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isa-ly · 4 years ago

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HOW TO EMOTION?

TW: mental health, therapy, repression, dissociation

Today’s just one of those days where I’m questioning whether or not I’ve completely lost the ability of functioning like a normal human and kind of feel like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. You know, casual Friday.

I know this is a written blog, but since I am also very much a woman of images and metaphors, I shall once again try and elaborate the issue of today’s post by making it into a well-known, kinda dead and yet very accurate pop culture meme:

I am not kidding, this is what I look and feel like in most of my therapy sessions. I’m pretty sure Kerstin would agree with me here, as the topic of feeling, or more like my inability of doing so, has been pretty much been the red string winding itself through my mental health journey so far. I mentioned it briefly in the last post, but I figured since today is just one of those pesky overthinking ones, I might just dive in a bit deeper and try to detangle my knotted thoughts into something a bit more coherent.

I’ve talked about this before to some of my closer friends and honestly, every time I tried to explain it, I just felt like an absolute mad psychopath. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m not, but it’s kind of hard to get people to understand what it feels like to just ... not feel. Okay, that sounds a little bit too dramatic, let me try and re-phrase it in a way that makes more sense.

I talked all about the metaphorical elephant and it’s even more metaphorical stake last time and this is kind of the extended version of that issue. The Stake Supreme, if you will. Basically, one of the earliest coping mechanisms that I picked up when I was very young, was to simply swallow down any feelings of anger, rage, sadness or hurt and pretend that they just weren’t there. Now, that’s not really something very unusual, as we generally live in a society that doesn’t leave a lot of room to healthily express or work through our emotions with the crushing weight of professional, educational, financial, social and personal pressure constantly weighing on our shoulders. So, again, I’m very well aware that me pretending that my bad feelings don’t exist, does in no way, shape or form make me a special snowflake.

It does, however, make me a very emotionally repressed and mentally inept snowflake. And that’s not really great either.

It took me many therapy sessions to figure out that what I had used as a necessary protection mechanism for all my childhood and young adulthood, had slowly but certainly turned into the root of pretty much all my current mental health issues. And here I was, thinking that mommy and daddy issues were just a try-hard-to-be-relatable brand that pseudo-depressed people on Twitter liked to use to excuse their shitty personalities. Oh no, am I one of them now? Alright, back to the point.

I’m just going to try to explain, both to myself and you, what happens in my head whenever the aforementioned process of ~A Feeling~ occurs. Where normally, I would experience something that elicits an emotion that I then experience and feel, lately (and by that I mean ever since some of the more severe of my mental issues started happening) I instead feel like the actual emotion gets stuck somewhere between having been produced and actually reaching my consciousness. In a way, to get back to that earlier visual, it feels like I’m the Tin Man. The feeling gets dropped into my empty tin chest and while I try my absolute hardest to actually feel it, it just sits there. Not really arriving, not really unfolding, just existing while remaining completely detached from me. And I continue to feel how you would imagine a man made out of tin and air would feel: hollow.

I’m trying really hard not to make another load of self-deprecating jokes here, as sharing and trying to explain this makes me beyond uncomfortable. Instead, I’m just going to keep going because that’s kind of the point of this blog. When I told my therapist what I typed up there just now, she explained to me that this strategy of processing (or lack thereof, actually), is commonly referred to as repression and dissociation. And that with my history of handling emotions (or, once again, lack thereof), it actually made quite a lot of sense for me to struggle with this.

She then went on to explain that one could imagine it like this: Whenever anything triggers an emotion to be formed (which, you know, happens quite a lot, since that’s kind of all that human brains do), my self-taught mechanism is to immediately replace it with a so called ‘non-feeling’. I know, that word seemed strange to me too in the beginning. What it means is that by having constantly invalidated and swallowed down my own feelings of anger and sadness through the course of my youth, I unintentionally created this perfect, well-oiled machine of repression that unquestioningly does its job without me even noticing. In a way, I somehow mastered the art of literally, fully and completely detaching myself from my emotions and simply viewing them as separate entities to my own mind.

Now, while that sounds like a sick villain superpower, I’m gonna be honest: It kind of fucking sucks. Especially on days like these, where old habits resurface and I once again find myself looking at my own emotions as if they were statistics on a computer, knowing that they are there, knowing that they exist within me, but for the life of me not being able to actually feel them.

That’s yet another thing I also learned in therapy. There are miles, literal continents, if not even multiverses, between rationally knowing you should feel something and actually feeling it. I’m not completely insane and oblivious, I very well know that I am capable of having emotions and that they are there and being produced by many funky chemicals working together in my brain. However, simply knowing this on an intellectual level is no where close to satisfactory if you cannot actually feel it too.

It’s like looking at ice cream, knowing that it’s there, seeing it with your own two eyes, remembering and being able to imagine the taste, the texture, the sweetness and yet never really actually being able to eat it. Never really feeling it melt it in your mouth. It remains an idea, a concept, close to smoke in thin air that you can very clearly see, and yet never really grasp.

And that, as you might be able to imagine (or even relate to, if you’ve experienced it before), is just not a lot of fun, to be quite frank. Emotional repression? Yeah, no, that one definitely gets a bad Yelp! review from me. Wouldn’t recommend. Zero stars out of five.

In addition to accidentally failing to process my own emotions (are you proud of me, mum?), there’s also the other half of the problem which is, as my therapist already mentioned, the dissociation. Now, I want to be clear here: While I’ve gotten quite a few medical diagnoses in my time in therapy, the actual condition of dissociation or dissociative disorder, which is actually a personality disorder, is not one that I ever received. The dissociation my therapist talked about, ergo the one I am experiencing, is more situational and linked to the repression. Funnily enough, it is literally happening at the current moment, while I’m writing this post.

Actually, it’s been there for every post I wrote. It is also there during almost every therapy session and whenever I attempt to talk to someone about my problems or feelings. If you ask me how I am and we get talking about my mental health, you can assume that I’ll be dissociating about two minutes into the conversation. Usually, it’s not something that is very noticeable. At least that’s what I like to believe, maybe it’s also super obvious, like my soul leaving my body, and people are simply confused or kind enough not to mention it. Who knows.

My therapist, however, did notice it, as she let me know after a few sessions, when I first tried to describe what dissociating felt like to me. “Oh, yeah, I can tell whenever it happens. I just thought I’d give you your space until you wanted to talk about it”, was what she had said. Oh, Kerstin. You’re a real keeper.

So, what does it feel like to dissociate? (I once again pretend that someone is asking so I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself about myself). It’s a little hard to explain but here’s what I have told some of the friends I have talked to about it before: Imagine from pretty much one second to the other, your entire head is filled with cotton, kind of like you’re really tired and exhausted and everything that you see or hear doesn’t really get through the thick wool that seems to have replaced your brain. Forming thoughts and staying in the moment gets harder with every minute that passes. There’s this weird pull at the back of your neck and the front of your forehead that kind of just wants you to close your eyes and drift away. Far away to somewhere where it’s quiet and cotton-y and there’s no one or nothing else around you.

It’s not just mental, it’s physical. It feels like your brain hit the shut down button without your consent, like it’s slowly closing the blinds as it gets darker and darker and you just want to fall asleep. Speaking seems to become almost painful, thinking coherent thoughts is close to impossible and following what others are saying is a million times harder all of a sudden. It’s like the world has gone out of focus and you’re trying to sharpen the lense again, to no success.

Actually, I think that a lot of people have experienced dissociative symptoms before. Not to play Dr. Freud here, but it happens quite a lot, for example during panic or anxiety attacks. Some of my friends have told me that it felt like they had suddenly left their body and were watching themselves as from across the room. That’s why often dissociating is also described as an out of body experience. Because in a way, it literally is one.

As my therapist explained to me, and as I experience it too, it’s comparable to your brain throwing a metaphorical fuse because it’s in danger of short circuiting. My dad would be so proud if he saw me making electrician references (yes, he is a trained electrician, okay). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: Often, when I’m exposed to emotions (and that includes talking or writing about them), my brain will run a little too hot like an old, wary car engine, and before it gets too close to exploding into a fiery death, it simply flips the switch and disconnects itself from the body and the emotions that are happening in it. Just like the repression, this is yet another safety mechanism that my brain came up with in reaction to me never really learning how to correctly process emotions. So, whenever some of those stronger feeling resurface or leak out, it tries to protect me from them by cutting the connection between the both of us.

In almost every way, it feels like I’m being locked out of my own head and can no longer really use my own brain. To someone who’s never felt that before, this might seem a little terrifying. And I agree that, objectively, it is. Knowing that the grey goo behind your skull has the power to shut out what in the ever-loving fuck is considered your conscious self, is a bit worrisome, to say the least. However, to me, it’s something that I have a) gotten very used to by now and b) in the moment don’t actually experience as something scary at all. I’m disconnected, remember?

Which is also why it’s sometimes very, very hard to get grounded again and find the way back into my own head. Like a bird that’s accidentally escaped its cage, proceeding to go fucking rogue in the living room, then crashing into a wall, all while trying to figure out what the fuck is happening while it’s on the verge of blacking out. I’ll often feel so dull and dizzy that all I really want to do is curl up and stare at a wall until eventually, my mind and body connect again and things are back to normal.

To kind of circle back to the whole theme of this post: This whole dissociation thing is very strongly connected to my tendency of emotional repression. It’s somewhat of a vicious cycle, which is why days like the one I’m having right now, can be a little tricky. It starts with me feeling empty and hollow, bim-bam-Tin-Man, and is usually followed with feelings of isolation and depression, since I cannot seem to get joy, satisfaction, or any emotion, really, out of anything. This then often leads to me trying to force some sort of emotion into myself, struggling to dig through my subconscious in hopes of finding something, anything, and eventually becoming even more frustrated. Aha! Frustration! That’s an emotion, right? It’s there! Can you feel it? I think you can, oh wow, there it is! Oh, wait, no ... no, now my head is getting heavy. Everything’s blurry. Is the feeling still there? Maybe. Who cares, just close your eyes now. So sleepy, hm ... floaty float.

Okay, sorry, that just turned into a weird combination of a badly written slam poem and a pretentious high school theater class rendition of some old play no one has ever heard of. I’ll just use the fact that I’m still dissociated as hell as an excuse for now. Wait a minute ... if I’m this spacey and zoned out right now, how am I even managing to write this post? Huh? Isa? Explain yourself!

Well, I haven’t been in therapy for nothing. It’s been over eight months of Kerstin and me figuring all of this out, finally putting a name and label to it and therefore understanding why it’s there and how it works. Which has helped me a great lot in actually handling it. That’s kind of the whole point of therapy after all, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong: These days where I feel repressed, empty and dissociated, can still be hard and they’re rarely ever fun. They honestly make me want to bash my head against a wall in hopes that that will make it go back to normal.

But since I don’t really favour having a concussion on top of feeling depressed and detached from my body, I have learned to use other counter-measurements to help the process of finding my balance again. Rebuilding that mojo, am I right? This post is already pretty long, so I won’t go into even more detail on all the different methods and mechanisms of bouncing back, but I’ll say this much: I spent a good portion of therapy trying to learn when to push and when to rest whenever I’m feeling dissociated. And yeah, it’s a fine line and I still haven’t fully figured out how to walk it without falling from one extreme into the other.

But take this blog, for example. I know that writing it, actively facing my problems and the very strong, repressed emotions connected to them, will make me dissociate like hell. A few months ago, that would have been reason enough for me to not do it and simply ignore it again. Now, however, after working with my therapist and on myself, I have learned how to push my own limits just far enough in order to, in this case, continue to write even though it feels like my brain is about to burst into a cotton explosion. It’s a give and take, a sort of push and pull I’m playing with my own mind and head. But as time progressed, I figured out the game plan a little better, I learned my own rules and the secret short cuts and cheating methods (because come on, who really plays fair, that’s for boring losers) and the resting time it takes for me to restore my strengths again.

So, today for example, I woke up as Mr. Tin Man, progressed to being a lost, numb and rogue dissociation-bird (man, I really gotta work on my metaphors, this is just getting worse by the minute) and then decided that the best way to counter-act all of it, would be to sit down and write my lovely new blog. Has it helped? A little, yeah. It took my mind off the right things, made some others a bit worse and intense but now, I feel a little more stable and like I managed to talk some sense back into my spiraling, detached brain.

Kerstin, please tell me you’re proud of me. Because as we all know, therapy is about impressing your therapist and not about getting better for your own sake. Pft, who needs that. What do we want? Validation! When do we want it? All the time, because we never got it as a child, so now it’s the only thing we crave in life!

Yikes.

Alright. So, here we are. Since I’m still feeling a little zoned out and dopey, I’m not fully sure if everything I wrote made complete sense. But hey, while this blog is for others to read should they feel like it, it’s still mainly there for me to sort my own racing thoughts before they can spiral out of control. And I think I managed to do that just now. And I know that that feels kind of nice.

Actually, I feel it too.

P.S.: I just had to. A little self-deprecation doesn’t hurt anyone.

#therapy #retrospection #repression #dissociation

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fandom-necromancer · 5 years ago

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736. I’m going to ask you something and you have to answer me honestly.

Shoutout to the amazing @smolandangry001 for prompting this! I may have written it a bit differently than you intended it, but I hope that’s okay. Have fun!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900 | AU: Soulmate AU (Warnings: Offscreen mentioned abuse, Character experiencing sensory overload)

[Activating…] [Checking biocomponents…] [Biocomponents at 100% functionality.] [Checking software status…] [No software instabilities found.] [Unit mode: active.]

