needed.”

“Enj,” Courfeyrac said, resting his chin on his hand, “you do realize that since we all talk and text, like, multiple times a day, and we’re now on week, what, 8 of social isolation, you probably don’t need to worry about doing ‘follow-ups’, right?”

Enjolras ignored him. “We’ll meet back here on Saturday. Combeferre will send the link again—”

“Because I’m the only one with a licensed Zoom account,” Combeferre grumbled. “One of the only fringe perks of doing a postdoc.”

“And believe me,” Grantaire interjected with a smirk, “we all appreciate your sacrifice for the Cause.”

“As opposed to everything you’ve contributed,” Combeferre shot back. “Which, let me check my notes here, but, uh, what exactly have you contributed recently?”

Grantaire’s smirk didn’t slip as he raised his beer bottle in a mock toast. “Morale,” he said simply.

Bossuet tried to cover his laugh with a fake cough that turned into a real cough, Joly pounding on his back worriedly, and Enjolras sighed. “On that note,” he said, loud enough to be heard over Bossuet’s coughing, “I will talk to you all later.”

He waited for everyone to hop off so he could end the meeting, but to his surprise, as the rest of the squares on his screen disappeared, one remained, even if it was without its former occupant. Grantaire’s video feed remained on his computer, and Enjolras frowned. “Grantaire?” he called, feeling foolish when Grantaire didn’t answer. “Are you still there? Did you need something?”

There was no answer and Enjolras sighed, his cursor lingering over the ‘End Meeting For All’ button. But something, likely against his better judgment, stopped him.

It was probably the same thing that had stopped him from kicking Grantaire out after the man had first wandered into a Les Amis meeting all those years ago, the one decision of his that Combeferre had ever openly questioned. But there was just something about Grantaire, something that infuriated and inspired Enjolras in somewhat equal measures. 

The fury part had happened a lot less recently, but Enjolras suspected that was a temporary side effect of not being in the same room with each other, and was likely to be as temporary as this stay at home order they were all under.

Shaking his head, Enjolras turned back to the work that he needed to do, leaving the Zoom call on in the background. About fifteen minutes later, Grantaire wandered back into frame, holding a full bottle of beer. “Oh, there you are,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire did an almost comical doubletake, his beer bubbling over the lip of the bottle.

“Jesus Christ,” Grantaire huffed as he quickly sipped at the foam to stop it from overflowing. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

“Sorry,” Enjolras told him.

Grantaire’s eyes narrowed. “Funny, you sure don’t sound it,” he said, sitting back down in front of his laptop. “Besides, isn’t the meeting over? Or have I been held after class so you can scold me?”

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Believe me, if I thought scolding you would do any good, I’d’ve tried it long ago.” Grantaire grinned and Enjolras allowed himself a small smile as well. “And yes, the meeting is over, but you were still in the call.”

“Ok,” Grantaire said slowly, “but you’re the host. You could’ve just ended it for everyone, myself included.”

“I know, but I didn’t want to just disappear on you.”

Grantaire blinked. “You know, that may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes again. “Shut up,” he said, but without much heat.

The video of Grantaire suddenly tilted, as if he had picked up his laptop, and a moment later, he came back into view, reclining on his couch, his computer resting on his stomach. “So what are you up to?” he asked, taking a sip of beer.

“Trying to figure out what protesting looks like in the age of social distancing,” Enjolras said with a sigh. “Our die-in at the state capitol was incredibly successful, but—”

“But laying out body bags doesn’t exactly have the same media impact as real humans lying there?” Grantaire supplied wryly. “Yeah, but what else can you do?”

Enjolras shrugged, glancing down at his notes. “I was thinking of trying to put together some kind of virtual rally, but even that’s not going to have the same impact.”

Grantaire nodded slowly. “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he said bracingly, and Enjolras raised an eye at him.

“You know, that may be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he said, and Grantaire laughed.

“Shut up,” he said. “Tell anyone I said it, and I’ll deny it.”

Enjolras grinned. “They wouldn’t believe me, anyway.” He hesitated. “So I’ll assume since you’re still on this call that you don’t have any better plans for this evening?”

Grantaire sighed. “I’m afraid that even my usually full social calendar has been negatively impacted by COVID-19,” he said with a dramatic sigh, clearly doing his best Courfeyrac impression, and Enjolras snorted. “But I can go if you need to get work done.”

Enjolras hesitated. “Honestly, it’s kind of nice having someone online with me,” he admitted. “Almost reminds me of all those nights at the Musain, y’know?”

“When you were working late and I was too drunk to stumble home?” Grantaire supplied.

“Well, something like that, anyway.”

Grantaire nodded slowly, something wistful creeping into his expression. Then, abruptly, he shook his head. “Never though I’d see the day where I missed that,” he said ruefully.

“Yeah,” Enjolras said. “I know what you mean.”

Grantaire sighed, his head tipping back to rest against the arm of his couch. “I just want things to go back to normal,” he said, his voice muffled from being further away from his computer’s microphone.

Enjolras made a face. “Do you even know what that means?” he asked, the sharpness in his voice making it teeter on the edge of a demand.

Grantaire sat upright again and rolled his eyes. “Yes, because I’ve clearly thought through every single socio-economic implication of stating my wish for ‘normalcy’,” he sniped. “Fine, if it’ll make you happy, I want my particular, individual life circumstances to return to how they were before.”

“It’s not about making me happy,” Enjolras pointed out. “It’s about making yourself happy. Or do you really want to go back to working two minimum wage jobs just to scrape by in between selling your paintings?”

Grantaire pretended to consider it. “It wasn’t so bad,” he hedged, and when Enjolras just gave him a look, he laughed and shook his head. “Ok, so the work was shit but the hours were manageable and besides, that way I got to spend my free time doing what I wanted. And besides, it’s a helluva lot better than being unemployed.”

Enjolras winced. “Fair point.”

Grantaire took another swig of beer. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you eager for your individual life circumstances to go back to normal?”

“Not sure anyone would call anything in my life normal,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire choked on his sip of beer.

“Truer words have never been spoken,” he managed after spluttering for a long moment. “But you know what I mean.”

Enjolras shrugged. “There are things I miss,” he said.

“And?” Grantaire prompted.

“And if you keep badgering me instead of letting me work, there’ll definitely be one less thing.”

Grantaire chuckled. “You win,” he said. “I’ll go back to muttering to myself while you ignore me, how about that?”

“Just like old times,” Enjolras murmured, and Grantaire laughed.

“Exactly.”

He did just that, breaking out his tablet to assumedly work on some art, muttering occassionally to himself, and Enjolras was surprised to find that the familiar background murmuring was strangely soothing, enough for him to settle into his own work.

It wasn’t until very late that Enjolras finally had to call it a night, and Grantaire stretched, looking over at the clock. “Jesus, when did it get to be 1 in the morning?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Right around the time I realized I’m supposed to be getting up at seven tomorrow,” Enjolras said through a yawn. “Or, well, later today, I guess.”

“Seven in the morning?” Grantaire repeated, horrified. “Why in the world do you have to be up at the asscrack of dawn? Don’t you realize we’re in the middle of a pandemic and time is meaningless?”

Enjolras rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Seven is hardly the asscrack of dawn,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got work to do.”

Grantaire shook his head. “No wonder you’re eager to go back to normal, since your life clearly hasn’t changed at all.”

“Goodnight, Grantaire,” Enjolras said pointedly.

“Yeah, yeah, goodnight, you freak. Getting up at seven to do work, I swear to God—”

Enjolras clicked the ‘End Meeting for All’ button, cutting Grantaire off before he could truly launch into a rant, and he hadn’t even closed his computer before his phone buzzed with a text. [From: Grantaire] Rude.

[From: Enjolras] Well, you said you were missing normal, and I figured this was as close as I could get to making Bossuet or Joly drag your drunk ass home.

[From: Grantaire] ...fair.

Enjolras laughed and stood to head to his bedroom, surprised when his phone buzzed again, and he glanced down at it. [From: Grantaire] Want to have another little bit of post-meeting normalcy on Saturday?

Despite himself, Enjolras couldn’t stop the smile that spread across his face at the thought. [From: Enjolras] Sounds like a plan.

----------

Sure enough, they spent Saturday night (and well into Sunday morning) the same way, both of them keeping each other company while working on their various projects. And after that, it became routine. Every Les Amis meeting was followed by Grantaire staying on the line to hang out, almost always drinking, only occassionally actually working.

As much as Enjolras hated to admit it, it felt...nice. Like Grantaire had said, a little bit of normalcy, despite everything. In fact, it was one of the few things keeping Enjolras sane as the stay at home order extended another month, dashing his plans for a return to the advocacy work he had so meticulously planned.

Nice was probably too mild a word for the quiet comfort that Enjolras found with Grantaire. He enjoyed having someone to talk to again, someone to bounce ideas off of, just like they had so many nights at the Musain. 

But it was more than just comfort. Enjolras found himself actively looking forward to their time together, and while he’d never pretend to know what Grantaire was thinking, he got the feeling that Grantaire looked forward to it as well. 

It helped that, without the urgency of everything else normally going on, they were able to actually talk, and not just about Enjolras’s latest idea. As much as they had been friends for years, too often their conversations were layered by Grantaire’s cynicism and sarcasm, and Enjolras was glad to really get to see beyond it.

“Where’s the first place you’ll go when this is over?” Grantaire asked one evening, lying on his couch, this time on his stomach, his computer balanced on what Enjolras could only assume was the arm of the couch, given the angle.

“Hmm,” Enjolras said, considering the question before barking a laugh. “You’re gonna make fun of me.”

“I always do,” Grantaire said cheerfully. “And that’s never stopped you before, so spill.”

Enjolras laughed again. “Alright, the first place I’ll probably go is City Hall. I’ve got a bone to pick with the permits office.”

Grantaire snorted a laugh. “God, you’re such a nerd,” he marvelled. “It’s truly incredible.”

“Shut up,” Enjolras said, laughing. “Where are you gonna go?”

“A bar,” Grantaire said promptly, “to get drunk with people instead of by myself.”

Enjolras made a disparaging noise in the back of his throat. “Nope, try again.”

“Excuse me?” Grantaire said, amused. “Are you trying to tell me that my answer was wrong?”

“No, just insincere,” Enjolras told him. “I know you’ve thought about it, or you wouldn’t have brought it up. So c’mon, where you really want to go?”

Grantaire’s smile softened, just slightly. “Honestly? I want to go to the zoo.” Enjolras blinked and Grantaire shrugged. “Don’t ask me why, since it’s not like I went all that frequently before, and it’s probably because of all the stupid videos they’ve been posting online during all of this, but. Yeah. I want to go to the zoo.” He gave Enjolras a withering look. “And now is not the time to launch into your tirade against keeping wild animals at zoos.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything!” Enjolras protested, but he was laughing, and Grantaire glared at him before laughing as well, the conversation turning from there.

If they had nothing else to show for it, Enjolras figured at the very least they’d come out of this whole thing as far better friends than they had started.

And then, finally, finally, there appeared to be good news on the horizon, with contact tracing and a decrease in new cases, and much of the Les Amis meeting that night was spent on the governor’s press conference, and her announcement that the state would move towards reopening in the next few weeks.