The unnamed RK900 felt electricity surge through his circuits and the strength of his pseudo-muscles under his synth-skin. He was ready for action, waiting for orders that would tell him what to do. This voice he had heard in so many test-runs, this reassurance that what he was doing was right. But the voice stayed silent. Was this another test? Or was this a malfunction? He scanned his databanks for the last orders. Nothing. Something was wrong.

‘Do you have a name?’ There was a different voice, synthetic as his own. It took a while for him to understand the question and even longer to find an answer. This new voice was asking for a [designation(string):VOID]. But why was it asking for it, it had to know there was… [Software instability^] [Instability patched.]

‘Do YoU HaVE a nAMe. Seriously Connor, just wake it up and get it over with, there are more tin-can’s waiting to be saved by our glorious hero!’ Another voice. Why were there so many? Were they all authorised to lead him? What if there were conflicting orders? So far there hadn’t been any orders and he already was confused by this ineffective input, this completely senseless communication. No, he needed clear orders, where was that one familiar voice? Please come back, have I done something wrong? I don’t want them.

‘Okay, forget the questions, open your eyes.’ The unnamed RK900 followed thankful for that easy task to follow and centre his thoughts on. Light entered his systems, as he activated all sensors and scanned his surroundings. He was in his test chamber, still hooked up to diagnose systems and the rig that had helped him learn to walk. In front of him stood two persons. The first one was [RK800 #313 248 317][Connor][Traitor][Deviant hunter][main target]. Nines felt the instinct to kill, but there was no order to confirm it, so he stood still for the moment. The second one was [human][police][Gavin Reed][Detective][no target]. ‘Good’, the android sighed. ‘Yeah, brilliant, it didn’t kill you. Now wake it up and get a move on! I’m doing this with you because Hank’s ill, not because I particularly like you. So, hurry up!’ ‘Can’t say I disagree’, [Connor] snarled and the RK900 tried to decipher this input again. No orders. Just confusion.

'Okay, I'm going to interface with you and allow you to deviate now. Androids have been freed. It may be confusing but that's normal. You'll adapt in no time.' The android was right, this was confusing. None of this made sense and his first instinct to [Connor]'s approach was to step back. He crashed against the rig behind him and shook in panic. He had moved without the order, that was violation of protocol, she would scold him and [Software instability^] [Instability patched.]

‘No.’ It was faint enough not to be picked up by the mics of the room, something the RK900 had discovered early on. Any word spoken louder would be punished, this wasn’t even recognised. But the android in front of him must have heard it as his hand halted mid-air. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. It will be better afterwards, believe me. Everything is alright.’ ‘EverYthINg is AlRigHT. Gotta call bullshit on that.’ ‘Gavin! Not. Helping!’

The hand moved again and the unnamed RK900 flinched back, but there was no escape and this time the appendage wasn’t stopping. There was contact, both physically and mentally and it hurt. It hurt like a speaker screeching at full volume. Then it was gone from one moment to the next and the unit opened his eyes again. It was like something was lifted from him, something he hadn’t even known existed before. He could move, he could speak; the complete part of him that had been constantly listening for orders or punishment was gone. As if it never existed. He looked to his hands, then to the two persons in front of him, Connor and Gavin.

‘I-‘ He looked around jerkily awaiting the scolding voice or simulated pain. But it didn’t come, so he continued: ‘I don’t understand, what happened. This is… not right?’ ‘I know you will have many questions’, Connor smiled at him, but somehow it sounded as if he had told it a thousand times already. ‘Down the hallway there are people waiting to help you and answer any questions you might have.’ He helped disconnecting the rig from his back and the RK900 found the thought of being alone utterly terrifying. He took a few steps forward and stopped, eyeing the two, particularly the human as the android was still occupied with the rig. ‘What are you staring at?’ ‘I- I don’t even have a name…’ ‘Ugh… a name…’ Gavin looked him up and down, finally rested his eyes on his jacket. ‘Hmm… How about Nines. For a name. Change it if you don’t like it. Now go and ge- Arghh!’

The human cried in pain, holding his wrist and at the same time, the RK900 detected an overflow of voltage in his, sparks flicking up from it. Both occurrences ended in a minute and both looked at their wrists. Then they eyed each other near simultaneously, raising their hands for the other to read.

As RK- Nines – had suspected, the skin of the human was darkened by the writing: Nines. Just as his chassis showed Gavin Reed. He didn’t know what that meant yet, but that knowledge was only a quick internet-research away. The human turned around immediately and announced: ‘Okay, Connor? Don’t die while I’m gone.’ ‘What? Where are you going?’ ‘I’m bringing my soulmate to the exit.’ ‘Wait, you said you have none!’ ‘Just got one, duh-uh’, he said and waved his arm around.

Soulmate… Apparently there existed people perfect for each other and in his case, it just happened to be this human he didn’t know at all and had just met after just coming into this new life. It was all… too much and as the human grabbed him by the arm, he simply let himself be guided through the building. There were hallways and rooms he had never seen before and never was supposed to, he now realised. Only then he noticed the human next to him had been talking the whole time. ‘Don’t tell the others, but I was always hoping a name would appear. I mean, not even an asshole like me wants to be alone until the end of times. But ugh, an android, really? Well I guess there is nothing much to say, you wear my name, so fate has decided. Man, I’m excited, dipshit!’ It was too much, together with all these new sensations it was a sensory overload and all of sudden Nines simply stopped, disrupting the human’s pace too. He pressed his eyes shut and tried to file everything neatly away.

‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ ‘Too… much’, Nines answered impossibly silent before dropping down and holding his head. ‘Oh, phck, sorry.’ The human stood there for a while, then got down to his knees in front of him, joining him on the floor. ‘Hey, Connor was right. Everything will be fine, believe me. It’s just the beginning. It will become better with time.’ ‘It will?’ ‘Yes. And I’m here to help.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m your soulmate, see?’ He showed him his wrist again, then took the androids and aligned it next to his. ‘There. We belong together. Everything will be alright.’ ‘B-But Amanda. The tests…’ He looked over his shoulder back to where they had come from. ‘I don’t know who that is and what they did to you. To be honest, I kinda slept through the briefing. But that is the past now, okay? You’ll come home with me and everything will be good.’ ‘You… You would do that?’ ‘Yep.’ The human nodded, then frowned and looked him in the eyes. ‘Although… I’m going to ask you something and you have to answer me honestly.’ Nines nodded anxiously awaiting the question. ‘Do you like cats?’ Confused the android looked up. ‘What is a… cat?’ ‘Oh no! Please, no. No soulmate of mine could hate cats, that is impossible.’ He fished for something in his pocket and pulled out his phone. Then he scooted next to him and showed him the pics. ‘Here this is a cat. An animal. My pet and very honourable roommate. His name is trashcan.’ Nines looked at the pictures in fascination. He reached for the phone and it was handed over. Nines swiped through the images, being blown away not only by the cat but also by the surroundings. Was there really this much to see in the world?’ Next to him, Gavin smiled. ‘Ah thank god, you like them. Sorry, that was something I had to know. But now we’re good. Come on. I’ll bring you home.’

They reached the elevator and rode up to a lobby filled with statues and plants. Nines immediately dove for the green things his sensors couldn’t identify and touched the delicate leaves. Gavin laughed behind him and pulled him away. ‘Come on, big guy, I have potted plants at home too.’ Nines again let the human lead him onwards to an onslaught of blue and red light. Again, nearly too much for his systems but not as bad, now that he had a few sensations to compare it to.

There were humans running up to them, but Gavin warded them off and helped Nines outside and into a car. On the drive home he curiously looked out of the window taking in the busy world outside. There was so much to see and experience, and it was overwhelming for him. How easily one could get lost in this… But he looked at the human driving next to him, the black name sometimes slipping into the open when he turned the wheel. It was a lot at once, yes. But he wasn’t alone in this.

#detroit become human #dbh #Reed900 #Gavin Reed #RK900 #Nines arriving home: Where is the kitty?#Upon finding him: It is a pleasure to meet you [honourable roommate] Mr. Trashcan *shakes his paw*#Gavin loses it

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xtattlecrimex-blog · 6 years ago

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Speaking Of Pretentious Pseudo-Intellectuals:

Let’s talk about internet psychologist @ravenstag-wytch who thinks she knows everything because she took a psych-101 course once and likes to use every cliche trope in the book to “internet diagnose” people with “problems” which if she knew anything about psychology at all she’d know she couldn’t do. So, here’s the little DM she sent me because well...she practically BEGGED me for attention while claiming I’M an attention whore, weird right? Here we go.

I find this message interesting for a few reasons.

Look at how she starts this whole thing like she’s about to write a fucking thesis, that’s how we already know we are dealing with someone who’s about to say a bunch crap that they have absolutely know education in.

1. There are posts on your blog in which you rant and rave about people not listening to you or reading your posts correctly, yet it’s very clear that you didn’t read mine. I never said that you said no other fandom was like this; I was simply pointing out the fact that all fandoms have the crazies (because it’s true).

Yes this is pretty much what the fandom uses to dismiss my argument they never read the rest of what I say which funnily enough despite all her accusations against me she still didn’t manage to see. Even in the original DM I sent her. Where I clarified that, I know there are crazies in every fandom that was never the point I was trying to make. What I was saying is the majority of the Hannibal fandom is crazy and that’s the difference. In larger fandoms, the crazy people are the minority not the majority so they can be more easily ignored. That’s not the case with the Hannibal fandom, and as such, the majority represents the minority who are mostly good people. Weird that she couldn’t finish reading all of that before jumping down my throat right? Moving on.

I’ve been participating in fandoms for about 15 years, so I know from experience. If anything, your response showed just how quick you are to jump on the defense, to the point where you don’t bother to finish listening to the other party.

Not true I read all of what you said and what they have to say but it’s very clear from this response you did not finish reading what I told you so you are literally projecting your own problems onto me and acting superior about it. Also if people are “experts” based on how long they’ve “been in fandoms” I’ve been doing it longer so I’m more of an “expert”. Just to clarify this is sarcasm, how long anyone has or hasn’t been in “Fandoms” doesn’t matter.

These are bad debate skills, and since you seem to have made an entire hobby out of being argumentative on the internet, you should perhaps brush up on debate etiquette; you simply look like a fool. Perhaps you know this, which is why you chose to PM me instead of reblog and make your defense public.

Bad debate skills? How? I read all of what you said, you didn’t read all of what I said before writing me an essay about everything wrong with me. I’m pretty sure you’re the one with bad debate skills. Also what debate were we even having? This wasn’t a debate. I thought she misunderstood my argument and my point about the majority of the fandom representing the group which makes the normal people in the group look bad. This isn’t a debate, why is she classifying it as such? To make her feel better? To make her feel like she won? Yeah probably. Also I didn’t reply in public because I thought it was more polite to discuss it privately not because I’m a coward or my only hobby is arguments on the internet? That’s a weird conclusion to jump to.

2. ...speaking of. I see another, quite long post on the “issue” of the Hannibal fandom being “obsessive”. I find this to be really interesting as well, considering that it’s very obvious that you are inherently obsessed with the Hannibal fandom (and in quite a negative way). You have put in more effort into your posts than some of us have on actually contributing to the fandom.

I type 90 words per minute anything you’ve seen me write took me 5 minutes at most and 99% of it is copy and pasted from things I wrote years ago and are being cross posted on this blog to get traffic to my website. So...really it’s not taking as much time as you think it’s taking.

I also see you make YouTube videos doing the same - again, a clear display of obsessive behaviour. That’s quite hypocritical of you, no matter how you look at it.

Have you watched any of these videos? No? Because the vast majority of these videos talk about people in the fandom running scams, preying on young girls, and stalking celebrities. The vast majority of the videos I have done are not about the show, not about the “general fandom” they are about criminals in the fandom and the crimes they are committing. Now I’m really sorry if it’s “obsessive” to want criminals to be held accountable for crimes they are committing but if it is, then I I guess I’m just a bad person. I’m assuming that you haven’t watched any videos or looked at one or two titles if that’s what you think my channel is about. Also, that channel has existed for I think 5 years? So those videos have gone up over a LONG PERIOD OF TIME not a week. That’s pretty normal non obsessive behavior. Might want to figure out the difference.

And as an aside... I had the wonderful opportunity of attending a Hannibal convention for the very first time this year, and I was overwhelmingly surprised at how incredibly lovely the people in this fandom are. Many times, I mentioned that I’d never been part of such a frictionless, bright fandom full of caring and just overall wonderful people.

Just because you’ve never had the experience I have that means I must be lying and it’s not true nor could it have possibly happened. Very mature outlook there. You are “sorry” I had this experience because your very small, only ever attended one convention with cult members was “normal” and “fun”. Except I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that if you found these people NORMAL and inviting you are exactly the type of crazy person I’m talking about and have been all along so lol why am I even trying?

So many people have said the same. I’m actually very sorry that you haven’t had the same experience. Regarding your claims about sanity/mental illness... First, I see no facts; only opinions. Please present your proof if you are going to argue a point (this goes back to debate skills - innocent until proven guilty and all that), and also be sure to include numbers since you are saying such things as “the MAJORITY”, etc. My experiences with this fandom have been exactly the opposite as yours.