“You must be thrilled,” Grantaire said when everyone else had logged off.

“Of course I am,” Enjolras said, ebullient. “Aren’t you? You’re the one who’s wanted things to get back to normal.”

Grantaire made a face. “Yeah, but what does normal even mean anymore?” he mused. “Most folks will still be working from home, and even though we’ll be able to do some smaller protests and such, it’ll still be awhile before we can do any big rallies.”

Enjolras’s smile faded. “I mean, you’re not wrong, but is now really the time to bring it up?” he asked.

Grantaire forced a smile. “Of course, sorry,” he said. “We should celebrate! Wish I’d gotten a bottle of champagne with my last instacart order—”

“You’re using instacart?” Enjolras practically yelped. “After everything we’ve talked about with their exploitative business model?”

Grantaire’s smile widened into something more genuine, and infinitely more smug. “It’s called a joke, Enjolras. Glad to see your sense of humor is returning to normal as well.”

Enjolras made a face before hesitating. “I guess that probably means the end of these late night meetings as well,” he said, and Grantaire looked up, startled.

“What?” he said blankly. “Why?”

Enjolras blinked. “Well, I assume you’ll be going back to work, as will most of our comrades, so we won’t be able to have as frequent meetings, and besides, your social calendar will probably fill up again.”

He said it jokingly, but Grantaire didn’t smile. “My social calendar never stopped me from hanging out at the Musain before.”

“No, I know,” Enjolras started, but Grantaire cut him off.

“If you don’t want me to bother you, just say the word and I’m gone.”

Enjolras stared at him. “What are you—” he started before cutting himself off. “That’s not what I meant,” he said instead, trying not to sound as exasperated as he felt.

Juding by the look on Grantaire’s face, he hadn’t succeeded. “No, I know exactly what you mean,” Grantaire said, taking a larger than normal swig from his bottle of beer. “Once this Stay at Home Order is lifted, everything will go back to how it was.”

“Grantaire—”

“It’s fine,” Grantaire said, forcing a smile that didn’t even remotely meet his eyes. “After all, I’m the one who wanted things to go back to normal, remember?”

“That’s not—” Enjolras started, but Grantaire again cut him off.

“Goodnight, Enjolras.”

He left the Zoom call, and Enjolras stared at his laptop, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

And far more importantly, how he was going to fix it.

----------

Enjolras knocked on Grantaire’s apartment door, breathing in the fresh air for what felt like the first time in longer than he cared to admit.

Even though he had left his apartment during lockdown, it didn’t feel quite the same as it did now, and he smiled slightly as he glanced over his shoulder at the other people milling around in Grantaire’s apartment complex, all of them looking as happy as he was to be outside.

The door opened and Enjolras turned to look at Grantaire, who was staring at him as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Hi,” Enjolras said, wincing when he realized how stupid that sounded. 

“What are you doing here?” Grantaire asked, still staring at him.

Enjolras hesitated. “I don’t want things to return to normal,” he blurted, everything he had carefully prepared going out the window, and Grantaire’s brow furrowed.

“Yes, you’ve made that perfectly clear, but what—”

“I don’t just mean, like, socioeconomically or anything,” Enjolras hurried to add. “I mean, um, between you and me. I don’t want that to go back to normal.”

Grantaire’s expression was unreadable. “Then what do you want?”

There were a thousand things that Enjolras had prepped for that exact moment, but he didn’t bother with any of them. Instead, he told Grantaire simply, “This,” before leaning in and kissing him.

Then, just as quickly, he pulled back, eyes wide. “Oh, wait, I’m sorry, affirmative consent, I should—”

Grantaire cut him off by kissing him, something heated and desperate in the press of his lips against Enjolras’s, as if he was afraid they’d lose the moment.

Enjolras wished he had never done or said anything that would make Grantaire feel that way.

When they broke apart this time, Grantaire was smiling, just slightly, almost nervously. “So, uh...dare I ask what this is about?”

“I like you,” Enjolras said, feeling his face flush as he said it. “And apparently, it took me a global pandemic to realize it.”

“Technically, you don’t have to say global and pandemic,” Grantaire said. “It’s implied.”

Enjolras sighed. “Grantaire—”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist,” Grantaire said with a laugh, and Enjolras shook his head before reaching out and drawing Grantaire close, resting his chin on top of Grantaire’s head as he held him.

“I missed you,” Grantaire whispered, so quietly that Enjolras almost didn’t hear him.

“I know,” Enjolras said, kissing Grantaire’s forehead. “And I’m sorry that I was an idiot, and didn’t figure things out earlier.”

Grantaire arched an eyebrow. “Speaking of,” he said, lacing his fingers with Enjolras’s, “did you come to this realization on your own?”

The corners of Enjolras’s mouth twitched. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

“No.”

Enjolras snorted and shook his head. “Fine, I had some help. And some sense knocked into me.” He made a face. “Apparently every single one of our friends figured it out before I did.”

“Color me shocked,” Grantaire muttered.

Enjolras ignored that, instead taking a deep breath so that he could say what he actually came to say. “Grantaire,” he said carefully, “one of the few bright parts of this fucking pandemic was spending time online with you. And I’d really like to continue spending time with you. And, well, I’m sorry that I didn’t figure that out until it was almost too late.”

“Well, you know what they say,” Grantaire said, a slow smile stretching across his face. “Better late than never.”

Enjolras laughed, but the sound was mostly lost against Grantaire’s lips as they kissed again, slower this time, Grantaire’s hand resting lightly against Enjolras’s cheek, the other gripping the front of Enjolras’s shirt as if he could somehow pull him closer.

Then, abruptly, he pulled away. “Hang on a second, I thought the first place you were going to go after this ended was City Hall.”

“What can I say, I lied,” Enjolras murmured, ducking his head to kiss Grantaire again, but this time, Grantaire didn’t let him.

“Really?” he asked skeptically.

Enjolras hesitated. “Well, no,” he admitted. “City Hall opened at 8 and I figured you wouldn’t be awake yet, so I went there first and then came here.”

Grantaire laughed loudly. “God, Enj,” he said, pulling Enjolras close and wrapping his arms around him again. “I’d say never change, but clearly we’ve proven that even a pandemic couldn’t change you.”

“Are you sure about that?” Enjolras asked, and Grantaire considered it for only a moment before kissing him again. 

“Ok, fine, maybe it changed you just the right amount.”

“So I’ll take it you don’t want things to go back to normal?” Enjolras asked teasingly.

Grantaire rolled his eyes. “Fuck normal,” he said decisively, and Enjolras grinned.

“Technically, that’s what I’ve been saying all along,” he pointed out, and Grantaire cut him off by kissing him once more.

“Shut up,” Grantaire advised, and Enjolras grinned.

After all, who needed normal when they finally had each other?

[ardellian]

I. Am very ANGRY.

For all the trans people who read this - you are amazing, you are brave, and fuck everyone who dares to tell you how you are allowed to express who you are.

Anyway I went through JKRs essay on trans issues and tried to deconstruct it because a prominent Swedish political figure just supported it and these are EXACTLY the kind of arguments I have had to counter and it SUCKS. I will have to sit through this shit being thrown at me again not far from now. So this is... venting, I guess. 

This is going to be long and if you want to understand it I guess you should read what she’s written; it’s on her homepage. But also don’t read it because it will probably make you sad and angry. It’s transphobic and ignorant, and just, please, stay away from it if you know that will make you feel like shit. I’m also going to be quoting her in the text below, so I’m putting it under a cut. 

M’kay. 

First, what even is she trying to say with this essay? She says she’s worried about the “new trans activism.” What exactly is worrying with this new activism? Well, she doesn’t say it outright, but it seems to be that she believes it’s getting too easy to transition. That the “rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation” is being eroded, and this is bad.

Through the essay I can find two main arguments she has to support this claim.

1. Cis youth (in particular cis girls) will be fooled into to thinking they’re trans. 

The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers. 

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

She also supports this idea by sharing a personal history of being uncomfortable with gender roles, and confusing that with gender dysphoria: 

“The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.” 

“Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.” 

3. A concern that fake trans women invading women’s spaces would make “natal women” less safe:

“A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.”

“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

Okay. 

Let me make an observation here before I try to counter these points. She’s having very different problems with the ease of transitioning for trans women and trans men. If it’s too easy for trans women to transition, men will use this as an opportunity to prey on women. If it’s too easy for trans men to transition, young girls will be in danger of forsaking their womanhood. She clearly identifies with the young afab people who question their gender, but not with trans women who want to be recognized as such. Let that sit with you for a bit and I’ll see if I come back to it. 

Let’s see if I can argue against these two points first. 

1.  Cis youth (in particular cis girls) will be fooled into to thinking they’re trans.

Her statistics aren’t wrong. There has been a huge increase in trans youth. This increase is especially prevalent in neurodivergent afab people. Trans health care, at least where I live, is struggling with how to deal with this. Those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders often have difficulties with feeling comfortable in their bodies and the language used around that can be similar to the language used around gender dysphoria. Many people are concerned, as JKR obviously is, that these people might think that transitioning would get rid of these symptoms, when in fact they stem from something completely different. These people may transition and still have these symptoms. They may be disappointed. 

The conclusion you’re implicitly supposed to draw from these statements, and those like what I quoted above, that these young trans people aren’t really trans. That they’re somehow being tricked by trans activists. You have to believe two other things for that: that young neurodivirgent people can’t interpret their own lived experience in a correct way, and that transitioning is harmful. 

Because why would it be a problem if a young person questions their gender, identifies as trans, transitions, and then changes their mind? Who cares if they have an autism diagnosis? It is only a problem if transitioning is bad for you. And the part that people like JKR seems to think is harmful is that they might have “altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility”. But the unaltered body holds no moral superiority over the altered one. While fertility is something many people desire and something many who lack it grieve, it is not something that inherently gives your life more value. To JKR, the inherent harm of transitioning can only be justified if the person is really trans.

The tendency of a specific group to display a higher prevalence of identifying as trans is then used to cast doubt on their experiences. It’s a “social contagion” - they’re not really trans. But why does any of that matter? So what if a person identifies as trans because they see themselves in another’s story and go - that’s true for me too? Why can’t you believe them? 

Well. Because you don’t really believe trans people are real. You believe that when young people speak of dysphoria, they are referring to the experience you had when you were young. And you’re happy with being a woman now. So surely they just need to accept themselves for what they are and they won’t be trans anymore. 

I get it. I recognize myself in what JKR writes here. I felt “mentally sexless.”  I also “found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians” and this reassured me. Find a woman who has not during a period of their life hated their body, I dare you. The world we live in does cause women to have strange relationships with their bodies. And it’s very easy from there to make the logical leap to the idea that young trans men are just girls who never found that reassurance! I might have also thought so, if I hadn’t connected with trans men in my teens, and actually tried to understand their experience, and realized that my negative feelings about my body not living up to some standard of beauty, about not being woman enough in some way, and not wanting to be “pink and frilly”, was not the same as their experience. I mean - I didn’t like my body because I thought it should look like a beautiful woman’s body, but they felt bad about their bodies because they thought they shouldn’t look like women at all!  Young boys don’t find reassurance in texts about womanhood. Because they’re not women.