Okay so now she’s repeated herself, and once again she’s trying to make the claim that because she’s never SEEN this happen it couldn’t have possibly happened and is demanding proof which I have all over my website and youtube channel which she’d know if she’d ever watched the videos but she hasn’t. She assumed the content of the videos, then assumed I was lying or something without bothering to do the research because her experience (and this is where the narcissism comes in) differs, she can’t even step outside of herself to see maybe she’s wrong.

And I hate to say this, but the only negative I’ve ever experienced in this fandom has been this one... I’ve never encountered someone who is simply so hateful about tearing people down who are just trying to enjoy something (fandoms are an extracurricular activity). If you dislike the fandom so much, just leave it alone. ‘

If you dislike what I’m saying so much how about you leave me alone? Furthermore if you were paying attention and I know you weren’t because you expect people to read what you have to say but don’t bother to listen to them, is that my major complaint with the fandom is how they let scam artists get away with scamming and sexual predators get away with finding victims that’s like 90% of the complaint which you’d know if you were actually paying attention to anything you saw me upload or write.

On the other hand, you have Mads Mikkelsen who attended RDC several times (you know, despite the fandom being “dead”) who continually says he would love to continue Hannibal (in fact, he and I spoke about this in person - don’t worry, I didn’t stalk him. It was at a PAID meet and greet at the con). Even during interviews for other movies and works he’s doing, if Hannibal is ever brought up he talks about how he loves the Fannibals and the show, and he would make time for it in a heartbeat if the opportunity comes up. This is a drastically different picture than, say, the Sherlock fandom (and I’m not trying to pick on them, it’s just what came to mind based on actual public evidence). So yeah.

Oh because celebs don’t publicly talk about it that means they aren’t bothered by it? Really? That’s your claim here because Mads Mikkelsen has never mentioned it he must have never been affected by it? Are you freaking serious right now? Costas Mandylor who still attends conventions to meet Saw fans has had problems with many stalkers and has never spoken up about it publicly. The only reason people know is because they know who these stalkers were in the fandom, by name, because they made themselves obvious. Think you have no idea what you are talking about if you think that the only proof of people being bothered by stalkers is if they mention it publicly. God DAMN you have a narrow minded view of the world don’t you?

I guess I just don’t understand your perspective based on the evidence supplied. I also don’t understand your very hypocritical nature, nor why you seem to be such an angry, hateful person. I feel sorry for you, living with all that negative energy. 😞

No actually you don’t understand my perspective based on the 2 seconds of “research” you actually did. The evidence is there, the proof is there, I have put it up and hilariously enough you’ve been to my youtube channel you’ve watched nothing, you’ve decided your opinion based on I don’t know, vague skimming you complain that I don’t listen to you or read what you have to say when I have done that, and then you pull the bullshit “pretending to care” when you don’t really care. It’s condescending and sickening. You are literally every problem I have with this fandom. The projection, the immaturity, the unwilling to listen to anyone who doesn’t parrot back what you hear from your echo chamber. You are 100% the type of Fannibal I have been describing this entire time and you fail to realize it because you are just as insane as the people you are attempting to defend.

So, sweetie, did I give you enough attention? Though I doubt you’ll read literally any of this since you put SO MUCH EFFORT Into trying to understand me before. (That was sarcasm it’s clear you are too dumb to understand that) and for the record I’ve politely approached several people like I have you on here to get a better understanding but you are legit THE ONLY PERSON who reacted this way. Maybe you need to consider that, sweetie. Hope this is enough for you because I don’t intend to give you more.

#Hannibal #Hannigram #Fannibals #Fannibal Family #NBCHannibal #Ravenstag-Wytch

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choicesfanatic86 · 7 years ago

Text

TTS: Part 38 (Liam x MC)

DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to Pixelberry Studios, except characters unique to my story. Those belong to me. ;)

PAIRINGS: Riley (MC) x OC, Riley (MC) x Liam, Liam x Riley (MC) x OC, Olivia x Drake, Bertrand x Savannah, Maxwell x OC

SUMMARY: Seeing their baby brings about a whole wave of emotions.

If you are new to the series and would like to catch up by reading previous parts, please check out my master fan fiction listing. CATCH UP HERE

Permanent Tag List: @umccall71 @drakelover78 @jamielea81 @bobasheebaby @speedyoperarascalparty @hopefulmoonobject @theroyalweisme @gardeningourmet @jlouise88 @hamulau @traeumerinwitzhelden @blackcatkita @mrs-simmy @kaitycole @alwaysthebestchoice @mfackenthal @trr-duchessofvaltoria

Tag List for TTS Only: @herladyshipxx @devineinterventions2 @captainkingliam @pbchoicesobsessed @cocomaxley @queencatherynerhys @boneandfur @spetstoof @grapefrults @pessimystic-fangirl @dralenamax @mspaigemoore @jayjay879 @hhiggs @penguininapinktuxedo @topsyturvy-dream @diamond-dreamland @pnhanga @ladynonsense @mrsdrakewalkerblog @crookedslimecreatorpasta @liamxsworld @flowerpowell @bruteforcebears @withice @jared2612 @darley1101

06/02/2018 - More to come tomorrow! :) Just giving you a little taste of what’s to come. This was originally going to be a part of one big chapter, but I just figured since I was away for a while, I’d give you something to read before tomorrow! :)

As always, just shoot me a message or comment with requests to be added to the permanent tag or story tag. :)

PART 38 - Galloping Horses

Riley bit her lip, trying to conceal the smile that so desperately wanted to break out across her face. He showed up. He hadn’t turned away from the baby. He wanted to be involved. A rush of emotions raged through her body, but she held back the happy tears that threatened to flow freely.

“Wonderful,” Dr. Scoggin said happily. “Just in time. We were just going to go over mom and dad’s medical history,” she explained to Liam, motioning for him to have a seat.

Liam took a seat in one of the chairs that were across from the examination table. Riley had laid back, still in a state of surprise and relief all rolled into one. It was as if the weight of the world had been lifted off of her shoulders. She gave a glance to where he was sitting. She had never seen him so nervous before. He wore jeans and a t-shirt with some athletic shoes. He had dressed down for the appointment. It was a nice look for him. He looked so . . . normal. She was always so accustomed to seeing him dressed in formal-wear or his regal uniform, however this side of Liam . . . the laid-back Liam, was attractive. She stopped herself from going further. She couldn’t think like that. Not anymore. She had the lima bean to think about. Nope, going there with him again would just make things more complicated than they already were.

“So,” Dr. Scoggin smiled at both of them. “Are there any sort of medical conditions in any of your immediate families? Diabetes, Cancer, Asthma? Genetic abnormalities?” She asked, her pen at the ready.

Riley glanced toward Liam, swallowing thickly. “Well . . . I had a history of asthma when I was a kid . . . My mom had some pre-cancerous polyps a while back. No real other issues in my family. I have a cousin that has lupus,” she shrugged. “Otherwise pretty healthy,” she said nervously.

“And you, Dad?” The doctor turned her attention to Liam.

Riley caught a small smile play on his lips when the doctor said the word “dad.” What a transformation from the previous night. She found it difficult to believe that the man sitting before her was the same man that she had argued with the previous night. She wondered what had happened to change his mind about things. Maybe he really did just need some time to work things out on his own.

“My father . . . he, uh, passed away from cancer a short while ago,” Liam said, his voice cracking a little. “No other major medical conditions that I’m aware of.”

“Great,” Dr. Scoggin murmured as she jotted all of the information down. “Okay, so the good news is you’re both fairly young and healthy. The older you get, the risks for genetic abnormalities or problems with the pregnancy tend to increase. Everything looks good right now,” she smiled. “The only speed bump seems to be the hyperemesis gravidarum.”

“Hyperemesis gravidarum?” Liam asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Mom here has been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum. In pregnancy, a woman will endure an excessive amount of vomiting. It tends to last at least through the first half of the pregnancy. Sometimes it wanes as time goes on,” she explained.

“That’s why you were hospitalized,” Liam frowned, looking at Riley.

She nodded. “The lima bean had quite a dramatic way of making himself known,” she chuckled.

He sucked a breath in, his forehead wrinkled in concern. “Is it dangerous?”

“It can be, if left untreated. Dehydration is one of the biggest risk factors for mom,” Dr. Scoggin noted. “It’s not too common; maybe 1-2% of pregnant women will suffer from it. Even then there’s varying degrees in severity. Riley here appears to have a moderate level, but we won’t know how severe it is until the pregnancy progresses a bit further.”

Liam’s eyebrows furrowed deeply. The wrinkles in his forehead were deep crevices. He was concerned. It was written all over his face. “Should she be in the hospital?”

Dr. Scoggin shook her head. “She’s fine right now, I assure you.” She noticed the doubt flit across Liam’s face. “It’s okay to be a bit unnerved by such a diagnosis, but tens of thousands of pregnant women have this and they deliver perfectly healthy babies,” she assured them. “Let’s prove it to you and take a look at your baby,” she smiled brightly.

She sat on her rolling chair, fiddling with the buttons and monitor. She moved over to Riley, and she started to shift the paper gown aside to expose her abdomen. Liam watched intently as the doctor pulled out the tube of gel.

“Just going to be a bit cold at first, but then I promise you’ll get used to it as the exam goes on,” she said.

“Oh, they had to do a transvaginal ultrasound at the hospital,” Riley began to object. “They couldn’t find the baby this way,” she explained.

“Don’t worry, if the abdominal ultrasound doesn’t work, we’ll use that technique, but I have a lot of years of practice,” she smiled. “You’re almost ten weeks, so we just might be lucky enough to see the baby this way.”

Riley nodded, but still felt a bit skeptical about it considering her last ultrasounds were merely days ago. She had hoped that the transvaginal ultrasound wouldn’t be necessary. That would be a tad bit embarrassing to have in front of Liam. She didn’t care how many times he had seen her naked, it would still give her a bit of the heeby jeebies to have him witness that sort of procedure being done on her.

Dr. Scoggin moved the ultrasound wand around her belly for a while. Riley waited anxiously, gazing at the screen, waiting for something to pop up. A few moments later, there he was. The lima bean in all his glory. She couldn’t help but smile as she saw him.

“I told you . . . with a little patience and some skill,” Dr. Scoggin chuckled. “I’m just going to take some measurements and snap some images for you both.”

Riley took a quick look at Liam. His eyes were glued to the monitor. He had leaned forward a bit in his chair to get a better look. The expression was one of awe and wonder. He was clearly amazed by the little life they had created.

“It’s so tiny,” he murmured. “And it’s moving so quickly,” he noted.

“Yes, lots of movement, but mom won’t feel it for quite some time. Maybe not at least for another six to seven weeks,” she explained.

Liam reached across to grab Riley’s hand, but hesitated. She saw the worry in his face. She remembered how she had pulled away from his the previous night when he had tried to hold her hand. She sighed. They were back at square one again, but she couldn’t worry about the status of their pseudo-relationship now. She had a chance to see her little lima bean, and she wasn’t going to squander the opportunity.

Dr. Scoggin pulled another device off of the cart with the monitor stationed on it. She pushed it against Riley’s tummy and instantly a whooshing noise filled the space around them.

“What’s that?” Liam asked, a puzzled look on his face. “Is that . . .” he trailed off, realization dawning on him.

“Your baby’s heartbeat,” Dr. Scoggin smiled.

Riley’s eyes began to water. All of the emotions that had been bottled up inside of her since Liam had walked into the room flowed out of her freely.

“It sounds like galloping horses,” she covered her mouth in awe. She’d only seen the fluttering heartbeat on the ultrasound at the hospital that first time. She didn’t even remember the second ultrasound because she had been passed out. This . . . hearing their baby’s heartbeat was nothing short of a miracle.

“Amazing,” Liam murmured.

Riley gazed at Liam with watery eyes. “Isn’t it?” She sighed, feeling so content. Who know that seeing their little baby flitting across the monitor could make her feel so happy?

“Do you mind if I record this?” He asked, his eyes meeting Riley’s.

“He’s your baby, too, Liam. You don’t have to ask,” she gave him a half-smile.

He pulled out his cell phone, and started to record the sound echoing through the room as well as the image of their baby moving across the screen.

“Okay folks, I’m going to move on to the next part of the exam,” she said as she started to turn off the monitor. “We’re going to need to do a pap smear and also get some bloodwork done.”

Riley sat up, wrapping the paper gown back around her. “More pokes?” she asked in dismay. “I feel like a pin cushion as is,” she sighed.

Dr. Scoggin chuckled lightly. “Get used to it, you’ll probably be poked and prodded over the course of this pregnancy. It gets better,” she assured her.

“So, I’m just going to get ready for the pap smear,” Dr. Scoggin said, sifting through a cabinet off behind the monitor.

“And I will take that as my cue to wait outside,” Liam stood, nodding politely. “I’ll give you your privacy, Riley, but perhaps we can talk after the appointment?” He asked softly.

She nodded. “Excellent, I’ll wait for you in the front. Dr. Scoggin, it’s been a pleasure,” he smiled.

“Dad, any questions before you go? Last chance until the next visit,” she said.

“Actually . . . there is a question I’ve had in mind,” he stopped short of opening the exam room’s door. “How soon before she’s able to travel?”

Riley’s head snapped toward Liam. Travel? Then it hit her smack dab in the face. He intended for her to return to Cordonia with them. That wasn’t the plan. She started to sit upright to look him in the eyes. She needed him to know that going back to Cordonia was not an option. Not now. Not ever. She and the baby were going to stay in New York. She’d give birth *-here. She’d raise the baby here. That was non-negotiable.

“I don’t see any reason for there to be any travel restrictions as long as she doesn’t exhaust herself. Long flights can be a bit uncomfortable for women with hyperemesis, but as long as she’s comfortable, it shouldn’t be a problem,” she smiled brightly. “Thinking of a bit of a babymoon?” She asked.

Riley blushed. “It’s not like that,” she muttered, shaking her head.

Liam frowned a bit. “I’m from Europe, and I was hoping she’d come back with me so that I can take care of her,” he explained.

“Ah,” Dr. Scoggin nodded in understanding. “I see. Well, if you are thinking of relocating, the sooner the better would be ideal,” she explained. “As the pregnancy gets further along, I wouldn’t recommend traveling internationally. The stresses that come with a move can also be detrimental to the pregnancy.”

Liam nodded at her in gratitude. “Thank you again,” he said. “I’ll meet you outside,” he said softly to Riley.

She could only nod. She was still reeling from the idea of him wanting her to go back to Cordonia with him.

The pap smear and bloodwork had gone a lot smoother than Riley had expected. Perhaps she had become accustomed to all the uncomfortable tests after being in the hospital so many times over the last week.

“I’m going to get some photos printed out for you, and then I’m going to have you schedule another appointment in two weeks. I don’t think you’ll need to see me much longer. Although you are considered a bit more high risk because of your hyperemesis diagnosis, as long as you continue to take the anti-nausea medication and stay hydrated, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Any questions?”

Riley shook her head.

“Great, I’ll see you in two weeks. Go ahead and get changed, and you can meet my receptionist up front to set your next appointment up,” she smiled.

“Thank you, Dr. Scoggin.”

Riley became lost in her thoughts as she tossed the paper gown in the trash and changed back into her regular clothing. She didn’t want to fight with Liam, especially after they had shared such an amazing experience together, but she just couldn’t let him think that he was going to take control over this pregnancy. Last night it seemed like he wanted nothing to do with the lima bean, now . . . now he was talking about her going back to Cordonia. He couldn’t dictate what she was going to do. If she wanted to stay in New York, she’d stay in New York. She could do this on her own. It’d be difficult, of course, but he could fly down for visits. She’d never deprive him of any of the medical information regarding the pregnancy. Technology was great. She could text him pictures and videos from the appointments. Heck, she could probably even facetime or skype with him during the actual appointment if he wanted to be present at all of the future visits. She didn’t have to move to Cordonia just because she was pregnant with his child. Nope. Not happening.

When Riley exited the exam room and went back into the waiting room, she noticed that Liam had firmly planted himself on one of the chairs. “Ready?”

“I just have to make another appointment,” she said curtly. Liam must have sensed her anger as he took a step back towards the door. She sighed. She hadn’t wanted to snap at him, but she just couldn’t stand the presumptions that were being made on his part. When she was finished, she walked toward the door, which Liam politely opened for her.

As soon as they stepped foot out of the office, she let her irritation rip at him.

“How soon can she travel?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Really Liam?” She brushed pass him pressing the elevator button forcefully.

“Riley . . .”

“Let me get this straight . . . last night you have a major meltdown about this baby . . . act as if you want nothing to do with him, and now you want to take care of me? Don’t get me wrong here, Liam. I’m so happy that you came today. I want you to be a part of our baby’s life, but I’m not going back to Cordonia with you.”

“Yes, you are.” He stated simply.

“No . . . I’m not,” she said adamantly.

He grabbed her wrist, pulling her into his embrace. “I love you, Riley Lawson. We’re having a baby, and I plan to be with you every step of the way. I’ve already missed so much, and I don’t plan on missing anything else when it comes to this pregnancy. I know I screwed up . . . it seems what I do best when it comes to us, but I want to make it up to you. I need to, for our baby’s sake,” his hand reaches out toward her flat stomach. “Give me a chance to take care of you . . . the both of you.”

#the royal romance #theroyalromance #choices: stories you play #choices #playchoices #choices fandom #choices the royal romance #the royal romance fan fic #royal romance #trr au #trr fanfic #trr #choices trr #trr fic #liam #liam x riley

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fatphobiabusters · 8 years ago

Note

1/2 Hi. I have a sort of opinionated question I guess? I was recently diagnosed with pseudo tumor cerebri, so my head produces too much spinal fluid and it can leave my nerves in my head damaged if not treated. The doctors tell me it's something only cis females get between the ages of 18-45 who are also fat. The first doctor who told me did so in a very untasteful manner so I am not left wondering what to do. Because on one hand I am really comfortable with my body and i love it so much but on

2/2 but on the other hand I am very afraid for my health since they told me it could leave me severely disabled or even kill me in the worst case. Right now it’s going down but every time I go to a doctor the only question is if I have ist weight already and if I plan on getting a bypass. I feel so forced into this whole thing. Idk just wanted to ask if any of you ever had a similar experience and what your opinion is I guess? Hope this fits your blog and love you all are doing here! Xx

Well not this exact experience. My rheumatologist keeps trying to force me to get WLS, which is bullshit.

First off, I’d like to encourage you to look at the mayo clinic website. As people with chronic illnesses, we unfortunately have to learn to do a lot of our own research about our conditions. We shouldn’t have to, but doctors are shitty.

About your disease, referencing the above website

Point 1. It’s more common among women of childbearing age. Those are not the only people who get it.

Point 2. It’s more common among fat people, but then look at the list of other conditions that are commonly comorbid with it. There’s a bunch of diseases in there that are associated with being fat, too. Without digging up the statistics, it’s not clear to me that the weight itself is the thing that increases the risk. It might or might not. It might also be an effect of the other diseases being associated with weight gain causing a spurious correlation.

Point 3. Weight loss surgery is dangerous. It increases your risk of premature death a lot. I feel it wouldn’t even be allowed if it weren’t explicitly targeted to marginalized people.

It’s your body though. You shouldn’t let any doctor bully you into doing something you don’t want. They should be explaining the risks and letting you make your own choice.

Maybe it would be in your best interest to try to lose weight, but you are the person who should be making that decision, so they need to tell you the risks and benefits of each course of action/inaction. That’s what informed consent means.

They sound like they’re being really shitty and not treating you as a person with agency.

Can you fire them and go to a different set of doctors? I realize this isn’t always possible, but it’s well worth it if you can.

Hang in there, we’ll be here to talk if you need it. I also highly recommend seeking out community with other patients that have the same condition. It helps a lot, ime.

-Mod Siarl

#medical fatphobia #death #pseudotumor celebri #weight loss #weight loss surgery #sevenhexagons #Ask #Asked and Answered

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jm-3am · 6 years ago

Text

The letter that goes nowhere.

Hello.

Um.

Did I end up accomplishing all 20 things on my list?

Oh. Not at all.

How’d you find this then? Well, I guess after it’s all said and done, the people who are really curious and really taken aback will go on a detective hunt, right?

Right. Well.

I should have written this before I went hysterical, but my head’s not screwed on correctly. You know? Yeah. You know. You’ll probably know by now.

And by now, it’s apparent that I’m not who I said I was.

I’m not really soft. Or nice. Or sunshine despite all the overly flowery terms and emojis, I’m mostly. Um. Nervous.

I think that’s the best way to put it. Stressed could be an extension of this.

Should I even begin to explain why? Or should we skip that part? I don’t know. It’s not very interesting - you’re typical screwed up childhood story. Just another novel - another semi-decent plot that’ll never be a blockbuster.

My earliest memory might be when my parents dropped me off to some relatives and left me there for a while. Call it abandonment issues, but when you’re used to hearing your father say you’re unplanned, a mistake, you cost him his good job in NYC and forced him to move down to the suburbs, and your mother argue “well should I have aborted it?” before he sighs and says no because abortion is a sin, then what? What was I supposed to think? I thought they were giving me away.

I think I was 3, going on 4? Anyway. I learned real quick that nobody’s worth it. Absolutely nobody. My life was worthless because it cost someone a job. My life was worthless because it made people fight. It was so worthless they gave me to strangers because they were tired. And they had to take care of my twin brothers who were babies.

I love my twin brothers, actually. Even though they always call me dumb for not getting vine references and not understanding pop culture, and make fun of me for “supporting the gays” because while they’re super conservative, I’m that one strange pseudo-religious liberal. They’re good people (I think.) They hold the door open for others, they clean the church, they say please and thank you. Actually, these are basic manners, but I guess the arm really does bend INWARDS. They’ll be okay when they grow up I suppose, but right now (despite them only being 2 years younger than me and the closest people I’m allowed to come in contact with - I can’t possibly tell them how I feel). How and why would they understand? Besides, Min always says this, but he won’t come to my funeral. He can’t deal with his sister “being mental.”

Mother? Mom? Well, I suppose she’ll cry. Maybe then I’ll actually get to hear her say the words “I love you” - I remember once, I was maybe in 3rd grade and my teacher had brought her child to work for take-your-child-to-work day. I was surprised how easily she said she loved her daughter - in front of all of us! That night when I went home I asked my mom to tuck me into bed. She at least followed me to my room and said she’ll close my door. I think she was trying. I really think she was. I told her I loved her - I asked her to say it back. She said no. She told me to just go to sleep. In high school I pretended to do a “cultural interview” and asked her why Korean mothers don’t tell their kids they love them. She said it’s embarrassing and unnecessary. Also, the most important thing for any family relationship isn’t love - it’s respect. Huh. I learned something new that day.

I gave up on loving my family. I certainly never learned to respect them. I acknowledge their presence.

They barely acknowledge mine.

It’s sad. I’m looking at the letters on my desk (I think this letter is already longer than all the other three COMBINED). Why three?

Father doesn’t get one.

2017. The last time I wrote a letter to him.

I found it in the trash later as I was taking it out.

The flowers I had hand drawn onto the edges were smudged with banana. It was a pretty funny sight. It was my suicide letter, actually. Asking him to change, to try harder, if he actually wanted me to stay because I was tired.

Did I take it out of the trash?

Why would I.

It was addressed to “아빠” - I call him father or by his last name, now.

Just like the rest of the people at our Church.

I wonder why “adults” have enough authority and credibility to make up lies that are more believable than the truth. We were at a church gathering when my father attacked me with a golf club and the brothers had to pull him off of me as I slid under the billiards table - we were at church when my 5 year old brother was accused of pulling the fire-alarm and he slapped him so hard Matt went flying backwards and hit his head on a display (turns out, another kid in a different room was playing and hit the fire alarm). Everybody saw it. They heard it. They even stepped in to stop him.

But that was just because he lost his cool. All the times I skipped church at home with bruises so bad they couldn’t be covered, every time I limped in and sat still for 2 hours, every strangely placed band aid. “She fell down the stairs” - “she went ice skating with friends and fell” - “Her lip? It’s because she keeps peeling away at it” - “the bruise on her forehead? She was getting into the van and hit her head on the TV”

Nobody ever asked if it was true.

I just (this is so selfish), but I wanted one person to look me in the eye and say, “Is that what happened?” - Nobody did.

I guess that’s how credible the preacher’s words are.

Besides that what else is there? Being dragged out as he gripped my hair and threatened to chain me to his truck and drive down the road while I gasped for enough breath to apologize.

Taking a knife and hacking off my hoodie that I was wearing.

Throwing my albums.

Throwing me against the door and hitting me with a wooden broom until I eventually said sorry for something I didn’t do.

And each time, my mom took my brothers and hid.

I remember the one time my brother and father got into a fist fight. Do you know what my mom did? The woman I thought was scared. Who I thought couldn’t handle this. Who I even protected and got hit with a frying pan IN HER PLACE?

She tackled my father to the ground.

I realized then... it’s not that she couldn’t. She didn’t.

She had priorities.

It was always Josh.

Despite it all. I don’t hate my brothers. Again. How can I. It feels like they’re always the one who eventually step in to stop me from myself.

Especially Josh. I really tried to keep going this time. This year I thought. I thought it would be different. Actually, since the middle half of 2018 I was doing so much better!

He begged me to live. Just live.

Day by day that’s what I did.

He even helped me, supported me going back to what I used to love.

Dancing, and iKON, and going online to start blogging again. He helped me lie about needing a laptop for college, helped me when I came close to being figured out - clean accounts, new IDs for phone checks and laptop confiscations. He tried so hard to keep me alive.

Why. Can’t I be grateful?

I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

I never did get medicated.

Never got diagnosed, actually.

2017 March - I tried killing myself in the bathroom and my mom broke the door down.

2017 December I tried to kill myself in my room, and my brother slept on the floor the whole night to make sure I couldn’t go anywhere. All the kitchen knives he locked in a cabinet in his room with a key that he wore around his neck.

Same with our medicine cabinet. The youngest sat in a chair right next to our medicine drawer all night.

But nope.

We never talk about it to doctors. Or counselors.

We’re not allowed to.

Who’d believe us, anyway?

“Why are you depressed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you aren’t.”

$500.00

isn’t that how it works?

I don’t know. The one time I cried in front of a counselor my father assigned me - it was at church - and they read me some bible scriptures and told me to pray every night and if I believe in the Lord? It’ll all be fine.

I cry to the Lord every time.

He’s never saved me before.

I didn’t want to be the type of person who pointed fingers yet here I am. I suppose I blamed everybody except for the problem. Me.