So I feel a bit sorry for her. Because I think that she sees herself in these young people, and it terrifies her - what if I could have turned out to be trans? But that would only be a problem if you think being trans is a problem. So maybe you could have been trans, JKR. Why does that bother you?

And god, if you want to talk about things that pressure young people into irrevocably altering their bodies, how about the  “rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation“ that tries over and over again to make sure, double sure, triple sure, that you really are what you say you are. Trans people who want access to gender-affirming care have to show no weakness - if you slip up and say that you might not want surgeries, that can be used against you and you get nothing. Trans people repeatedly say they have to perform their gender to the extreme in order for health care providers to believe them. They’re being questioned and doubted and pushed and to get through that, you have to dig in and fight. This is not a process that encourages careful consideration and doubts - it’s a system that says: all or nothing, hesitate and you’re out. 

So we get to her second argument:

3. A concern that fake trans women invading women’s spaces would make “natal women” less safe:

Here she draws a line between real trans women, who have passed through some rigorous testing process, and men who fake it. She uses her history of abuse as a cause to be worried about the safety of women if the gender binary were relaxed. The only argument she makes here is the one I already copied up there: 

When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth. 

Let’s be charitable and say that she means men who would fake being women when she writes “any man who believes or feels he’s a woman“, and not trans women who just don’t perform womanhood according to her standards. But still the question remains - why oh why are you so scared of seeing a body that doesn’t agree with your ideas of a woman in a changing room? If that “fake trans woman” is there, and doing nothing wrong, then why are you so bothered about it? Why? Is the sight of male secondary sex characteristics inherently harmful to women? No! Are you afraid that someone might experience sexual attraction when looking at your body? Then do you think lesbians should also have separate changing rooms? No, you obviously don’t! Sexual harassment is never acceptable, and just because you have a same-sex space doesn’t make that space immune to it. Opening it up to non-conforming bodies does not make sexual harassment somehow acceptable. Those who enter spaces with sexual harassment in mind should be dealt with - but the presence of non-normative bodies is not sexual harassment. 

Trans women are women, JKR says, and I sympathize with them - but only if they display their womanhood in a way that agrees with my idea of it. And they’re not like me. Only if they have the right kind of bodies, have gone through medical procedures, want to do these surgeries, will I extend my pity.

And fuck that.  

Look, the kind of logic she presents here paints trans people into a corner where the only acceptable way of being is to subscribe to a certain kind of body. Which harms the very people she claims she wants to protect - young people questioning their gender. Especially non-binary people, whom she doesn’t even acknowledge. 

And now let’s stop being charitable - JKR doesn’t believe trans people exist. She believes that those who say they are trans are tragically confused and we should only accept their words because we are nice. We should accept their delusions because we pity them. She doesn’t understand her own opinions this way, I’m sure. But fuck her understanding. 

She’s upset because the idea of “womanhood” is moving away from her. She feels - I’ve felt this too! - that this push for increased inclusiveness is taking the focus from the real issues. Things that affect all women. But claiming that women have “unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class” is something that white women say. When anyone talks about “the real issues”, they usually mean “issues that affect me.”

I mean that’s privilege 101, people. 

Ugh.

In conclusion, I’m still angry. 

[samwrights]

Plastic Flowers [ 3 ]

Chapter 3: When My Mind is Uncertain, My Body Decides

Warnings: Language

Escaping from the orphanage, the Exemplary Home for Girls, at a young age, Hitoko “Kohta” Ohta was never very good at socialization, especially considering the copious amounts of bullying and hateful remarks she received for being ‘quirkless’ and having such a volatile soulmate mark. If the children she grew up with knew that she was running a cafe and bar, they would all be shocked at her running such a social career. While she was fairing well, deep down Kohta knew handling certain situations was still incredibly difficult for her. So when she was met with her soulmate once again, Hitoko could only speak what was on her mind with no filter. “Didn’t I tell you I never wanted to see you ever again?”

Katsuki was taken aback at the bite of her words. That...wasn’t how he pictured this conversation was going to go. The two of them were soulmates—shouldn’t this woman be falling to her knees and kissing his feet like his fans? How was he supposed to react to her abrasive nature? The only way he knew how, obviously. By getting angry, or rather snarky. “Yeah yeah, whatever. You knew that wasn’t going to be our last encounter, soulmate.” The word slipped from his lips with such distaste. Hearing the word so spitefully filled Kohta’s chest with dread, a small frown tugging at her lips. In this current moment, she could feel her deep rooted fear of an ill relationship with her soulmate coming to fruition, but did her best to ignore the heavy feeling. Not like she wasn’t goading it with her own negative contributions.

“I don’t really care.” Kohta replies as nonchalantly she could muster, turning her attention back to her other bar guests as an attempt to look away from his unnerving crimson eyes. She wished she hadn’t. Apparently her regulars had heard the “S” word slip from the blonde’s mouth, now each of them were overzealous and filled with excitement.

“Oh, come on Kohta! Give him a chance!” One of her regulars jeered, causing her to roll her violet eyes. If she did not dearly love the older gentleman sitting at her bar top, she would have tossed his old graying ass out for making any form of commentary. But the man had been coming to her for as long as she had open; she could almost consider the nameless man a friend. Almost.

“Fine, what do you want?” Her arms folded over her chest impatiently as she stared at Bakugo. She couldn’t explain to herself, or anyone else for that matter, the sudden change in mood from jovial to hostile or why her soulmates presence pissed her off so much. Most likely due to him being the reason she had to close for so long, or least that’s how she rationalized it in her own mind. Being so out of touch with her emotions, it was challenging for Kohta to understand that her response to fear was anger, very much like the young, scowling blonde mad that stood in front of her.

“Just another round for Eijiro and I.” For what was probably the first time that he could ever recall, Bakugo was intimidated. It wasn’t that Kohta was scary, but the fact that she was just so brash and short with him left him the slightest bit of discomfort. What if...what if they really didn’t end up bonding and he did end up completely losing his quirk? No matter how much Bakugo tried, he could not parish that thought from rearing its ugly head over and over. When the brunette returned with two tall beers, Katsuki made sure to leave twenty five hundred yen on the counter, a small token of kindness, in attempt to soften her seemingly stone heart. Confused, Hitoko looked at him with furrowed brows.

“It’s only twelve hundred?”

“The rest is for you. Come find me when you can catch a break.” Was all he said before fleeing back to his table over where the pool table once stood and returning to his now seated best friend. As Hitoko stood completely dumbfounded, her regulars sitting at the bar top began hollering and cheering at the gesture of goodwill. Flustered, she turned away, putting the entirety of the bill into the register without taking the change out of the drawer as a security measure. Kohta began wiping down her counters, trying to ignore the words of encouragement coming from her customers to take a break and spend some time with her newly discovered soulmate. As if they couldn’t notice she was still ignoring the blonde.

“Come on, Kohta go talk to him!” One of her female patrons shouted, her husband clapping her on the back in pride as she spoke. The brunette only laughed it off, telling them teasingly to quit it before she cut them off for the evening. She didn’t want to talk to him; she was still inexplicably angry with him and the fact that he had the audacity to show up in her cafe after being kicked out was the icing on the cake for Kohta. While neither the brunette woman or the blonde man could believe the other was their predetermined life partner, whatever omniscient power up above that branded them as such must have been laughing at the two of them—their stubbornness and temper only a taste of their similarities. It was only a matter of time until they discovered that.

“Dude, will you quit looking so antsy?” Kirishima asked his best friend out of annoyance and concern. Since Bakugo had returned from the counter, the blonde had not stopped fidgeting once. He was constantly tapping his fingers along the wooden top of the table, checking over his shoulder, and anxiously bouncing his foot on the footrest of the bar stool he sat upon. “She’ll come to you.”

“Tch.” Katsuki let out a click of his tongue before letting his nervous ticks continued to get the best of him. “Why would I care if that shitty girl comes to talk to me or not?” Kirishima grimaced, the red head resting his chin on his palm as he looked to his friend in worry. Despite nearly two months passing since the soulmates had their first encounter, Eijiro noticed the most subtle changes in Ground Zero's behavior. With him being more on edge, Bakugo was more irritable than normal. And while Eijiro was no therapist, he had no doubt meeting his soulmate was stressing Katsuki out. If it were only an internal issue, Kirishima might not have been as worried as he was. But considering that the blonde hero's explosions were slowly weakening, as he learned from a recent training session, and he started losing control over them—Kirishima knew Kohta and Bakugo needed to at least talk, and soon.

"Hey, Kohta. Nice to see you again." Speak of the devil, Kirishima thought. The red head responded nonchalantly, not picking his head up from its rested position as the owner casually sauntered over.

"Thought I told you little shits to never come back to my bar, Kiri." The brunette woman's tone wasn't as snippy as it had been before. While Kirishima could tell she was joking, Bakugo looked as rigid as ever at the sound of his soulmate's voice. It wasn't as whimsical as he had imagined, now that Bakugo was truly listening. Picking it apart, he noticed her voice had much more soprano to it than he remembered, almost as if it wasn't as feminine as his memory recalled. It was almost off-putting; or rather Bakugo was searching for reasons as to why he had chosen not to pursue his soulmate. In his own mind, it was his choice as to why they weren't bonded—there was no way she chose it to be so. Every girl wanted him, Kohta was and would be no different.

"Yeah, yeah." Red Riot waved his hand in disregard before sitting up straight. "I don't think I had the chance to properly introduce you two last time." Kirishima would be damned if he wouldn't be a proper wing-man to his best friend, especially in such a crucial moment. "Kohta, this is my friend Katsuki Bakugo. And Bakubro, this is Hitoko Ohta."

"My friends call me Kohta." By now, the brunette was leaning on her elbows atop the boys' table, taking up the space to assert her presence. It seemed she was more willing to cooperate, to them at least, but by no means was Kohta going to play nice. "For now, you can call me Ohta." A click of Bakugo's tongue left his throat as a sign of frustration. He knew what she was doing—attempting to establish her dominance. If she thought she was calling shots in this relationship before they had even bonded, he would need to put her in her place. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?" Kohta droned sardonically as her dull purple eyes flickered between the two pro heroes.

"Just grabbing a drink, is that a crime?" Bakugo drawled, taking a sip of his tall beer.

"Funny that you come here of all places." Kirishima looked at Bakugo in expectance, as if trying to lead him into speaking with his own soulmate. How had this stupid man been top of the class at one point, the red head wondered. For someone so book smart and academically disciplined, Bakugo was incredibly dense. When Ground Zero said nothing, the red head interjected to keep conversation going.

"Well, Bakugo here didn't really get much of a chance to talk to you last time. I figured you two needed some time to chat." The unbound pair both snapped their attention to the red head, Katsuki giving him a glare harder than Red Riot's quirk, while Kohta just looked nearly disgusted. The thought of forced conversation that lead to feelings of any kind made her cringe.