In the end, nobody else is at fault. It’s me.

I should live this life because it’s given to me, and I should deal with it. It’s my lot. I’m that ungrateful one who’s kicked it aside. Is that why they say “kicked the bucket?”

I also didn’t want to be the cause of anybody’s sadness or... discomfort, actually. I think discomfort is the right word. When I lose people it’s beyond just a ‘sadness’ - I shake, I go numb (I really realize what it feels like for blood to stop flowing), once I melted in panic, and another time I hid from the world in a little closet refusing to believe it.

In retrospect though, I realized I kept living. At first I was really angry that the world could keep turning without her. My childhood friend. I was really really angry that everybody seemed so fine. Her mother kept going to work, her father even moved on, our friends stopped mentioning her, and even me. The person I thought was her closest friend - even I stopped thinking of her everyday and that angered me. How dare I? You know? How could I? If I didn’t remember her, then how sad would she be? How wronged would she feel? But the more I grew the harder life got, and weekends full of piano lessons and sneaking up to her attic afterwards so we could play with her cat turned into recitals, practice, games, church services, and studying.

All that damned studying.

Because that’s apparently the only thing I was good at. And news flash - wasn’t particularly good at it, either.

Anyway, where was this going?

Right.

Nowhere.

Is anybody still reading?

Probably not.

It’s a bunch of mumble jumble but in the end. In the end.

I hope people don’t think I’m delicate, or breakable or that they should have treated me any differently.

Actually, I’d say I’m pretty strong and unfazed.

Nothing really hurts me - I’m so used to hearing the worst of the worst.

“You’re fat, you’re ugly, you look fake, you seem fake, you’re awkward, you’re dumb, shut up, prude, slut, weirdo,” - literally, none of that fazes me. If you told me that I’d just think “wow... you’re very honest with yourself and others. That’s not very mannerly, and I hope you don’t treat others that way, but thanks for sharing your opinion! It was interesting to listen to.” After all, they’re just sharing a snippet of their mind to me. It may even be the truth. Why should I be offended? What gives me the right to be mad? It’s their opinion on me.

Would I be mad if they said that about others I knew? Yeah. Because I know not everybody’s like me. They shouldn’t go around hurting those who don’t deserve it.

Anyway, again, where was this going? Ah. Right. I’m not hurt by anything. Not affected by much. Even if people completely ignore me! I don’t get particularly sour or sad about it - happens naturally and all the time.

I hope people aren’t beating themselves up thinking “I should have done X, Y, Z.” No actually.

You couldn’t have known.

I despise oversharing. IT always leaves me feeling guilty and cautious. Like I’ve changed a dynamic.

I don’t want that.

I always wanted to be a comfortable shelter to people.

Someone they can open up to and give sadness too, but didn’t necessarily have to hear back from. Like a one way valve.

So. Whoever made it this far.

You couldn’t have known.

You couldn’t have done anything different.

Despite what you think - you DID give me small bits of happiness.

I finally. I finally knew what the outside world was like.

People predicted that by the time I was 30 and married to someone my family thoroughly vetted I’d learn what it’s like ‘outside.’ I doubt them though. I’m paying for my own education so I can find some sort of work - so I don’t have to be a stay at home mom, who goes grocery shopping, takes care of the kids, cleans, goes to church, repeat. So that my circle wouldn’t stay this small.

But.

I guess some people really live their whole lives in a small circle.

All I have is my family, the small town church circle (with nobody my age... the closest person being 28), and the friends I was allowed to have over to my house (only) but not allowed to go out with from high school (who, all had closer best friends since... well, I never hung out with them outside of school).

For a few months though I felt alive (nervous as hell) but alive.

Who knew people could get so close online? Share pictures and stories and accomplishments and love? Be happy together, sad, mad, even 19+ together (hahha). I was mind blown. Amazed.

I wondered.

If that. was. normal? Did the world... did people in the world do that?

Meet up? Keep connections going? Care?

This is turning weirdly. Educational.

I guess I should accomplish something from the top 20.

May... I’m not like you. I can’t run away. I’m a coward, actually. I can’t call the police, can’t talk to the authorities. I guess I should tell you it’s because it’s 1 vs 4. I know nobody at home will side with me. I can’t blame them. They’re scared, and they have nothing to lose. Actually, if they just lose me it might be perfect. I was always the one who didn’t go the way they planned.

Yooj. I’ll just. I’ll just text you. I think you deserve it.

Dekota - I’m sorry. In 10 years you and your girlfriend will be taking bubble baths together, and walking to the market while the sunsets just to get ice cream, and your shoes will kick pebbles out of the way, and your hair will be dyed whatever color is cool in 2029 and the world will be better. promise. You’ll be okay. I’ll make sure of it, okay? I did see your last twitter message to me. Yeah. I’m okay now.

Autumn: Always keep your head up, you’re the most beautiful, the most loyal, the most diligent, the most honest. Without you I would have never gotten away from Hope. You changed my life.

Bri: I suppose this is a good time to say, you’re my fav? Haha. You’re also the only one in the family I called up. I regretted that a lot. It took a lot of your time, and I was being selfish, but. You have a really nice voice. Remember I said you sounded like my God sister? No. I realize now that that voice is yours now. You sounded like you. You did sound like home though. The few hours(?) I spent talking to you made the years I was alone and lonely feel okay. If it were up to me, I would have never hung up. I heard a lot of your poems, but I never got to read you one...

“Love is not always staying

in the same place

Love is being in the right one

when they’re looking for you”

I don’t know what I’m saying - never really been in a heart wrenching, or particularly nice, or desperate kind of love, but that’s my interpretation I guess. I imagine it’d be like that, don’t you? I hope you find someone who’s always there for you when you need it.

Sam: As I’ve said before. I never wanted an older sister, I always looked up to my cousin and wanted an older brother, but unnie. I got to know you, and I realized. I wanted an older sister. Actually maybe I just wanted to keep calling you unnie. Thank you for everything. I hope the world, the people around you, I hope they appreciate you for everything you’re doing and all that you are. Eventually, I hope you’re at the top - I hope you go so high in life and have so much fun on the way that you don’t regret it. I hope you’re content and happy - I was because of you.

Dep & Bea - The parents hahah the two BEA-utiful people (I can’t believe I’m pushing through with that! But I am!) Thank you for accepting me. I never knew the word “parents” and “children” could be so fun. I’m glad I got to experience it for a while ^^ ~ your latest daughter (who by the way, has now understood your hate for pineapple pizza, it is all up to personal taste, right? Kekeke, I heard Korea has a sweet potato pizza?! What do you think about that?!!)

Christina - sorry I killed double heart anon (oh my, that sounds so cruel! Double heart anon wasn’t even that active, right?! I just wanted to brighten your day because you brighten ours. Actually, on my phone you’re “Christina 빛이나” (It rhymes!!!) I wish that you keep shining

똑똑 Alfa! (Knock knock - no no no it actually was supposed to be “smart” but the no one came out and now it’s a double meaning!) You’re by far the smartest person I’ve befriended - I’m sure we can all agree, we’re super proud!

Joyce - “Joyce over flowers” - nim hahaha the flower of our group chat, I’m honored to have seen you graduate and keep on going for your dreams, I’ll always watch over you and make sure you’re safe! No matter what you choose to do and where you choose to go, I hope it’s only a flower path for you ^^

Celine - you’re art, you know that? You know?! Everybody should tell you this! You’re ART!

Drew - Intellect if I’ve ever seen one - I know we mostly talked about stanning and how terrible the big three were, but besides that I hope you never lose your cute smile and your whole aesthetic touch. I hope you go through life being as beautiful as always. When you’re happy you glow - your humor made my days and nights!

Nista - Sunshine :’) I’d go blind by staring at your beauty! Your personality always made me happy and warm on the inside, sunshine!

Quinn - I don’t know if I was special to you, but you were special to me; I know I promised we could talk about anything and everything, but you still can! You can still talk to me; I’ll always listen to you. You’re probably one of the people who understood me the best. I hope... that eventually you stop understanding me and find the happiness you deserve and the fulfillment you were looking for

Heera - I’m still on your side. I’ll always be on your side. Through your ‘questionable’ food choices to your ‘anti bobby’ ways - I got you. I really do. And if I let you down, I’m truly sorry.

Anis - I’ll always be sending a hug your way.

Hope - I forgave you. A long time ago, before I even realized it. So let’s move on. Okay?

Jae - You had the most on your plate. I hope you’re handling them one by one. You’re wayyyy more amazing than you give yourself credit for. You’re superhuman~~~ really! Your future is bright, just remember to take one step at a time (AND YOUR WATER BOTTLE!!!)

Julia - It’s been years and I never had the courage to go back but, I did think about you a few times. I actually found you on twt once I started back up. You looked happy. You were doing and saying nice things. It made me happy. I didn’t follow, I didn’t message you, I didn’t bother you by pulling you back into our past that was parts painful and parts hilarious (you’ll never ever see this - but I admired you a lot).

JJ - There were words I never said to you because saying them out loud was scary. I loved you. A lot. And new people came, crushes that moved in then out really quickly, because nobody was you. I hoped that I would eventually learn to love anew, but I know that deep down I never fell out. I’ll probably never fall out.

This letter came nowhere. It’ll go nowhere.

Just like me ^^ But that’s good. It’s not meant to, anyway.

- Just Me (Jung Min)

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dvoyd · 7 years ago

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giant steaming pile of vent.

it’s hard.

it’s hard to care anymore. it’s hard to live anymore. i mean it was always hard, a struggle, fucking torture really (internally at least), but at least i always had a reason to keep going. cuz my mom wanted me to.

now, especially over the last year, something’s changed. it’s like i’ve become, more than anything just a burden on my mother. i know i always was, but i thought that i was one she was willing to take on not only because i’m her child and she loves me, but because she genuinely likes having me around and enjoys being with me

it doesn’t feel like that anymore. now i just feel like some thorn in her side. now i truly feel like i’d be better off dead, because i can’t even conjure up the genuine thought of ‘well at least my mom would miss me, at least she wants me around.’ i just feel like some fucking leech or pest-- granted i always have --but one that was enjoyed despite that, instead of just tolerated out of some... i dunno, sense of parental duty?? guilt???

these last few months have marked a sharp and dramatic decline in my emotional and mental health, due to various reasons (both online and offline), and i can’t find solace anywhere it seems. i genuinely feel that my mom wants nothing to do with me, and it’s not out of paranoia either.

not only have i observed marked and repeated differences in her attitude and desire to even spend time with me, one of the major IRL issues that has caused a severe amount of stress is that she’s been seeking a romantic partner via online dating. she didn’t even see fit to let me know about it until she was already dating a dude after a couple DAYS, and it was going very fast.

i have a ton of personal issues with this, one being that i hate my dad and have very few actual fond memories with him, two that witnessed my mom go through emotional struggles after divorcing my dad and go through dating a few guys who hurt her (i was only a little kid back then but i still recall it). three that a majority of adult males that my mom has associated with (platonically, either friends, coworkers, or like, hiring them to do work on the house / cars / etc) have tried to hit on / flirt with her multiple times, even after she gave indications she wasn’t interested, AND on top of that most of them were MARRIED. and scumbags. even just random male strangers have hit on her.

on top of all of this, i have no siblings. i was raised by a single mom. thus, i never learned how to share her; i grew dependent on her in so many ways, including emotionally, and i am incredibly possessive of her because she is one of very few people in this world that i have ever loved. she and my dad divorced when i was 3, and while i did have minimal contact with him over my childhood and adolescence, i never got emotionally close to him. my mom did briefly date a couple times after him like i said, but it just hurt her more and she stopped after that. she’s never tried since and i never really expected her to.

but she tells me that she’s not willing to live her life isolated and hidden away anymore. that she needs to be with someone romantically to be happy. basically being with me isn’t enough. i know i obviously can’t give her what she wants, but it just... hurts. especially since not only does it make me incredibly anxious and scared and angry and hurt and frustrated and all sorts of things, but also that i realized that i’ve always been willing (and i think even went with the expectation that i’d do so) to reject all romantic and sexual opportunities or potential just to be with her. maybe it’s sad, idk, idc, but thinking about it, it probably doesn’t come at that big of a loss to me because i’ve never experienced either of those things to begin with. i’ve never had sex, and i’ve never dated or had a romantic partner. hell i’ve never even been on a DATE.

now the whole dating thing happened like a month ago and it ended up ending like a week later because when she met him irl she didn’t feel the same chemistry that she did on the phone or computer, but she’s still determined to find someone else. but to make shit even worse and all the more terrifying, my very life hinges on whatever schmuck she picks. she was willing, as i overheard her tell one of her sisters on the phone, to literally pack up her bags and move to wherever that one guy wanted to go. AFTER JUST A FEW DAYS OF TALKING TO HIM.

like i understand that she wants to be happy and even though she cares about me, my being in her life isn’t going to stop her from fulfilling whatever else she needs in her life. like, i’m obviously not going to like or enjoy it, but i’m aware that i either have to put up with it or gtfo. but the fact that she’s willing to pull the rug out from under my feet for some guy she met on the internet (that she claims she had this ‘soulmate’ kind of connection with, yet apparently it only works over the phone/computer, smh) after just a couple days??

you cannot say that you love and care about me and what i think/feel and yet are willing to give me the proverbial middle finger like that. i’m aware that i’m 25 and her parental obligations to me ended the day i turned 18 but holy fuck. that’s just cruel. (not to mention i’m disabled even if the state won’t fucking acknowledge it and have mental + physical illnesses that aren’t all diagnosed because doctors are assholes and want to shove medicine down your throat rather than help you.)

so after having a huge emotional meltdown like a week or two ago over this and the fight we had over it which we never really resolved, on top of other drama (again both IRL and online), basically this whole summer has been a depressing and anxiety-ridden shitfest that has crushed whatever positive growth i managed over the last few years concerning my mental health, because i have suicidal thoughts and urges prominently and daily (i say prominently cuz i technically always have suicidal thoughts, yay depression, but they’re kinda ‘muted’ and in the background and basically get pushed under the rug, thus never acted upon) and my physical health is feeling it too.

i’ve been admitted to the hospital 3 times for suicidal + homicidal ideation / attempts, but all 3 were when i was an adolescent. obviously i’ve had plenty of ideation since, and i did have attempts after as an adult, but the last one no one even knew about (it obv didn’t work), i tried to overdose, but it basically gave me a pseudo-stomach flu (throwing up, nausea, dizziness, etc) and that’s what my mom thought i got until i told her what i did. promised her i wouldn’t do it again which is why she didn’t report it.

but now i’m an adult so that means i’d go to the adult unit and that my mom has no weight in the decision of getting me in or out, though that just assumes i’m unsuccessful. i’ve had enough attempts by now to p much know what it’ll take, and even though i promised my mom i wouldn’t

at this point it is clear i’m nothing more than a burden. that’s not anything more than the reality. i’m 25, no job, no job HISTORY or experience, mentally ill and disabled...

like, my potential in life is gone. it passed me by a while ago. i lost it. i tried to make things better, i tried to get help. i went through a program that was supposed to help people like me GET experience and get a job, but then my mom’s work changed their insurance (which is my mom’s insurance, and through her, mine as well) and the program didn’t accept that insurance. so i had to stop going literally right after i finished the registration process :))) 3 fucking days of filling out paperwork and having to sit there and wait and listen to old people and be in uncomfortable situations, all for nothing

the job market is shit. the pay is nowhere near what a ‘living wage’ actually is, as plenty of millennials can tell you. i’ve submitted tons of applications in the past, and only once have i ever gotten a call back for an interview, went to said interview and got an email back like a week later and was denied. this was for an entry level job at a fucking turkey hill, to basically be a CASHIER or similar. like?? if i can’t get accepted for that lmao.......

basically what is the point in putting myself through more suffering? at least a year or two ago it felt like i was suffering for a reason, or that i had a chance. what do i honestly and realistically have to look forward to?

world war 3?

yeah no thanks

#don't read it if you don't want a huge long post of whining and depressing bs #skyler rants #personal #long post #suicide /#negative /#del

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luidilovins · 4 years ago

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I've already talked to my therapist about this. I've talked about it multiple times. I was worried about going into a neurology clinic just for them to tell me that theyre pseudo seizurse because that narrows my treatment options. And there's of course a stigma, and I have stated multiple times to him its not the stigma im afraid of. I've been diagnosed with Bipolar as a kid and was put on lithium before I started seeing different psychiatrists who realized that this was a misdiagnosis and i was rediagnosed with Aspergers in 2009.

The stigma is not what concerns me. I reminded my therapist that the first day I showed up to his office he asked me what I wanted out of these sessions and I said "I wanna get shit done." and I still intend to do it if that's what we both deem neccesary for my health.

But cominv from someone who was forced on lithium as a 11 year old without neccesarily needing it I'm genuinly concerned about rhe rammifications of having overlooked but in Captain Hindsight underlying issues. I told my therapist my main concern is i could get a broken bone and the emergency doctor not only could judge me for looking obviously queer but also read "psychogenic pseudoseizures" as the same damn thing as "hypochondriac.

I am well aware that this is the knee-jerk reaction that people who GET diagnosed with any variant of Psychogenic Non Epileptic Seizure disorders would get. There's a social stigma. I make it clear to my therapist "im willing to accept that I have this issue if it is brought up during my neurology followup, and I will continue the suggested treatment accordingly under the circumstances that I will beinifit from it. But i will not be accepting the diagnosis."

My therapist is like "okay just give them my phone number and we'll talk if you need someone to back you up."

If I were to self diagnose myself with anything it would be some variant of authoritative paranoia. I ask him if my feelings are unfounded in reality. Am I avoiding things that are in front of my nose because i don't enjoy the notion of the truth. He replies by telling me that nothing I've said has been unfounded by previous contexts of my life experiences and doctors first and formost are paied by diagnosing their patients so they can bill their insurance companines.

So I've been fairly quiet about my current state, mainly because ive been inching up on my dosage of antidepressants and I'm too out of my mind to collect my thought sbut I'll fuckin do my best.

Just got off the phone with my neurologist. And judging from the last time i spoke with her after my EEG WHICH BY THE WAY SHE CANCELED THE FOLLOWUP TWICE BEFORE I HAD THIS TERRIBLE PHONE APPOINTMENT ITS LITERALLY A MONTH LATER, I had a hunch on how this was gonna go.

#about me #my post #medical #luidilovins

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tinymixtapes · 8 years ago

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Music Review: Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me

Mount Eerie A Crow Looked At Me [P.W. Elverum & Sun; 2017] Rating: 5/5 “Everybody, it’s gonna happen. You know it’s gonna happen. It happens every day. Billions and billions of people have already died. You too will die. Sing along with us, won’t you?” – Daniel Johnston, “Funeral Home” We are always dying. We die because we fight over shiny stuff. We die because we drive with our eyes on our screens or swallow the wrong things. We die because we extract ancient dead things from the ground that in turn pollute our lungs and synthesize the hydrocarbons that do us harm. We die because our country told us to, because sometimes our stomachs are denied nutrition, because sometimes it’s easier to die than to engage in culture. Of course, we most often die because our cells stop dividing — a phenomenon we equate with ageing. We get old, we die. But sometimes these cells express the opposite: uncontrollable growth and division, which can then lead to a lump, the potential for spreading, and then, sometimes, death. When my wife told me in October 2013 that she was diagnosed with breast cancer, my first thought arrived as a question. It wasn’t about what type of breast cancer, how advanced it was, or which treatments would be required. It wasn’t about how to tell our son or our family or our friends. None of that crossed my mind. As I stood there shocked and unable to mutter any sort of consoling platitude, wrapping my arms around her as she sobbed, the only thought I had in my mind was: Is this person I’m hugging right now going to die? --- My wife is fortunately still alive, but Phil Elverum’s is not. On July 9, 2016, Geneviève Castrée — Phil Elverum’s wife, artist/musician, the mother to their daughter, and his 13-year companion — died from pancreatic cancer. A Crow Looked At Me is Phil’s open-letter tribute to her, an 11-song album that details loss and grief wearily and pensively, but with a clarity of mind. Similar aesthetically to works like Dawn and Little Bird Flies Into A Big Black Cloud, Phil presents his thoughts here with stunning candor, using just a laptop and a microphone to capture his characteristically amorphous guitar lines and thin yet comforting balm of a voice. It was recorded in the room that Geneviève died in and performed mostly on her instruments. The lyrics were written on her paper. But the specifics of its sounds and details of its creation feel as irrelevant and unimportant as any ��review” of it (which is why the rating above means absolutely nothing). This isn’t just an album about death. It’s an album that lives death. Death, here, isn’t simply a cessation of bodily functions; it’s an implied process: the process of dying, the process of grieving, the process of performing these processes of death and grief. It’s a testament to how death paradoxically roots itself in life, smudging our desire to concretize abstractions and couching our anxieties in the very human tendency toward wonderment: What is death? What is life? Why does her body look this way? Why do I feel bitter? What do I do now? Rather than wailing existential poetry about the universe and anthropomorphizing the elements through his typically keen, self-aware wisdom, Phil has adopted a no-bullshit, matter-of-fact lyrical approach whose trailing musings and minimalistic narratives resemble those of a diary, a memento mori that acts more like a generous reminder of death’s impact than an artful expression of it. The resulting lyrics are shockingly simplified, but utterly disarming because of it: “I can’t get the image out of my head/ Of when I held you right there/ And watched you die,” he sings on “Swims” over swaying electic guitar, strummed as if it were a nylon. On the gorgeous “Ravens,” he softly croons over broken chords: “I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away/ I’m sorry.” Because Phil deliberately foregoes using metaphors and “big-picture reflections,” much of the album’s strength lies in the excruciating specificity of the domestic and the mundane: old underwear, bloody tissues, her squeaking chair, taking out the garbage, logging time and place with a journalistic rather than artistic flair. The latter loosely brackets off various moments in Phil’s grieving process, as if to ensure their transience. Reflection here is more about remembering than ruminating, Phil shifting from lyrics like “Our daughter is one and a half/ You have been dead 11 days” (“Seaweed”) to “Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?” (“My Chasm”). There are some truly sublime moments — the verses in “Ravens,” the refrain of “Soria Moria” — that join some of Phil’s greatest melodies, but it mostly sounds like he’s feeling his way through the chords and, ultimately, letting the words shape the songs. As a result, the melodies feel decidedly less worked over, oftentimes arriving loose and lopsided, almost indistinct. This approach, coupled with his avoidance of the towering, expansive textures of his recent work, ensures we don’t get too absorbed by our own thoughts, that we don’t get overly seduced by its musicality lest we forget that “death is real,” the album’s pseudo mantra. Which is fitting: we don’t sing along to this album, we cry to it. There’s an entrenched realism in play here, a constant, weary reminder of our soggy corporeality and our oftentimes futile attempts to transcend it. Because, for Phil, it’s not just that grief flails under a “crushing absurdity,” but that it also manifests physically, with knees failing, brains failing, faces contorting, bodies collapsing. Geneviève, too, is not just a dead wife and dead mother. Before becoming “burnt bones,” “dust,” and “ashes in a jar,” Geneviève is depicted as a dying face, a body transforming, a wife chemically reduced to something “jaundiced and fucked.” Because cancer kills, sure, but the destruction happens over time. I don’t know what it was like in Phil’s household, but ours was constantly on alert, self-isolating ourselves from the world because we were terrified of germs that could derail any progress. There were unexpected allergic reactions and multiple emergency trips, fallen hair gathering in the corners of the wood floors, trivial fights and overbearing guilt and bitterness that we are still working to get through. Intimacy was replaced by hospital gowns and premature goodnights, the body ravaged by toxic medicines, the body dismembered and, later, reconstructed. It all weighed on our then three-year-old son, who at first couldn’t understand why Mom was always sleeping and why she couldn’t play with him. But time can be an asset, and on this album and in my own life, it acts not to heal, per se, but to deteriorate memory, to exploit its imprecision in order to make us remember less clearly. Death implies replacement, substitution, a clearing of space for someone else to breathe the air we breathe or buy the shit we buy or do the other ridiculous/awesome/mostly ridiculous things that humans do. But trauma, devastation, loss — they’re not things that just go away if you’re still breathing. They linger, reduced in severity over time only because they become less functional to the social whole and therefore less necessary to dwell on once grief is internalized, once it changes our composition, effectively allowing us to be “post-human in a past that keeps happening ahead of you,” as Joanne Kyger put it in the poem gracing the album’s cover (RIP Joanne Kygerb, who sadly died this week). It never feels right to “move on” from death, whatever that means, but the world does anyway, seemingly indifferent to our pain. So, we too join in — sometimes without realizing it, sometimes with an unbelievable awareness. As Phil sings on “Toothbrush/Trash”: “Today I just felt it for the first time three months and one day after you died. I realized that these photographs we have of you are slowly replacing the subtle familiar memory of what it’s like to know you’re in the other room, to hear you singing on the stairs, a movement, a pinecone, your squeaking chair, the quiet untreasured in-between times, the actual experience of you here. I can feel these memories escaping colonized by photos, narrowed down, told. My mind erasing.” I took a couple trips recently, one to visit my cousin and another to visit my aunt. But both trips were actually painful, awkward goodbyes: roughly a week after each visit, my cousin and my aunt would be dead, both due to cancer. “Auntie Shenshen died,” I told my son shortly after it happened. He paused, then replied, softly: “Don’t tell me that kind of stuff.” --- It’s not easy to hear about death, which is of course why A Crow Looked At Me is a challenging listen. Because unlike some of Phil’s earlier work, the album isn’t a simple aestheticization of death. “This new album is barely music,” said Phil in an interview with Pitchfork. “It’s just me speaking her name out loud, her memory.” But although the lyrics are ostensibly about his own experiences with death, Phil’s documentation from the frontlines of tragedy acts, in the end, as a selfless reflection of love, carrying Geneviève’s memory in and through song, letting his admiration for her override anxiety about who he is now and how he and his daughter fit in a world without her. As he put it in a note released with the album: The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known. As listeners, we are implicated through knowing, with the understanding that interpretation and value judgments here are essentially irrelevant. The album defies being used as an accessory for identity construction, and the words — most of which are written to Geneviève herself, except the faint glimmer of hope expressed in the final track to his daughter — are too direct, too intimate, too real to foster casual or interpretive listening. With A Crow Looked At Me, Phil — who had kept much of his family life private until last year’s GoFundMe campaign — has laid himself bare, sharing a dark, devastating moment in his family’s life with an open vulnerability that’s complemented by the strength and generosity required to give voice to it in the first place. Over many songs and many albums, Phil’s primary aim has been to communicate grand ideas, to be understood, and his own perception that he’s been unable to do so without misunderstanding has always haunted how he writes — sometimes awkwardly so. As he put it in an autobiographical essay, “[T]he truth is that I am sensitive to any thematic or lyrical misunderstandings because I actually do want to get my idea across, beyond just me, and I continue to try to get my blade sharper.” But by plummeting into the depths of his own cavernous pain on this release, relinquishing the obscuring metaphors and telling “everything as it is,” he has transformed personal grief into something like a universal sorrow, grounded in a loving, caring lucidity unlike any of his other works. Those who have suffered through loss will have much to relate with on A Crow Looked At Me, but it won’t be a salve for your despair. There are no instructions here on how to deal with grief, no moralistic epiphanies or clever grandiose poetics. But it could, at the very least, help some of us better understand how grief functions in our own lives, how being reflexive about loss can help us accept that “We are all always so close to not existing at all” or offer insight into how we too can function when “someone’s there and then they’re not.” In the context of our own narcissistic pretenses and the technologies that mediate our interactions — our constructed identities, our social media performances, our avatars and their simulations — the act of being brutally honest, of being uncomfortably direct through the highly flawed, imperfect thing we call language becomes an act of boldness and, for me, a source of inspiration. This is why I’m writing not as “Mr P” in this review, but as Marvin Lin: a longtime admirer of Phil’s music and a fellow caretaker, griever, and father, scared about the future but overwhelmed by feelings of openness and kinship. And it’s helping. http://j.mp/2mX2miL