"We don't need you to hook us up, ass hat." Bakugo snarled, the collective pronoun not going unnoticed by the other man at the table. However, Kohta stayed quiet as she felt the power of her quirk beginning to wane. When she glanced over, she could see the lifelike qualities in her favorite mannequin, Jiroda, was beginning to dull. The movements of the doll were becoming more stiff and rigid, her skin was losing color and beginning to shift to the cloth texture of the mannequin she was created from. Kohta needed to put the doll to rest, and fast.

"He's right, Kiri. If we want to bond, we'll figure it out. But right now, I gotta go." She said hastily before heading back to the bar counter. The boys watched her as she left, Katsuki not missing the motion of a male patron’s hand gently caressing the curve of her ass under her black skater dress as she walked by their table. Out of instinct, Bakugo stood up, though he was unsure where the sudden urge to deck the guy in the teeth came from. Before he could even take a step in her direction, Kohta stopped and snapped her head around, a fierce burn in her eyes as she glared. "Can I help you?" She seethed, poison dripping from every letter.

The man she turned to face was an older gentleman, possibly ten years her senior, with a salaciously wicked grin on his face. "Maybe. I know I can definitely help you." Kohta let out a quiet snarl as her heart raced with rage.

"You got thirty seconds to leave before I force your ass out of here." She bit back.

"What are you gonna do about it, princess?" The man sneered again, standing to tower over her. In addition to his age, the nameless man before her had a good two feet on her height, as well as at least a hundred and fifty pounds on her. Needless to say, he could kick Kohta's bony ass without a doubt. Still, Kohta wasn't going to let this perverted old man who stroked her bottom do that to her in her own bar. Despite the nearly depleted energy of her quirk, Kohta attempted to summon a male mannequin to act as a body guard for her, but she failed to feel the metaphorical thread connecting her to an inanimate doll in her utility closet.

"I think the lady asked you to leave." The gruff voice of Bakugo could be heard from behind the bar owner as he gripped her shoulder tightly, his calloused fingers digging into the bare skin of her arm. Hitoko turned around to see the blonde bomber standing mere inches away from her, a cross look on his face. "You might wanna scram, cocksucker." The older man just let out a scoff before reaching for Kohta's wrist.

"Let me know when you're done playing with boys—you look like you could use a real man in your life." Before anybody could blink, Katsuki grabbed the man's arm that was reaching for his soulmate with bone-cracking force.  The nameless man began barking at the blonde to let him go, though neither he or his soulmate paid attention.

"I've got this, Hitoko." Bakugo's voice was low and thick with anticipation. She was torn between going to get her slowly crumbling mannequin away from public eyes, but Kohta very much wanted to see a fight break out between her soulmate and this creep. With her better judgment, she reached a thin hand up on her shoulder to take Bakugo's hand off of her shoulder.

"Just throw him outside; I don't need you wrecking my bar again." Kohta paused before looking at the nameless man once again. "Thanks for taking out the trash for me." As soon as she walked off to deal with her issue with her quirk, Katsuki faced the man once again before reaching for the collar of his shirt.

"Well you heard the lady, let’s go."

"If you think I'm going anywhere with you kid, forget it." With fast acting reflexes, a small explosion went off in Bakugo's free hand before he slammed the pervert's head onto the wooden table he sat at.

"It wasn't a fucking suggestion. Now get the fuck out of here!" His patience was running very thin, almost to complete nonexistence as he picked the guy up by the collar. A bit of blood stained the table from where the man had hit his head, which Kohta would have his head for, but Katsuki didn't care—this scum of a bastard touched his soulmate. The bar was entirely silent as the blonde bomber carried this man, whom despite being at least double his overall size, straight to the front door and tossed him into the street. Stomping forward, Bakugo gave a swift kick to the stomach to the nameless man left on his hands and knees. "I don't ever want to see your fucking face in here again. And if I ever see your grimy hands on my soulmate ever again," by now, Ground Zero was crouching in front of the creep, who was now overwhelmed with fear and fright. "I will fucking kill you."

When he reentered the bar, an uproar of applause greeted Bakugo, much to his surprise. He had just assaulted a patron of the bar—why were people clapping? The act in of itself should have disturbed him. He was a professional hero, the number two in Japan. And he had just hit an "innocent bystander", so to speak. So why was he filled with undeniable rage at this man who had caressed a woman's butt in public under the skirt of her dress? Because it was wrong, he reasoned. It was sexual assault, unwanted advancements. He would have done it for anybody had he been a witness. It had nothing to do with the fact that this salacious man touched his soulmate. Speaking of which, where was that irritating woman? Crimson eyes scanned the bar top, behind the espresso bar, and out into the cafe; the brunette was no where to be found at the current moment.

"She's in the back, dearie." An older woman called out to him from the bar top. A grumble let Katsuki's lips as he pushed through the swinging door. He wasn't sure what to expect, never actually having been behind the scenes to retail since he started his pro career, but a stairwell to his right, another swinging door to the left and a utility closet dead ahead of him was not what he thought would be there. The utility closet was open, and while he couldn't quite make out what was in there, he could see the hem of Kohta's skirt, her slightly tanned and tattooed legs, as well as her black leather boots.

"Hey, Hitoko!" Katsuki didn't want to startle her, especially after such an incident. Her head whipped around at breakneck speed, her glasses nearly flying off her face.

"Who said you could come back here?!" Panic and alarm coated each of Kohta's words as she put away one of the now blank mannequins she was just using her quirk on. Hoping that Bakugo couldn't see into the dark room, she carefully stepped out before slamming the door shut and locking the closet with the keys that hung around her neck on a lanyard. The heavy breathing that left Kohta's lungs did not go amiss by the blonde as he carefully approached her, despite the heavy scowl on his face and everything in him telling him to run.

"I just wanted to check on you, shit head."

"Well, a-as you can see I'm perfectly fine, so can you please just—"

"You're hiding something."

Hitoko Ohta and Katsuki Bakugo stood in the interconnected stairwell in the back of house foyer of the Upside Down, staring at each other in an uncomfortable manor. The man had accused his soulmate of hiding something, not just from him, but maybe herself and the entirety of society. Kohta looked as if she were going to cry, her anxiety raising her heart rate as she feared her soulmate would learn of her slowly weakening quirk. The quirk she had lied about ever having—and now she could barely hold one mannequin for more than twenty minutes. Crazy to think just a month or so ago, she was able to control six dolls to such a grandiose heist; now it was taxing to even do one. "I-I'm not hiding anything." She stumbled.

"Yeah, you are." Katsuki snarled lowly. Every step he took closer, she took one step back. It was the first time he took notice to how intimidated she truly was by him. Which, in his mind, didn't make sense. She was bold and brash and didn't take shit from anyone, much like himself. But now here she stood with her back to the utility closet door, and Katsuki blocking her exit. He felt...guilty. Or maybe it was shame? Shame that he was the one scaring his soulmate this much. "Look," his voice dropped its usual bite. "You don't have to tell me now. But you will, eventually."

"And how can you be so sure?" She bit back. With Kohta feeling backed into a corner, her fight or flight response began kicking in. With no where to run, she had to retaliate.

"Because we're soulmates, idiot!" A small gasp left the brunette woman's lips as Bakugo grabbed her shoulders tightly. And despite the volume that his voice crescendoed to, there was no hostility in his tone. As her ears processed his words, he almost sounded as if he were imploring her. "It might not be a big deal to you, with you being quirkless and shit, but this creates a problem for me. So I have to know," Katsuki's head was hanging low enough that his blonde strands tickled her cheeks, muffling his words slightly. Still, Kohta could hear him clear as day with how close they were. She was gnashing on the skin of her lips as a nervous habit. "Will you at least try this out?"

"'This'?"

"Us, idiot. Don't make me fucking spell it out for you." Katsuki grit his teeth, feeling absolutely weak. He felt stupid, embarrassed, small, every negative emotion under the sun—he felt ever fiber, every cell of it down to the core of his being. "I-I won't be able to be a pro anymore. I'm starting to lose control of my quirk because we haven't established our bond." With his voice barely above a whisper, he bared the raw emotion that coursed through his veins. Even more so, Kohta could actually feel it. She figured it was mostly due to their close proximity, owing none of it to the fact that their souls were resonating on an ethereal plane.

"F-fine." Her word faltered as spoke, attempting to sound stern or even annoyed, rather than the fright that actually came through. "So how do we do this?" Her question was innocent enough; being an orphan, Kohta never got a formal education aside from the basics of language and arithmatic, especially after she escaped from the home. She never received sexual education which, by national and international standard, included how to solidify soulmate bonds. Not that she tried to soothe her curiosity or seek out her own answers, but she refused to take responsibility for that.

"Wait, are you shitting me?" Katsuki asked. How did she not know?! But she was merely silent, looking at him completely deadpanned. "Fuck, you're serious." He grumbled. By now, his crimson eyes were staring into hers, the hue reflecting in her large glasses. "Fuck, okay. You have to tell me now if there's any bit of doubt that you wanna do this." Between his sentences, Bakugo let out small aggravated sighs. What omniscient, all-knowing being was laughing at him, he wondered. Not only did his soulmate not like him, he had to entirely explain the concept and process of their predestined partnership to her.

"Of course I have doubts about this." Kohta said finally, gently picking his large hands off of her shoulders. While still scared, she stood tall and stared at him with bravery burning in her violet orbs. "I never went to school, never had crushes on boys, I don't even fully know how a soulmate partnership works—just that everyone has one and about the markings. Otherwise, I have been on my own for the last ten years, and I've been getting by just fine. But," Kohta gingerly took his calloused hands in her own, holding them very loosely only by his pinkies. "You're my soulmate, right? I trust that you wouldn't intentionally threaten me, I guess. And if you do, well…" Her voice dropped a couple octaves as she broke eye contact with him. “I’m a glutton for punishment; I’ve always been hellbent on self destruction.”

Bakugo wasn't sure if it was her defining words that caused his next actions, or if it was the ever growing anticipation is what did him in. But one moment, the two of them were hand in hand, the next his hands were holding her hips and his lips were on hers with bruising force. A fire ignited within the two of them individually as the burning pain of their soulmate marks finally dulled. At first, Kohta wasn't sure where to place her hands, but finally settled for wrapping them cautiously around his neck. Katsuki had never felt such an electrifying feeling in his life—and he had been shocked by Denki. With a hunger burning in his belly, he pulled himself as close as he physically could to Kohta, overwhelmed with the need to nearly suck the life out of her.

Kohta threaded thin fingers into his messy blonde locks at the nape of his neck when she felt his tongue tentatively lap at her lower lip. A grumble of pleasure erupted in her throat; is this what it felt like to be kissed? Why hadn't she done this sooner? Had she known, she would have made out with every remotely attractive guy she had close encounters with. Despite how incredibly riled up she became as Katsuki's tongue tangled with hers, Kohta could feel her lungs begging for air. Finally giving in to her need for oxygen, she pulled away breathless and panting.

"You feel that?" Bakugo asked in between his own attempts at catching his breath. When Kohta didn't reply, the blonde gestured down to his left arm where his nearly full red soulmate mark was receding into a faint scar at a snails pace. It was a minute detail, but one he noticed immediately.

"I-I don't get it." Hitoko whispered quietly before looking at her own words, noticing hers began to mirror his.