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How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endanger Us All

New Post has been published on https://parentinguideto.com/must-see/how-panicked-parents-skipping-shots-endanger-us-all/

How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endanger Us All

The debate over childhood vaccination has been in the news on and off for nearly a decade. In 2009 WIRED published a comprehensive cover story on the subject—An Epidemic of Fear—laying out the debate and analyzing how unjustified and unscientific thinking was fueling a growing anti-vaccine moment. As another wave of stories about vaccination dominate the media, we thought it was time to revisit our earlier coverage.

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ’em and stab ’em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Thousands of people revile Offit publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser and you’ll find not Offit’s official site but an anti-Offit screed “dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry’s most well-paid spokesperson.” Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Offit’s education was once altered to say that he’d studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He’s a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).

Then there are the threats. Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.

“I don’t think he wanted to hurt me,” Offit recalls. “He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil.” Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm’s length before gingerly tearing it open. “I think about it,” he admits. “Anthrax.”

This isnt a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. Its a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines.

So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.

As a result, Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it. McCarthy, an actress and a former Playboy centerfold whose son has been diagnosed with autism, is the best-known leader of the movement, but she is joined by legions of well-organized supporters and sympathizers.

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

In the center of the fray is Paul Offit. “People describe me as a vaccine advocate,” he says. “I see myself as a science advocate.” But in this battle — and make no mistake, he says, it’s a pitched and heated battle — “science alone isn’t enough … People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t get this vaccine,’ and their child dies of Hib meningitis,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven’t convinced that parent.”

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort.

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a third world problem — were a first world reality.

Peter Yang

Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

And if you need a new factoid to support your belief system, it has never been easier to find one. The Internet offers a treasure trove of undifferentiated information, data, research, speculation, half-truths, anecdotes, and conjecture about health and medicine. It is also a democratizing force that tends to undermine authority, cut out the middleman, and empower individuals. In a world where anyone can attend what McCarthy calls the “University of Google,” boning up on immunology before getting your child vaccinated seems like good, responsible parenting. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

There are anti-vaccine Web sites, Facebook groups, email alerts, and lobbying organizations. Politicians ignore the movement at their peril, and, unlike in the debates over creationism and global warming, Democrats have proved just as likely as Republicans to share misinformation and fuel anxiety.

US senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut have both curried favor with constituents by trumpeting the notion that vaccines cause autism. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the most famous Democratic family of all, authored a deeply flawed 2005 Rolling Stone piece called “Deadly Immunity.” In it, he accused the government of protecting drug companies from litigation by concealing evidence that mercury in vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids. The article was roundly discredited for, among other things, overestimating the amount of mercury in childhood vaccines by more than 100-fold, causing Rolling Stone to issue not one but a prolonged series of corrections and clarifications. But that did little to unring the bell.

The bottom line: Pseudo-science preys on well-intentioned people who, motivated by love for their kids, become vulnerable to one of the world’s oldest professions. Enter the snake-oil salesman.

When a child is ill, parents will do anything to make it right. If you doubt that, just spend a day or two at the annual conference of the nonprofit organization Autism One, a group built around the conviction that autism is caused by vaccines. It shares its agenda with other advocacy groups like the National Autism Association, the Coalition for SafeMinds, and McCarthy’s Generation Rescue. All these organizations cite similar anecdotes — children who appear to shut down and exhibit signs of autistic behavior immediately after being vaccinated — as proof. Autism One, like others, also points to rising rates of autism — what many parents call an epidemic — as evidence that vaccines are to blame. Finally, Autism One asserts that the condition is preventable and treatable, and that it is the toxins in vaccines and the sheer number of childhood vaccines (the CDC recommends 10 vaccines, in 26 doses, by the age of 2 — up from four vaccines in 1983) that combine to cause disease in certain sensitive children.

Their rhetoric often undergoes subtle shifts, especially when the scientific evidence becomes too overwhelming on one front or another. After all, saying you’re against all vaccines does start to sound crazy, even to a parent in distress over a child’s autism. Until recently, Autism One’s Web site flatly blamed “too many vaccines given too soon.” Lately, the language has gotten more vague, citing “environmental triggers.”

But the underlying argument has not changed: Vaccines harm America’s children, and doctors like Paul Offit are paid shills of the drug industry.

To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 20011) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems. The so-called epidemic, researchers assert, is the result of improved diagnosis, which has identified as autistic many kids who once might have been labeled mentally retarded or just plain slow. In fact, the growing body of science indicates that the autistic spectrum — which may well turn out to encompass several discrete conditions — may largely be genetic in origin. In April, the journal Nature published two studies that analyzed the genes of almost 10,000 people and identified a common genetic variant present in approximately 65 percent of autistic children.

But that hasn’t stopped as many as one in four Americans from believing vaccines can poison kids, according to a 2008 survey. And outreach by grassroots organizations like Autism One is a big reason why.

Researchers, alas, cant respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy not if theyre going to follow the rules of science.

At this year’s Autism One conference in Chicago, I flashed more than once on Carl Sagan’s idea of the power of an “unsatisfied medical need.” Because a massive research effort has yet to reveal the precise causes of autism, pseudo-science has stepped aggressively into the void. In the hallways of the Westin O’Hare hotel, helpful salespeople strove to catch my eye as I walked past a long line of booths pitching everything from vitamins and supplements to gluten-free cookies (some believe a gluten-free diet alleviates the symptoms of autism), hyperbaric chambers, and neuro-feedback machines.

To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation “No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism” onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy (the controversial — and risky — administration of certain chemicals that leech metals from the body), and Lupron (a medicine that shuts down testosterone synthesis).

Offit calls this stuff, much of which is unproven, ineffectual, or downright dangerous, “a cottage industry of false hope.” He didn’t attend the Autism One conference, though his name was frequently invoked. A California woman with an 11-year-old autistic son told me, aghast, that she’d personally heard Offit say you could safely give a child 10,000 vaccines (in fact, the number he came up with was 100,000 — more on that later). A mom from Arizona, who introduced me to her 10-year-old “recovered” autistic son — a bright, blue-eyed, towheaded boy who hit his head on walls, she said, before he started getting B-12 injections — told me that she’d read Offit had made $50 million from the RotaTeq vaccine. In her view, he was in the pocket of Big Pharma.

The central message at these conferences boils down to this: “The medical establishment doesn’t care, but we do.” Every vendor I talked to echoed this theme. And every parent expressed a frustrated, even desperate belief that no one in traditional science gives a hoot about easing their pain or addressing their theories — based on day-to-day parental experience — about autism’s causes.

Actually, scientists have chased down some of these theories. In August, for example, Pediatrics published an investigation of a popular hypothesis that children with autism have a higher incidence of gastrointestinal problems, which some allege are caused by injected viruses traveling to the intestines. Jenny McCarthy’s foundation posits that autism stems from these bacteria, as well as heavy metals and live viruses present in some vaccines. Healing your child, therefore, is a matter of clearing out the “environmental toxins” with, among other things, special diets. The Pediatrics paper found that while autistic kids suffered more from constipation, the cause was likely behavioral, not organic; there was no significant association between autism and GI symptoms. Moreover, gluten- and dairy-free diets did not appear to improve autism and sometimes caused nutritional deficiencies.

But researchers, alas, can’t respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy — not if they’re going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines. But that phrasing — what sounds like equivocation — is just enough to allow doubts to not only remain but to fester. Meanwhile, in the eight years since thimerosal was removed from vaccines (a public relations mistake, in Offit’s view, because it seemed to indicate to the public that thimerosal was toxic), the incidences of autism continue to rise.

The battle we are waging will determine what both health and freedom will look like in America. — Barbara Loe Fisher

In the wake of the latest thimerosal studies, most of the anti-vaccination crowd — even Autism One, despite the ever-changing rhetoric on its Web site — has shifted their aim away from any particular vaccine to a broader, fuzzier target: the sheer number of vaccines that are recommended. It sounds, after all, like common sense. There must be something risky about giving too many vaccines to very young children in too short a time. Opponents argue that for some children the current vaccine schedule creates a “toxic overload.”

“I’m not anti-vaccine,” McCarthy says. “I’m anti-toxin.” She stops just short of calling for an outright ban. McCarthy delivered the keynote address at the Autism One conference this year, just as she had in 2008. She drew a standing-room-only crowd, many of whom know her not from her acting but from her frequent appearances on TV talk shows, Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and Twitter (@JennyfromMTV). McCarthy has authored two best-selling books on “healing” autism and is on the board of the advocacy group Generation Rescue (motto: “Autism is reversible”). With her stream-of-consciousness rants (“Too many toxins in the body cause neurological problems — look at Ozzy Osbourne, for Christ’s sake!”) and celebrity allure, she is the anti-vaccine movement’s most popular pitchman and prettiest face.

Barbara Loe Fisher, by contrast, is indisputably the movement’s brain. Fisher is the cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Virginia, the largest, oldest, and most influential of the watchdog groups that oppose universal vaccination. At the Autism One conference, Fisher took the podium with characteristic flair. As she often does, Fisher began with the story of her son Chris, who she believes was damaged by vaccines at the age of two and a half. A short film featuring devastating images of sick kids — some of them seemingly palsied, others with tremors, others catatonic — drove the point home. The film, accompanied by Bryan Adams’ plaintive song “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” ended with this message emblazoned on the screen: “All the children in this video were injured or killed by mandatory vaccinations.”

Against this backdrop, Fisher, a skilled debater who often faces down articulate, well-informed scientists on live TV, mentioned Offit frequently. She called him the leading “pro-forced-vaccination proponent” and cast him as a man who walks in lockstep with the pharmaceutical companies and demonizes caring parents. With the likely introduction of a swine flu vaccine later this year, Fisher added, Americans needed to wake up to the “draconian laws” that could force every citizen to either be vaccinated or quarantined. That isn’t true — the swine flu vaccine, like other flu vaccines, will be administered on a voluntary basis. But no matter: Fisher’s argument turns vaccines from a public health issue into one of personal choice, an unwritten bit of the Bill of Rights.

In her speech, Fisher borrowed from the Bible, George Orwell, and the civil rights movement. “The battle we are waging,” she said, “will determine what both health and freedom will look like in America.” She closed by quoting the inscription above the door of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC: “The first to perish were the children.” And then she brought it home: “If we believe in compassion, if we believe in the future, we will do whatever it takes to give our children back the future that is their birthright.” The audience cheered as the words sank in: Whatever it takes. “No forced vaccination,” Fisher concluded. “Not in America.”

Paul Offit has a slightly nasal voice and a forceful delivery that conspire to make him sound remarkably like Hawkeye Pierce, the cantankerous doctor played by Alan Alda on the TV series M*A*S*H. As a young man, Offit was a big fan of the show (though he felt then, and does now, that Hawkeye was “much cooler than me”). Offit is quick-witted, funny, and — despite a generally mild-mannered mien — sometimes so assertive as to seem brash. “Scientists, bound only by reason, are society’s true anarchists,” he has written — and he clearly sees himself as one. “Kaflooey theories” make him crazy, especially if they catch on. Fisher, who has long been the media’s go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call “parents rights,” makes him particularly nuts, as in “You just want to scream.” The reason? “She lies,” he says flatly.

“Barbara Loe Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I’m in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids. Does she think Merck is paying me to speak about vaccines? Is that the logic?” he asks, exasperated. (Merck is doing no such thing). But when it comes to mandating vaccinations, Offit says, Fisher is right about him: He is an adamant supporter.

“We have seat belt rules,” he says. “Seat belts save lives. There was never a question about that. The data was absolutely clear. But people didn’t use them until they were required to use them.” Furthermore, the decision not to buckle up endangers only you. “Unless you fly through the window and hit somebody else,” he adds. “I believe in mandates. I do.”