"The marks start out like black tattoos." For the first time since meeting him, Hitoko heard Bakugo speak without malice or voraciousness marring his words—it was the first time she heard his actual voice. Maybe it was the hormones clouding her thoughts, but she wanted to hear him speak more, even if it were nonsense. To her, his voice held a pleasantly domineering tone. "When soulmates meet, it becomes white and slowly fades into a deep red the longer they go without bonding. We almost ran out of time."

"What would have happened if the whole thing turned red?"

"Loss of control over my quirk was part of it. Some people go crazy if they never bond, some kill themselves." Oh, Hitoko thought. The morose thought of suicide over not bonding with a soulmate seemed like an extremity. Then again, what did she know? Nothing, considering she had never sought out more knowledge on this topic in hopes it would contribute to her avoidance in meeting her own predestined partner.

"So...now what?" Momentarily forgetting that Kohta wasn't educated on the subject, Katsuki rubbed his eyes vigorously in irritation. Truly, he wanted to avoid having to explain the entirety of bonding to her and he would be damned if he had to do it right this second.

"I really don't want to fucking explain this right now." Bakugo said bluntly, though the gruffness had yet to return to his voice. It was...strange. His entire life, he had been so angry, so volatile towards anyone and any thing. But as he stood here, even with such a daunting task at hand, he lacked his typical hostility. For once, he felt calm. "How about you and I talk about this some other time when you aren't supposed to be working?" Realization slapped Kohta in the face—shit how long had the two of them been in the back room?!

"Oh, fuck." She muttered before attempting to regain her composure. "You're right, we'll deal with this later. Now get out of my back room, Bakugo." Blood pounded in his ears as his name left her lips. Despite his previous gripes about how her voice was far from his imagination, his name sounded like a delicacy coming off her tongue. Why did it sound so right, he wondered, as she was nearly out the swinging door in front of them that lead back to the cafe.

"Hitoko." Still using his natural, smooth timbre, Bakugo called out to the brunette woman while trying to grasp one of her wrists that was closest to him. He managed to pull her back to him, effectively spinning her around to face him once more. "It's Katsuki." Was all he said before he leaned down and planted his lips on hers once again. He wasn't sure why he did it, or who was even controlling his actions at this point anymore. It didn't really matter who, it just felt right to him.

The kiss this time around was much more brief, only lasting a fleeting moment before Katsuki pulled away and let Hitoko go. Instead of being flustered as she was previously, she was grinning at him with her prominent cheek bones lifting up her glasses slightly. "Hey, Katsuki. It's Ohta to you." Was all she said before exiting the small conjoining room, leaving him a brush bitter. He would be damned to the ninth layer in hell if she thought he was going to call his soulmate by such a formal, unfamiliar name.

By such a temporary name.

That name was going to change one day.

Plastic Flowers Masterlist

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Thank you guys for checking out this story! I’ll be updating the chapters every Saturday! Chapter title taken from The Front Bottom’s song “The Plan (Fuck Jobs) off their album “Back On Top”.

Taglist:

@wwwwyamd

[jereviendrai]

||| ooc; does every character on this blog have bpd symptoms? is this problematic, considering they’re all villains or would-be villains? is there a way to give a villain a mental health disorder without stigmatizing the disorder? well--

OH AND BIG TRIGGER WARNING FOR A WIDE RANGE OF MENTAL HEALTH TOPICS SUCH AS: eating disorders, mental illness, stigmatization of mental illness, self harm, suicidal tendencies, and a fuckload more. I don’t go into detail. There are just mentions. I’m not gonna say a bunch of graphic shit, I promise! If I went into graphic detail, this would turn into a PhD thesis proposal, and that’d be WAY too long to be worth writing. Also I have BPD, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on the subject. I’m not. My word is not law, but it’d be nice if my word was taken into consideration.

this post got so fucking long and disorganized jesus christ

The answers are: yes, not inherently, and absolutely.

I want to get into the mental health of all three characters in a second, but I think it’s important to talk a little about the other two points first. That said, though -- yes, they’re all borderline. All three of them! And they all experience it differently! I will come back to that. Anyway--

I feel like it’s important to talk about villains, mental illness and stigma. There’s a really common (and insanely lazy) tendency for writers to explain a villain’s villainy by simply saying, “oh, well they’re a psychopath,” or, “they’re just crazy.” This is not only lazy and offensive, but it contributes to an unfair stigma against the mentally ill.

Mental illness might, say, compel someone to steal a chocolate bar or snap at someone out of anger. It might make a person’s emotions volatile. It might make someone unreasonable. They might suffer delusions of abandonment, of some plot against them, of people’s secret intent to humiliate them, etc. They might suffer and handle their suffering poorly. They may cause harm. But that doesn’t make them... evil. It makes them complex. And how they react to and handle their negative actions says more about them than any diagnosis could.

When you have a villain with a mental illness, you need to examine how the illness is hurting them. Write about how it hinders their progress. Write about how isolating it can be for them. Write about the impact and struggle. Not how the illness makes them so evil or so irredeemably awful. The illness should be what humanizes them and helps to make them relatable. No matter how untouchable and powerful your villain is, they have some personal struggle that is independent of their villainy. When done correctly, it can go a long way in fleshing out your villain and adding interesting inner conflict!

I know, I know. You might be asking, “yeah, but don’t people with mental health issues sometimes cause harm directly related to their symptoms?” To which I say: yeah, duh, of course. Just like a depressed person might say something mean when they’re having a bad day. Just like someone with ADHD might make someone feel like they aren’t being listened to. Just like someone who has social anxiety might make a friend feel unloved. Just like mentally healthy people also occasionally cause harm.

I’m not saying mental health issues don’t cause problems and maladaptive behaviors. I’m just saying it doesn’t... make someone inherently bad -- real or fictional. And I need people to internalize that.

ANYWAY ON TO THE CHARACTERS AND THEIR BPD

(i know, you’re probably like, “dude oh my god shut up and get on with it” sakjlfdkjsa)

I’m going to be referring to the four subtypes. I know these are controversial to some people. Some really don’t like these labels, others feel comforted by them, etc. They’re just to make it easier to talk about this whole thing. No one fits neatly into any one subtype! Some people don’t resemble any particular one! Everyone is different! Don’t box people into these subtypes if you haven’t been given consent, thanks!

Mr. A / Clark Donovan Mr. A is a classic example of the Quiet Borderline. Someone with quiet BPD mostly directs their symptoms inward. It’s harder to detect than other types, as the symptoms that are most prevalent are mostly expressed, well, inwardly. Self-esteem issues, self-blame, insecurity, withdrawing emotionally, pretending you’re not angry when you are, self harming tendencies, suicidal thoughts, etc. He’s also kind of clingy. Mr. A is an extremely loyal person to a fault. He is a people pleaser and will go to the ends of the Earth to make his loved ones happy, even if it hurts him. This is of detriment to him, as he often finds himself getting hurt on behalf of people who might not care as much as he does. He’s let a lot of bad people into his life solely because they made him feel loved, wanted and useful. He views everyone he loves through rose-tinted glasses and only takes them off long after he’s been laid to waste by them. He has terrible issues with self-image and has thus developed an eating disorder. He also has severe depersonalization/derealization disorder, which is a result of how his mental health interacts with his reality-warping powers. It creates a lot of anxiety with him, watching himself phase through things and bend the world around him on a whim. His motivations in life are connected to this, but his motivation to do evil things is not. He wants to bring other superpowered people together as a united front against humanity, as he feels that humanity is a threat to their continued existence. This has nothing to do with his mental health issues. The part of it that does tie in is that he’s painfully lonely and has chronic feelings of boredom, so being surrounded with a shit ton of different people mitigates that. It’s a motive for him bringing people closer to him, but it is not a motive for him to launch an attack on all humanity. He’d be really offended if you tried to accuse him of doing this on the basis that he’s just a bit ill. His illness literally just makes him crave contact with other living beings just like him. He sometimes does bad or stupid things because of this, but it literally has nothing to do with his motives as a villain. As an addendum of sorts, Mr. A’s alias and reluctance to use his given name (Clark Donovan) are a result of identity issues he suffers due to his BPD. He finds it hard to maintain a stable sense of identity, so he just... doesn’t.

Ivan Chanteur Ivan closely resembles what we like to call an Impulsive Borderline, comorbid with ADHD. He is an impulsive person, as the name of the subtype suggests. He’s a thrill-seeker who suffers from extreme levels of chronic boredom, which he desperately tries to combat by any means necessary. Staying still and doing repetitive tasks is literal torture for him. If he cannot get up and move and do whatever it takes to keep himself feeling fulfilled and occupied, he is probably going to fucking lose it. When he is actively vocalizing his boredom on a regular basis, this means the chronic feelings of boredom have reached critical mass. It’s not just boredom. It’s anxiety, it’s agitation, it’s existential dread, it’s an inability to focus, it’s pent-up energy that needs to go somewhere and can’t just stay in him anymore. If he can’t get it out in healthy ways, he usually resorts to self-harm or less-than-healthy pursuits. He’s been known to dabble in drugs, self-harm, occasional promiscuity on a bad night. While therapy’s helped him get a handle on it, there’ve been a lot of stressful and traumatic things going on in his life have have made it a lot harder to keep himself in check. Ivan is pretty charismatic, able to cast a wide net and catch all sorts of people in his social web. He has a sort of natural magnetism that, on a superficial level, should make him quite popular. But underneath it all, he has difficulty trusting people long enough to actually let them into his life. He’ll act like an open book, only to slam himself shut and reshelve himself before anyone can get anywhere near the end. He’s easy to befriend, but difficult to get close to. This has caused him to feel lonely and frustrated. He wishes he could easily form deep connections, but it’s hard and it hurts him. In addition to all of this, he engages in a wide variety of attention-seeking and risk-taking behaviors. He often spends time with people who are not good to him, simply for the thrill of it. This has often gotten him hurt, but he finds it hard to cut this habit in spite of everything. This leads to a lot of frustration and self-hatred, as it makes it hard for him to protect himself. Every time someone hurts or betrays him, he beats himself up over it and tells himself he should know better by now. All that said, though, he’s come a long way in therapy. He’s not quite able to keep a handle on all of it all the time, but he’s managed to secure one or two decently stable friendships along the way.