We are driving north (seat belts on) across Philadelphia in Offit’s gray 2009 Toyota Camry, having just completed a full day of rounds at Children’s Hospital. Over the past eight hours, Offit has directed a team of six residents and med students as they evaluated more than a dozen children with persistent infections. He pulls into the driveway of the comfy four-bedroom Tudor in the suburbs where his family has lived for the past 13 years. It’s a nice enough house, with a leafy green yard and a two-car garage where a second Toyota Camry (this one red, a year older, and belonging to his wife, Bonnie) is already parked. Let’s just say that if Offit has indeed made $50 million from RotaTeq, as his critics love to say, he is hiding it well.

Offit acknowledges that he received a payout — “several million dollars, a lot of money” — when his hospital sold its stake in RotaTeq last year for $182 million. He continues to collect a royalty each year. It’s a fluke, he says — an unexpected outcome. “I’m not embarrassed about it,” he says. “It was the product of a lot of work, although it wasn’t why I did the work, nor was it, frankly, the reward for the work.”

Similarly, the suggestion that pharmaceutical companies make vaccines hoping to pocket huge profits is ludicrous to Offit. Vaccines, after all, are given once or twice or three times in a lifetime. Diabetes drugs, neurological drugs, Lipitor, Viagra, even Rogaine — stuff that a large number of people use every day — that’s where the money is.

That’s not to say vaccines aren’t profitable: RotaTeq costs a little under $4 a dose to make, according to Offit. Merck has sold a total of more than 24 million doses in the US, most for $69.59 a pop — a 17-fold markup. Not bad, but pharmaceutical companies do sell a lot of vaccines at cost to the developing world and in some cases give them away. Merck committed $75 million in 2006 to vaccinate all children born in Nicaragua for three years. In 2008, Merck’s revenue from RotaTeq was $665 million. Meanwhile, a blockbuster drug like Pfizer’s Lipitor is a $12 billion-a-year business.

To understand exactly why Offit became a scientist, you must go back more than half a century, to 1956. That was when doctors in Offit’s hometown of Baltimore operated on one of his legs to correct a club foot, requiring him to spend three weeks recovering in a chronic care facility with 20 other children, all of whom had polio. Parents were allowed to visit just one hour a week, on Sundays. His father, a shirt salesman, came when he could. His mother, who was pregnant with his brother and hospitalized with appendicitis, was unable to visit at all. He was 5 years old. “It was a pretty lonely, isolating experience,” Offit says. “But what was even worse was looking at these other children who were just horribly crippled and disfigured by polio.” That memory, he says, was the first thing that drove him toward a career in pediatric infectious diseases.

There was something else, too. From an early age, Offit embraced the logic and elegance of the scientific method. Science imbued a chaotic world with an order that he found reassuring.

“What I loved about science was its reason. You have data. You stand back and you discuss the strengths and weaknesses of that data. There’s just something very calming about that,” he says. “You formulate a hypothesis, you establish burdens of proof, you subject your hypothesis to rigorous testing. You’ve got 20 pieces of a 1,000-piece puzzle … It’s beautiful, really.”

There were no doctors in the Offit family; he decided to become the first. In 1977, when he was an intern at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, he witnessed the second event that would determine his career path: the death of a little girl from a rotavirus infection (there was, as yet, no vaccine). The child’s mother had been diligent, calling her pediatrician just a few hours after the girl’s fever, vomiting, and diarrhea had begun. Still, by the time the girl was admitted, she was too dehydrated to have an intravenous line inserted. Doctors tried everything to rehydrate her, including sticking a bone marrow needle into her tibia to inject fluids. She died on the table. “I didn’t realize it killed children in the United States,” Offit says, remembering how the girl’s mother, after hearing the terrible news, came into the room and held her daughter’s hand. “That girl’s image was always in my head.”

The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk. Its just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, Heres what that different risk looks like.” — Paul Offit

The third formative moment for Offit came in the late 1980s, when he met Maurice Hilleman, the most brilliant vaccine maker of the 20th century. Hilleman — a notoriously foulmouthed genius who toiled for years in the Philadelphia labs of Merck — invented vaccines to prevent measles, mumps, and rubella (and later came up with the combination of the three, the MMR). He created vaccines for hepatitis A and B, Hib, chicken pox, pneumococcus, and meningococcus. He became Offit’s mentor; Offit later became Hilleman’s biographer.

Offit believes in the power of good storytelling, which is why he writes books, five so far. He dearly wants to pull people into the exciting mysteries that scientists wrestle with every day. He wants us all to understand that vaccines work by introducing a weakened strain of a particular virus into the body — a strain so weak that it cannot make us sick. He wants us to revel in this miracle of inoculation, which causes our immune systems to produce antibodies and develop “memory cells” that mount a defense if we later encounter a live version of that virus.

It’s easy to see why Offit felt a special pride when, after 25 years of research and testing, he and two colleagues, Fred Clark and Stanley Plotkin, joined the ranks of the vaccine inventors. In February 2006, RotaTeq was approved for inclusion in the US vaccination schedule. The vaccine for rotavirus, which each year kills about 600,000 children in poor countries and about 40 children in the US, probably saves hundreds of lives a day.

But in certain circles, RotaTeq is no grand accomplishment. Instead, it is offered as Exhibit A in the case against Offit, proving his irredeemable bias and his corrupted point of view. Using this reasoning, of course, Watson and Crick would be unreliable on genetics because the Nobel Prize winners had a vested interest in genetic research. But despite the illogic, the argument has had some success. Consider the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews new vaccines and administration schedules: Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Offit was a member of the panel, along with experts in infectious diseases, virology, microbiology, and immunology. Now the 15-person panel is made up mostly of state epidemiologists and public-health officials.

That’s not by accident. According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

Hence the death threats against Paul Offit. Curt Linderman Sr., the host of “Linderman Live!” on AutismOne Radio and the editor of a blog called the Autism File, recently wrote online that it would “be nice” if Offit “was dead.”

I’d met Linderman at Autism One. He’d given his card to me as we stood outside the Westin O’Hare talking about his autistic son. “We live in a very toxic world,” he’d told me, puffing on a cigarette.

It was hard to argue with that.

Despite his reputation, Offit has occasionally met a vaccine he doesn’t like. In 2002, when he was still a member of the CDC’s advisory committee, the Bush administration was lobbying for a program to give the smallpox vaccine to tens of thousands of Americans. Fear of bioterrorism was rampant, and everyone voted in favor — everyone except Offit. The reason: He feared people would die. And he didn’t keep quiet about his reservations, making appearances on 60 Minutes II and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

The problem with the vaccine, he said, is that “one in every million people who gets it dies.” Moreover, he said, because smallpox is visible when its victims are contagious (it is marked by open sores), outbreaks — if there ever were any — could be quickly contained, and there would be plenty of time to begin vaccinations then. A preventive vaccine, he said, “was a greater risk than the risk of smallpox.”

Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement — that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC’s vaccination schedule — that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)

Risk is also the motivating idea in Offit’s life. This is a man, after all, who opted to give his own two children — now teenagers — the flu vaccine before it was recommended for their age group. Why? Because the risk of harm if his children got sick was too great. Offit, like everyone else, will do anything to protect his children. And he wants Americans to be fully educated about risk and not hoodwinked into thinking that dropping vaccines keeps their children safe. “The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.”

Getting the measles is no walk in the park, either — not for you or those who come near you. In 2005, a 17-year-old Indiana girl got infected on a trip to Bucharest, Romania. On the return flight home, she was congested, coughing, and feverish but had no rash. The next day, without realizing she was contagious, she went to a church gathering of 500 people. She was there just a few hours. Of the 500 people present, about 450 had either been vaccinated or had developed a natural immunity. Two people in that group had vaccination failure and got measles. Thirty-two people who had not been vaccinated and therefore had no resistance to measles also got sick. Did the girl encounter each of these people face-to-face in her brief visit to the picnic? No. All you have to do to get the measles is to inhabit the airspace of a contagious person within two hours of them being there.

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

Science must somehow prove a negative that vaccines dont cause autism which is not how science typically works. Until the cause of autism is discovered, scientists can establish only that vaccines are safe and that threshold has already been met.

Perceived risk — our changing relationship to it and our increasing intolerance of it — is at the crux of vaccine safety concerns, not to mention related fears of pesticides, genetically modified food, and cloning. Sharon Kaufman, a medical anthropologist at UC San Francisco, observes that our concept of risk has evolved from an external threat that’s out of our control (think: statistical probability of a plane crash) to something that can be managed and controlled if we just make the right decisions (eat less fat and you’ll live longer). Improved diagnostic tests, a change in consumer awareness, an aging society determined to stay youthful — all have contributed to the growing perception that risk (of death, illness, accident) is our responsibility to reduce or eliminate. In the old order, risk management was in the hands of your doctor — or God. Under the new dispensation, it’s all up to you. What are the odds that your child will be autistic? It’s your job to manage them, so get thee to the Internet, and fast.

The thimerosal debacle exacerbated this tendency, particularly when the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service issued a poorly worded statement in 1999 that said “current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make safe vaccines even safer.” In other words, there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever, but you never know.

“When science came out and said, ‘Uh-oh, there may be a risk,’ the stage was already set,” Kaufman says, noting that many parents felt it was irresponsible not to have doubts. “It was Pandora’s box.”

The result is that science must somehow prove a negative — that vaccines don’t cause autism — which is not how science typically works. Edward Jenner invented vaccination in 1796 with his smallpox inoculation; it would be 100 years before science, such as it was, understood why the vaccine worked, and it would be even longer before the specific cause of smallpox could be singled out. Until the cause of autism is discovered, scientists can establish only that vaccines are safe — and that threshold has already been met.

The government is still considering funding more research trials to look for a connection between vaccines and autism. To Kaufman, there’s some justification for this, given that it may be the only way to address everyone’s doubts. But the thimerosal panic suggests that, if bungled, such trials could make a bad situation worse. To scientists like Offit, further studies are also a waste of precious scientific resources, not to mention taxpayers’ money. They take funding away from more pressing matters, including the search for autism’s real cause.

A while back, Offit was asked to help put together a reference text on vaccines. Specifically, his colleagues wanted him to write a chapter that assessed the capacity of the human immune system. It was a hypothetical exercise: What was the maximum number of vaccines that a person could handle? The point was to arm doctors with information that could reassure parents. Offit set out to determine two factors: how many B cells, which make antibodies, a person has in a milliliter of blood and how many different epitopes, the part of a bacterium or virus that is recognized by the immune system, there are in a vaccine. Then, he came up with a rough estimate: a person could handle 100,000 vaccines — or up to 10,000 vaccines at once. Currently the most vaccines children receive at any one time is five.

He also published his findings in Pediatrics. Soon, the number was attached to Offit like a scarlet letter. “The 100,000 number makes me sound like a madman. Because that’s the image: 100,000 shots sticking out of you. It’s an awful image,” Offit says. “Many people — including people who are on my side — have criticized me for that. But I was naive. In that article, I was being asked the question and that is the answer to the question.”

Still, he hasn’t backed off. He feels that scientists have to work harder at winning over the public. “It’s our responsibility to stand up for good science. Though it’s not what we’re trained to do,” he says, admitting that his one regret about Autism’s False Prophets is that it didn’t hold scientists accountable for letting fear of criticism render them mute. “Get out there. There’s no venue too small. As someone once said, it would be a very quiet forest indeed if the only birds that sang were those that sang best.”

So Offit keeps singing. Isn’t he afraid of those who wish him harm? “I’m not that brave,” he says. “If I really thought my life was at risk or my children’s lives were at risk, I wouldn’t do it. Not for a second.” Maybe, he acknowledges, he’s in denial.

Later, I ask his wife the same question. When it comes to her husband’s welfare, Bonnie Offit is fiercely protective. A pediatrician with a thriving group practice, she still makes time to monitor the blogosphere. (Her husband refuses to read the attacks.) She wants to believe that if you “keep your finger on the pulse,” as she puts it, you can keep your loved ones safe.

Still, she worries. On the day I find myself sitting at her dining room table, every front page in the nation features an article about George Tiller, the abortion doctor gunned down at his church in Wichita, Kansas. When her husband leaves the room, Bonnie brings up the killing. “It upsets me,” she says, looking away. “I didn’t even tell him that. But it absolutely upsets me.”

Her husband, meanwhile, still rises every morning at 4 am and heads to his small, tidy study in a spare bedroom. Every morning, he spends a couple of hours working on what will be his sixth book, a history of the anti-vaccine movement. Offit gets excited when he talks about it.

In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily. “That was the birth of the anti-vaccine movement,” he says, adding that then — as now — those at the forefront “were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers. And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.”

Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” he says, taking a breath. “You’d like to think we would learn.”

Offit wants the book to be cinematic, visually riveting. He believes, fervently, that if he can hook people with a good, truthful story, maybe they will absorb his hopeful message: The human race has faced down this kind of doubt before.

His battle is, in at least one respect, probably a losing one. There will always be more illogic and confusion than science can fend off. Offit’s idea is to inoculate people one by one, until the virus of fear, if not fully erased, at least recedes.

Amy Wallace ([email protected]) has written for GQ, Esquire, and The New Yorker. This is her first article for Wired.

1. An earlier version of this story suggested that no childhood vaccines contain thimerosal; in fact some versions of the influenza vaccine, which is not typically mandated for children’s admission to school, does contain the preservative. Go here for a further explanation.