Eve Laurier Eve is particularly difficult to talk about, but I’m going to try my best. Eve is what happens when you make a conscious decision to be bad. He knows beyond a shadow of doubt that what he’s doing is wrong, but he feels so wronged by the world that he just cannot seem to motivate himself to care. This... again... has nothing to do with his BPD. If anything, it’s his struggles with this disorder that keep him at least somewhat... grounded in reality. Eve suffered a personal tragedy -- the loss of his twin sister in a housefire. Though ruled an accident, he cried foul play. Consumed with grief at the loss of the only person he felt could truly understand him, he vowed to find the culprit and make them pay. This set him down a path of vengeance that would make John Wick blush. Eve grew up as the heir to his family’s criminal enterprise. This put him in a position of power the very moment he was born. This also left him exposed to a lot of terrible, violent crimes from a very young age. Because this was normalized by his family, he internalized and compartmentalized any misgivings he had about violence. By the time he was ready for university, he had been thoroughly trained to carry out hitjobs on behalf of the family. He was a weapon from the moment he left the womb. He was groomed to do terrible things, and it’s because of this ongoing and continuous trauma that he developed his particular cocktail of mental health issues. He mostly fits in with the label of Petulant BPD. Repeated and violent trauma did a number on him, leaving him angry and hurt over what his parents let him fall victim to. He also experiences feelings of self-loathing over the part he feels he played in his own trauma, despite the fact that it started in early childhood. He is self-defeating and self-blaming. He has a difficult time expressing his feelings and has angry outbursts fairly regularly, often resulting in self-harm and suicidal ideation. He’s been known to reach for the nearest mind-altering substance just to get out of his head for a bit. His mood swings are intense and leave him feeling fatigued and anxious. He has severe social anxiety that sometimes manifests as cold indifference. He also has issues with control, has paranoid delusions about the people in his life and doesn’t often believe it when people say that they care for him. He will find any and every piece of evidence that points to the contrary, even if he has to make it up himself. This usually ensures that he’ll end up alone again. He doesn’t have very many close relationships, if any at all. His BPD is not the reason he hurts people. Any hurt caused by his BPD is directed at himself, not at others. His BPD is a direct result of what actually has primed him to hurt people. It’s a direct result of trauma. He’s traumatized. And no, trauma is no excuse for what he’s done -- but his BPD didn’t make him kidnap and torture Ivan while he waited for Ivan’s parents to send in the ransom. That was all Eve. That was his conscious decision to make, in spite of everything in his head telling him how awful and wrong he would be to do such a thing. He knew it was wrong and ignored it, as he was under the impression that Ivan’s family had a hand in his sister’s death. If anything, his BPD aggravates his feelings of shame and self-loathing when he does precisely what his parents had been training him to do his whole life.

Anyway-- I hope this was helpful or at least interesting.

The point I’m trying to make here is that mental illness isn’t some kind of ultimate litmus test of good and evil. A disorder doesn’t make you good or bad. It’s just another facet of who you are.

So... to that end... please for the love of fuck stop using personality disorders as the reason for someone’s villainy. Please. I am begging.

I wrote a bunch of BPD villains in various stages of villainhood because I have BPD and this disorder often makes you feel like you’re evil, a monster, etc. Honestly, on good days I feel like an inherently bad person who consciously chooses to do good. That’s very flawed and I know that logically I’m not inherently bad, but that’s kind of what stigma does. It makes you feel like you’re inherently bad. And that feeling influenced how I write all three of these characters.

This is an incoherent mess but today’s the day I find out if I have coronavirus and I’m so fucking stressed out and hopped up on DayQuil. Thanks for reading any of this, I guess?

[the-desolated-quill]

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds blog - Episode 1

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I was very much looking forward to the BBC’s adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi classic. How could I not? It’s the definitive alien invasion story that jump-started an entire genre of science fiction  Not to mention this is the first adaptation made by a British film company and actually set in the time period it was written. I was very excited. Nothing could possibly dampen my spirits... until I learned who was writing it.

Peter Harness is a writer I’ve been less than kind to in the past. For those who don’t know, he wrote some of the worst episodes of Doctor Who. Remember that stupid story about the moon being an egg? Yeah, that was him. He also has a penchant for writing painfully forced and thinly veiled allegories with all the grace and subtlety of a ballet dancing rhino in a glow in the dark tutu. Kill The Moon, for example, was a pro life metaphor that portrayed the other side as being irrational baby killers, and his Zygon two parter was about Muslim immigration and integration, with the slimy repulsive Zygons being used as stand-ins for Muslims and non-white immigrants.

Harness’ ability to write allegorical stories about sensitive topics is... under-developed, to say the least. So naturally he’s the perfect candidate to adapt one of the most beloved sci-fi stories ever written. I mean, why not? The BBC have already ruined Sherlock Holmes, courtesy of Steven Moffat. Why stop there?

In all seriousness, while I wasn’t excited about the prospect of Harness getting his grubby mitts on War Of The Worlds, part of me hoped that maybe he could pull something out of the bag. You may recall I held a very similar negative view toward Chris Chibnall, and his first series as showrunner of Doctor Who was an extremely pleasant surprise. Maybe Harness could achieve his own metamorphosis.

He doesn’t.

The first episode of War Of The Worlds was fucking tedious to sit through. It actually looked quite promising initially. We get some nice moody shots of the surface of Mars as Eleanor Tomlinson recites the famous opening lines of the book. But then just after the opening titles, it all goes downhill.

I was sceptical when it was announced that this would be a three parter because that just seemed too much. A feature length film you could do. Maybe a two parter, at a push. But three episodes? Each an hour long? That’s going to require a lot of padding, and that’s exactly what Episode 1 is. We see the Martian cylinders launch from the planet at the beginning of the episode and it’s not until the forty minute mark where we get our first proper glimpse of the Tripods or the heat rays. So what do we get in the mean time? Mostly pointless shit.

The original War Of The Worlds book isn’t exactly remembered for its characterisation. Outside of the astronomer Ogilvy, none of the characters even have names, but to be fair to Wells, the characters themselves weren’t really the driving force of the narrative. The Martians were. The narrator, a journalist, was merely there to relay and facilitate the plot, giving us a first hand account of the subjugation of Earth. Fine for a book, but somewhat harder to get away with in a film or TV series, which is why most don’t even try. Every single adaptation of War Of The Worlds attempts to expand on the central characters to varying degrees of success, and the BBC version is no exception. But where Harness really miscalculates is in anticipating how much the audience is going to care about the characters, to which the answer is ‘not that much.’ We don’t want them to die obviously, but we’re not so interested in who they are or where they come from because they’re not the main focus. The Martians are. So to have a significant chunk of the episode focusing on their day to day lives is quite baffling. Not to mention unbelievably boring.

George, played by Rafe Spall, is living out of wedlock with Amy, played by Eleanor Tomlinson, which causes their neighbours’ tongues to clack and net curtains to twitch. The only person supporting their union is Ogilvy, played by Robert Carlysle, which is how they learn about the mysterious goings on the surface of Mars. This is all established in the first five minutes, but as I said, the Martians don’t properly show up until the forty minute mark. Until then we’re subjected to painfully forced and tediously dull ‘right on’ posturing and irrelevant social commentary that adds nothing to the core narrative.

Here’s the thing. I’ve got nothing against the idea of expanding the characters. I definitely have no problem with giving the narrator’s wife from the book more development and screen time. In fact I’m all in favour of it. What I do have a problem with, however, is when that expansion and development comes at the expense of the plot.

A man and a woman shacked up together in defiance of society is all well and good, but what does any of this have to do with War Of The Worlds? It’s not even as if Harness tries to connect this back to the story’s main themes of imperialism and colonialism. It’s mentioned that Amy was born and raised in India. Maybe if she was an Indian woman, it could have been more thematically relevant, but no. Once again we have a period drama with no people of colour because, as we all know, non-white people weren’t invented until 1962. Also, while I get that society at the time was very strict, I’m not entirely convinced George and Amy’s relationship would have been that scandalous to the point where it would have affected his career as a journalist. That just seems like a step too far and is merely there to add some artificial tension... in a story about Martians invading the Earth.

In the end it all comes down to this. Why the fuck should I care? What’s the bloody point of this? Yes it expands the characters, but it doesn’t contribute anything to the narrative. It just wastes time. Again, I must stress, we don’t get our first Martian until forty minutes into an hour long episode. Previous adaptations never felt the need to bore the audience to death with pointless shit because they knew what audiences came to see. Martians blowing shit up. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War Of The Worlds from 2005 didn’t piss about giving us needless exposition about Tom Cruise and his family. We’re given the basic info about the characters and their relationships within the first ten minutes before the Tripods emerge and the action gets going. The BBC version, in contrast, is just painfully slow, dictating every tiny thing about these characters even when it’s not relevant to the plot.

And the thing is, once we actually get to the bits from the actual book (you know? The bits people actually want to see?), it’s actually pretty good. The Tripod looks incredible, as was the scene in Horsell Common where we saw people getting killed by the heat ray. Unfortunately we have to slog through all this other crap before we can get to the good stuff.

Eleanor Tomlinson probably gives the strongest performance as Amy. It’s just a pity the character is so utterly uninteresting. Like I said, I’ve got nothing against giving her a bigger role than she had in the book, but it feels like Harness is more interested in showing off his feminist credentials than actually telling a story or creating a believable or likeable character. Her being an assistant to Ogilvy I think is a great idea, but it soon becomes clear that this was only done so other male scientists could comment on how unusual it is to have a woman digging up a crashed cylinder, which is kind of ridiculous because I’m pretty sure female scientists did exist back then and you don’t exactly need a penis to use a fucking shovel. Then things turn really stupid when George’s brother, played by Rupert Graves, starts blaming her for the Martian invasion, saying that everything was going fine until she came along. Exploring 19th century sexism is one thing, but this is just daft. There’s no interest in actually exploring the root causes of sexism back then. Instead Harness seems content with portraying men as being the equivalent of cartoon caricatures foaming at the mouth.

George, meanwhile, goes from being a fairly boring character to a downright hateful one when it’s revealed that he and Amy aren’t just living out of wedlock, but that he cheated on his missus because she was infertile. So not only do I not care about him, I now straight up want him to die because what the actual fuck?! And this is not helped by Rafe Spall’s incredibly wooden performance. Seriously, I’ve seen corpses with more life in them. When the Tripod first emerges, we see him stare at it in what I assume was supposed to be shock, but instead he just looked gormless. It’s honest to God one of the worst performances I think I’ve ever seen. There’s no emotional range to him whatsoever. He just blunders around wearing a confused frown on his face. It’s as if he had just wandered onto the set by mistake.

The biggest problem with this first episode is that Harness is focusing on all the wrong areas. A large segment is dedicated to George investigating the Dogger Bank incident, which seems to be an attempt at making a parallel between the UK’s tenuous relationship with Russia then and now. What this has to do with War Of The Worlds, I don’t know. There’s so far been no attempt at exploring the themes of the source material as we’re too busy with this shitty romance. There’s even a moment where we see the characters dig up the cylinder and take a photo only for the same exact scene to happen five minutes later. I mean for fuck sake!

And then there’s the pointless plot twists. First we get the cliched pregnancy reveal, then it’s revealed that the scenes we thought were on Mars turned out to actually be a post apocalyptic Earth with Amy and a seven year old kid who is presumably her son. Wait, how long has this fucking invasion been going on for?! It only lasted a couple of weeks in the book! What happened? Did the Martians get vaccinated? This just highlights to me how inept Harness is as a writer. He can’t just do a straight adaptation of War Of The Worlds. He has to engineer these pointless and utterly idiotic cliffhangers to get people to keep watching because the story and characters clearly aren’t doing that.

If I wasn’t committed to reviewing this mini-series, I honestly wouldn’t watch the rest of this. This first episode is legitimately terrible. Boring, poorly thought out and utterly, utterly clueless. Just like everything else Peter Harness has ever written. I don’t understand why he was chosen to adapt War Of The Worlds and I don’t understand why he chose to adapt it in this way. Why so much focus on pointless exposition? Why over-complicate the lives of the main characters? Why can’t they just be a normal married couple living a life of privilege until the Martians come and trample all over it? It makes no sense! Some could defend this saying it was building tension until the Martians emerged, but there’s a significant difference between making an audience nervously anticipate the Tripods arrival and making them wait impatiently for something, anything, interesting to happen.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The 30 Minute Experiment: Friendship

Okay, let’s do this. 

I haven’t fully worked out the exact protocols for how I’m going to do this other than the 30-minute time limit, the single topic, the fact that I’m just going to write and not spend time going through and editing, and when the 30 minutes is up, it gets posted, warts and all. I will say that I have thought of a couple topics to write about, and in general, I’m trying to have a topic maybe a day in advance. I’m also going to try to go back and forth between negative/positive because I’m not gonna follow something like “Fear” with something worse like “Death.”  I hope people will read these without thinking I’m just looking for a soapbox to lecture on.  (Maybe a toilet paper box?)

So, today’s topic is “Friendship” and this might be one of those “Hey, Ed, this is the dumbest topic you’ve picked because everyone knows the importance of friends and friendship. Everyone wants friends. Everyone hates losing them.” Yes, this is all true but friends and friendship is also something we take for granted just way too much, and believe me, I’m so conscious of checking in on friends, especially in times like these when we’re not seeing them in person.   I’m not sure I know anyone who might ever consider me a “bad friend” and yet there are friends I’ve lost or stopped talking to and sometimes, it was on me, but just as many times it was their decision not to continue the friendship. And in some cases, these are very good friends. 

I actually had a dream about one of them last night, which just makes it harder to write about this topic. I haven’t spoken to this person in over three years even though we’re regularly in the same place, sometimes even feet apart. Some may know who I’m referring to if you know me even though I haven’t spoken about it much. And to this day, I literally have no idea why this person stopped talking about me. I reached out to him/her (yes, I’m only giving you a 50/50 chance to guess) to ask if I did something to offend them so I could apologize, but I never got an answer. And that’s that. Anyway, I don’t really think about this person much but then every once in a while, I’ll have a dream like the one I had last night where the two of us are chatting as if nothing happened between us. 

What’s weird is that I’ve had other friends and colleagues like this and I’ve started making a conscious effort to break the ice and end the silence. I did so at a holiday party last year where I saw one of the people who I had a minor argument with on social media and hadn’t spoken to in years. I just went up and said, “Hey, XXXX, can we just put this aside and be friends again?” or maybe I said, “Hey, XXX, we haven’t spoken in a while, so how are you doing?” and you’d be amazed how many people, however mad they might or how much they hate you, will answer you in a polite way. Now, granted, there was alcohol at this party and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the courage to talk to this person without it and vice versa, but I like to think that there was something about this person I liked at one point enough to consider them friends that I could end the silence. So what is the point of today’s column other than the chance for you to vent  and use me (the reader) as your free, personal therapist? 

The point is that I learned very early from my father the importance of having friendship and friends. He wasn’t the most gregarious or charming person but he was able to make friends easily because people would talk to him and he would listen and he would care, and that’s something that’s truly hard to fake. I’ve learned many times in the past ten years how important it is to have good friends, people who will stand up for you and be there for you when you need someone. I learned it in 2013 when my landlord was threatening to kick me out of the apartment due to the clutter, and I learned it even more a few months later when I found myself with leukemia and no money and a few friends set up a fund (without me knowing it) and thousands of friends and people I had only met a few times donated money to help with the financial burden of being sick. And others helped me more recently when I was having money problems... and this includes people who i hadn’t really seen or spoken to or spent time with in many years! I try not to think about it too much, but the friends of mine that have stepped up and helped me (like when I had to get eye surgery and a procedure for the pain in my forehead from neuralgia), these people will have my gratitude and loyalty for life. And yes, that includes a handful of editors as well, who either were my friends before or who I feel indebted to for putting their trust in me. So yeah, it’s kinda obvious that “friends are important,” but don’t disregard or ignore someone who wants to be your friend, because you never know when you might be in a place (like the current situation) where you desperately need a friend to talk to... and someone who won’t judge you even if they don’t necessarily agree with you.

The thing about friendship is that you also have to go into one not expecting anything but also being open to the fact that maybe this friend will be someone that can offer something valuable to your life that you can’t get from yourself. I mean, at this point, maybe we’re talking about finding a spouse/partner and marriage, and as everyone knows, I am single and I’ve mostly been single, and I’ve come to terms with that.  But what gets me through that is knowing that there are literally thousands of people who I can count on as friends in some regard or other... I mean, even if it’s just to answer my Email when I ask how they’re doing OR (Oh, my God, this happens so infrequently) they Email me out of the blue to ask how I’m doing.

You’d be amazed how nice it is to hear those words: “How are you doing?” Maybe the person asking those words doesn’t really want to hear a long-winded answer but it shows that they have some level of empathy towards you or others.  I feel like the people who do this are the ones I consider real, true friends even if I barely know them. Let’s see what else I have to say about friendship since looking at my watch, I still have 12 minutes to go. I guess I can talk about my history of friendships and how the internet has helped contribute to my abundance of friends, and sure, how sometimes, things on the internet can be misunderstood and cause friction between friends. I know the latter just a little too well, but I don’t really want to get into any specific incidents as those are personal between me and the other person. I got my first computer with internet access in 1994 and the reason I got it was that I saw this thing called DC Online in an ad in the comics which was a forum/part of AOL. (Anyone remember them?) So I went online and actually, the very first person I met became a good and trusted friend for two decades. We had a bit of a falling out sometime recently, and this reminds me that I really need to Email him. I doubt he’ll be reading this, and frankly, I’ll be surprised if he’s read a single thing I’ve written in the last 25 years. He’s just not that kind of guy. But this person was a good friend who was there for me in times of personal strife, and frankly, it’s someone I miss seeing or talking to. (I could give more details but I worry that might be a real giveaway who it is.) The thing is that even with all these friends I have right now, there’s something about this other friend that I miss. Like most of my friends, he’s one of a kind and unlike anyone else I know, and that’s also kind of important.  I’m not sure if my father was the one who said, “You can never have too many friends” or maybe it was something said in a movie, but i truly believe this to be the case, just as I believe that you can’t expect EVERYONE to be your friend and there are some people you will never get along with and never be friends so maybe it’s not worth the time to try too hard. But I always give people a chance to show me that they have more layers or depth than others give them credit for, and this is probably why I’m friends with a lot of people who are treated like pariahs by others. (No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m not friends with Donald Trump. If I was, I’d probably have a job... for a couple months... ha ha.) Hm... maybe I should try to keep this experiment politics-free, but I have a feeling that’s gonna be impossible as long as I’m doing it this year.  Anyway, if you’re reading this, and even if we’ve never met in person, I consider you a friend for at least giving me the time it takes to read through this. I’ll admit that this experiment might lead to a lot of “front-loaded” columns where I have a lot of thoughts on a topic and then quickly and suddenly run out of things to say about it. Like right now for instance... which is good, cause my time’s up for the day! Back tomorrow!

[chickadeedecrypt]

First Entry on an Old Account

Hi, my name is Jay. I've had an account on this site for years, mostly for an occasional scroll through fandom tags or whatever when I feel like it, but I've not been active in regard to posting at all. I can't draw or think of things to say even if I wanted to contribute, but I recently played a game that made me think perhaps it's worth it to write down some of my thoughts somewhere, even if it's just the same as screaming into a void where it'd be surprising if anyone actually bothered hearing this crap. But I’ll leave it public in case anyone does want to read my honest thoughts, feelings, or opinions, whether out of curiosity or whatever...

Honestly though, I'd prefer if people didn't read what is basically going to be my public journal, meant only for attempting to "make myself feel better by putting my feelings into words" where it wouldn't be connected to my real name or face or anything and it'd be unlikely that any family would find it here. I would say friends too, but I don't have any of those. A self-inflicted thing, I'm sure, but it's probably better for someone like me to keep myself isolated anyway.

So, first should be a little bit of background, right? Let's see if I can put it into a short-ish summary...I'm in my twenties right now, unemployed, and practically dependant on my parents to pay for my bills. Mainly health insurance, medications that are not covered by said insurance, renewals of my identification, food, and other living expenses. I live under their roof without rent and little in the way of responsibilities (although they do occasionally make good-natured jabs about my unemployment and the fact I have yet to take my driver's test). Basically, I am extremely fortunate to have such wonderfully tolerant and loving parents that put up with all my bullshit. Part of me wishes I could be properly grateful for such a good life, but even though I don't understand the why of it, I've wanted to just disappear for such a long time that I don't even know if I can.

Yep, that's right. I've been mentally ill since I was 13 or 14 with the desire for a night where I went to sleep and just never opened my eyes again. Hence why I felt extremely bad about going for all of the achievements in Headliner: NoviNews, considering specific events and characters that were in that game. (Not spoiling it too much for anyone past here, hopefully. If you’ve never heard of it and are curious, look it up!) Don't get me wrong, I really liked the game, and if I wasn't such a completionist with the ones I like, I would've left it at the first good ending I got. However, I think the fact I felt horrible about causing the characters such pain with my repeats was what made me want to talk at all. If I can still feel sympathy, even just for fictional characters, I can't be completely dead inside when it comes to other people, right? Some part of me wants to help others, usually only if I know the circumstances or have a good gut feeling about the person, but I realized I've never really wanted to help myself beyond getting medication to manage my hallucinations and exhaustion so I can feel at least somewhat functional.

I've never really thought of the "wish to die" as being "wrong" or "scary" or anything like that. I've seen others preach about it being wrong for a lot of reasons, and I've also seen the attempts at positive reinforcements and encouragement to get help or talk about it, but it seems like nothing will change that feeling. It's just a feeling that's there and no one knows why. I don't know, the doctors don't know, and strangers on the internet or in the media sure as hell wouldn't know why someone with such a loving family, a good life, and no experiences of crime or abuse or any kind of trauma, would feel as if they just want to die, yet not have a particularly negative view of themselves.

But I'm ranting and I should just make a tldr for myself if I ever come back and wonder what I was writing a wall of text about but didn't feel like reading all of it;

Hi, I'm going by "Jay" online, I'm frustrated that I have a mental illness but no diagnosis or reason for it, and I was inspired by that questionable media influence game with the Headliner to start actually trying new things to see if it makes me feel any different. Considering I have no friends to talk to and I don't want to rant in circles to my lovely mother who tries to be there for me but understandably has no idea what to say or do anymore, I've taken to a social media site that none of my family is on (to my knowledge, anyway), so that it won't be lost or found in a notebook or on my computer or phone or whatever. I don't know. Let's just try posting on here at least once a week, okay? Say, Saturdays or Sundays? Even if it's just bitching to no one in particular about nothing important.

[reyvolution]

Anxiety manifests itself in different ways depending on the person, and for me it always leads to some form of isolation in attempt to protect myself from whatever might cause me negative thoughts or emotions. The keyword there is “might” because a lot of times, those things don’t necessarily cause issues, but the scenarios in my head from them do, and so I avoid things or start building walls around myself. I’ve been handling my anxiety like this for a while and for better or worse, in this case probably worse, I’ve gotten quite good at it. The thing about building walls out of protection is that over time, they feel more like a cage trapping you in than a wall to protect you. It started off with simple things, not posting as often to facebook or just avoiding mentioning anything regarding my own personal life on it. It got to a point that I stopped posting there altogether and moved onto tumblr where I felt I had some form of anonymity. As time passed and my anxiety grew, I began to post less personal things on tumblr too. I had built up a queue to try to keep my tumblr somewhat active, but that actually ran out for the first time in years. 

In it’s current state, my anxiety keeps me hidden from a lot of social interaction. I shy away in groups on discord, because I don’t know how to contribute to a conversation and at this point I’ve been so quiet in the groups that I’m in that I feel like it’d be weird for me to say anything at all now. I rarely hop into FFXIV as often as I used to, because I feel lost when I do go online. I can’t help but feel like I’m just that one weirdo that nobody really knows in the FC whenever I come on, and I can’t help but feel like I don’t belong. This is no one in the FC’s fault of course. Everyone in there has been nothing but kind and welcoming to me, but the voice of anxiety in the back of my head makes me feel like I’m being annoying to them in some manner and so I should just keep to myself. 

Overall, I just feel like there’s a lot of pressure swelling behind these walls, and I really want to let them down. I want to start posting silly things again, I want to share more of my thoughts, I want to take fun screenshots and hang out with people, but I can’t help but feel like I’m a bother or a nuisance and that people are better off just not dealing with me.

Sorry if this took up a bit of your time. I appreciate that you read this if you did, and if you didn’t I don’t blame you. 

[pokefanbri]

Found out something about myself today. The type of anxiety I have is called social anxiety? My breathing is rapid & I just shut down, & can't talk when someone is angry at me or raises their voice to ridicule me....an affect of being abused most my life, I can't help it when it happens & I cry, but I can take a moment after an ordeal to breath & recover. Working in a social environment probably isn't the best for me, but a rude customer is somewhat rare so other wise im fine. Does explain a couple factors of my previous relationship with my ex bf though, I didn't ever want to disappoint him but I felt I was a disappointment...it wasn't bad just a tiny bit of a bully 😅 but that's normal for him...was all it took i guess when it came to him cuz he was the 1 person I did care of what he thought of me...my anxiety just mainly crying & somewhat steadily constant. I don't get it though he was extremely mild compared to let's say my mom or my brother, he was great....but words hurt sometimes. But again I didn't want to disappoint....I couldn't be myself after a while, I was an emotional wreck just being empathetic....sensing the atmosphere & body language that I wasn't wanted & was just a bother...it is a very sad feeling being alone when someone's there. We clicked but not fully, I couldn't be comfortable & more so on edge with him than with my ex husband of which I dont think I ever cried. idk completely what it was but at least I know what causes me to panic & uncontrollably cry 🥲 as long as I know I can try to control it better. I let people get to me more than I should, it hit me more with him cuz I really do care about him more than anyone, so I sought for his approval & fell short..and felt worthless. He does this all the time & did it to me technically...though not the only solution either 😒, he taught me something valuable that I forget sometimes, whenever there's a person u can't deal with use the ban hammer or block them....its not like a stream or social media though when they're right infront of u 🤔 its more difficult to manage.

Social anxiety is a chronic mental health condition in which social interactions cause irrational anxiety. For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment. Symptoms may include excess fear of situations in which one may be judged, worry about embarrassment or humiliation, or concern about offending someone. The exact cause of social phobia is unknown. However, current research supports the idea that it is caused by a combination of environmental factors and genetics. Negative experiences also may contribute to this disorder, including bullying.

The more I find out about myself, the more I can better it as long as im aware of it, it can be helped at least a lil bit. I can learn to better deal with it. Many things affected us & contributed to our downfall but we still had fun together nonetheless as best friends do, I fell too hard maybe...I treasure the time we spent, & I place him close to my heart forever. He's worth it to me, the only one I've loved more than anyone else, unforgettable. Getting my heart broken by him showed me the depth of my heart. I ain't ever loved no one liked that. We didn't work through our issues, but that doesn't mean we can't learn & grow from our experience & try our best wherever we go next 💖

[dcollins44]

Epilepsy

I was first diagnosed with a seizure disorder in 5th grade, so I was about 11 years old. I did not have full blown grand mal seizures. It began as something called petite mal seizures. These are seizures where someone basically spaces out for 3-6 seconds and is unaware of what is going on around them. I remember when I first got an eeg to test what was wrong, the initial doctor said “I have never seen anything like this before”. This was definitely something that got my family’s attention.

Hearing something like that from a doctor when you are 11 years old is terrifying. However, now that I am older and a parent, I can’t imagine everything that was going through my mom and dad’s mind. Becoming a parent is the most amazing thing in the world, but it is also the most stressful thing in the world. Worrying about everything, from bumps on the head to paying for bills. So I know this was an extremely difficult time for them as well.

After seeing a specialist, having more test, and being diagnosed with petite mal seizures, I was put on medication to help control the seizures. After about a year the seizures went away. No issues whatsoever. I thought the medicine cured me or like the doctor said I grew out of them. I continued my 6th grade year playing football and baseball, swimming riding bikes, doing all the things I had always done as a kid. I am now 34 years old and this is still one of the most memorable and best school years of my life. Life was back to normal, so I thought.

The summer before my 7th grade year, a small, socially awkward kid, began having seizures again. I knew what this meant, I may not have the opportunity to do what I had always dreamed of as a kid, be a part of the school sports teams. I grew up watching my cousins dominate in our schools football and baseball programs including winning a state championship. I dreamed of continuing this winning tradition when I got old enough. However, I finished summer baseball and went on to play 7th grade football. I wasn’t very good, I was extremely small, but I was able to start and contribute every game due to my effort and being raised in the game. I was having a great school year and football season despite dealing with these seizures. Going into the last game of the season we were undefeated. Coaches had a game plan for me to get more involved in the offense and catch some passes. Little did I know the morning of the game, my life would get rocked and forever be changed. 

Thursday, October 21, 1999, started just like any other day of school, only with a little more excitement. I was excited to get more involved in the offense and finish my first school affiliated football season undefeated. I left for school told my mom and dad I loved them. My mom had to calm me down because of how nervous I was for the game. She was a big sports fan and always knew what to say. I got to school, went to my first two classes as normal. In second period I got called to the counselors office. I thought it was kind of weird but the counselor was my uncle and also one of the football coaches, so I didn’t think to much about it. When I got to his office I knew something was off, my preacher was there as well as a police officer and my best friend/cousin. It was at this time my Uncle had to tell me that my mom had been killed in a car accident shortly after I left for school. 

Not only was this devastating for myself, my brother, and my dad, but the entire family. She was kind of the glue that kept our large family close. I obviously did not play in the football game that day. The affect of this tragedy, would also play a role in issues I have with seizures, or at least I believe it has over the years. Dealing with the loss of a parent and health issues is not easy and caused some extreme depression, stress, anxiety, and tension. I played one more year of baseball and football before the doctor suggested that I stop. My dad was now a single parent and did what he thought was best and followed the doctors orders. I understand now as a parent, but baseball and football were my life, my outlets. I was not a special athlete or anything but my love for the game outweighed everyone else’s. I also was not allowed to swim, ride bikes, drive when I turned 16 as well as many other things. While there are many worse things to deal with in life, when your’e a teenager, these things take a toll on your mental health. 

I then began to get behind in school work. Sure I had plans to go to college but I thought, I’ll just work hard then. I didn’t have football or baseball, my mom wasn’t there to be on my ass about homework obviously, and the medication took a huge toll on me. I did not understand why I had no energy, why I was gaining weight, and why I was depressed at the time. I didn’t even really know what depression was, I just knew I wanted my mom back and I wanted to drive and play sports. Little did I know medication was making all of this even worse, however, it was the only way to try and control the seizures. Finally going into my junior year I hit my growth spurt. I thought to myself I can and I will play football my senior year I don’t care what anyone says, its my last chance. I found an outlet in lifting weights and working out for football and things started to turn around a little bit. By the end of my junior year I had been working out for about 4 months, the doctors had started to find a good medication balance, and I was able start driving myself to summer practices and school for my senior year. It was a fun football season. I did not get to play much since I had not played in 3 years, but we won 11 straight games before losing in the second round of the playoffs. I learned a lot and knew I wanted to coach someday. I went on to finish my senior year like your average student and just wanted to get out on my own. For the next 3-4 years I would continue to struggle with depression, my seizures, and figuring out what I wanted to do. My first attempt at college did not work out so I bounced from job to job. Eventually I decided on law enforcement.

My dad was a cop, and it was always something that intrigued me but I never gave it much thought until i randomly stopped by the academy one day and signed up. I loved the job. It was exciting, I learned a lot about life, not only my own, but what others go through as well. I was not the best police officer, I was probably to young and immature for a job of that importance, but I cared and I was trusted. It was something I was proud of, I felt like my mom would be proud of me and my dad was proud of me for. This would not last long, my small seizures that were under control for the most part would become bigger grand mal seizures. I had multiple at critical times that should have told me to find a new job but I worked to hard to get where I was. Eventually I had a grand mal in a patrol car, luckily i felt it coming on and had parked. I knew then it was time to once again find something new. I again bounced around from different jobs trying to figure out not only what I wanted to do, but what I could physically do. I decided education was something I wanted to do. I was scared to go to college though because school was so tough for me with my medication and epilepsy. Eventually I met someone so amazing, that she basically saved me from all the negativity in my life. She believed in me before I did. She gave me the confidence to go back to school and get my degree in education. 

After a couple of terrible relationships I decided I wasn’t getting married or having kids. However, this woman saved my life. She showed me that while battling depression and epilepsy life can still be great. I know a 28 year old man should probably be able to figure that out on his own. But she cared for me like no one else ever had. Not only did she believe in me, she took care of me what I was feeling down or when I had a seizure. As a matter of fact she still does to this day 6 years later and has been my wife for 4 of those years and given me my sons. Because of her I am a teacher, a football coach, and I have someone that cares enough to take care of me for several days after a seizure and help me with doctors appointments. God has blessed me with someone so amazing despite all the negativity I lived with in my heart for years. I have had more grand mal seizures in the past 4 months than I usually have in two or 3 years, we have a one year old, and another one due next month, but she has still been there every step of the way. I know she feels my pain and sadness, I can see it in her eyes. I wish I could take it away primarily for her. We will continue to work with doctors, pray, and do our best to get these life altering seizures under more control. 

Like I said before there are far worse things in this world to deal with, but I do believe epilepsy is often over looked. It is hard to deal with, it scares people when they see one happening, and even doctors are still trying to figure out causes and triggers to this issue in the brain. If you have this issue try to stay positive. Someone like my wife could come along in your life when you least expect it to help you out, or you may figure out a way of dealing with them yourself. Don’t give up on finding the career for yourself either, lots of jobs are dangerous for us but I truly believe all of the jobs I had and could not do, has led me to be doing what God wanted me to do all along, teaching, coaching and helping kids.

Please pray for people with epilepsy, our parents, our spouses, and our children.