#also still staring death in the face and flipping it the bird btw

[beautifulterriblequeen]

This is full of personal and TDP angst so I’mma cut for those who aren’t into that today.

cw: injury, death, illness, angst

I don’t want to overidentify with my favorite TDP characters and I don’t want to overshare, but I’ve been having Many Thoughts these past few months and I thought I’d try to write them out. I know I always process things better after writing them out. Maybe this’ll help put some stuff in perspective for someone else, too.

So psst psst there’s a pandemic on, right, and in the middle of it, my husband got Very Ill. It kind of snuck up on us because Gosh There’s A Lot Of Shit In 2020, but by early November, I was mentally preparing to be a widow by Christmas. Things were Very Not Good and every day was, ah, let’s call it Rough. That’s a, that’s not something you really tell people when you’re in the middle of it. You just smile and wave and carry on, because what are they gonna do about it? Okay, maybe you’re better at sharing your feels than I am. I didn’t tell anyone.

I wrote my fics and played my games and messed around on my ask blogs and pretended everything was fine.

Narrator: You read the above paragraph. You know it was not fine.

Illusion is great sometimes. But there is going to come a point when you just, you can’t. You can’t keep looking at it. Reality is gonna reach through and bitchslap you, and you gotta pay attention to it, because reality is what matters the deepest. Illusion still matters. It serves a purpose. Illusions are like memes, we all get them, we all pretend identically. But every now and then, you need to look the truth in the face. And you can’t be scared when that happens.

it’s 13 feet tall and built of lanky shadows, and it’s shuddering out some kind of infrasound too low to hear but it’s shaking your guts and eating your memories. And you have to stand there. And stare it dead in the eyes. And say, “I see you. You might win this one. I might lose and it might totally suck. But I see you. I see what I’m up against here. And I’m fighting anyway.”

[Thor voice] “Because that’s what heroes do!” is optional, but always appreciated. You do you, guys!

Anyway, emergency surgery and Christmas in the hospital, yadda yadda yadda, things are a little better now, but this forest is endless, or maybe it’s walking alongside us, not sure which. Either way, not out of said woods yet. Treatments are serious and ongoing and no one has precise enough answers for which you-can’t-change-your-mind-later path to take. Such fun times, you have no idea, and I hope you never do. It’s literally Pick Your Poison. Yesterday, my husband picked his poison. We’re going Thisaway with treatment, and what is done cannot be undone.

I’ve been having flashes of insight on how Runaan and Ethari might have been feeling during the months between Winter’s Turn and Runaan’s mission leaving the Silvergrove. Obviously their situation is A: different, and B: fictional. But sometimes I just gotta get out of my own head for a few minutes.

Today, my therapist called me out for locking up all my feelings. I know I’m doing it. Everyone needs me, and there’s only so much of me to go around. Everyone around me is falling apart in a different way. My husband, both my kids. I can’t fix everything. Some days I don’t feel like I can fix a damn thing at all. But we still gotta eat and sleep and work and do school do NOT get me started. So the feelings go in the tower and I Get Shit Done. I’m up early, I’m up late, I never get enough sleep. Therapist called me a machine. I told her she wasn’t wrong.

Then she told me I had to start letting them out, had to let go somewhere, needed to tell my fam how hard things were for me. And I felt a giant stalactite of ice fall from the ceiling and stab me in the guts. Let go? Admit weakness? When my whole family is a mess and they’re relying on me to hold them together? What if that disheartens them? If that ruins everything? If I fall apart, they will too, and that’s the opposite of what I want! I’m holding on this tightly because this is how I help.

Uh. A Runaan insight, maybe. I was genuinely scared of letting my family know that I couldn’t entirely and completely handle everything that’s going on. But my therapist had a fun metaphor: bleed off the pressure. Like turning on the faucet juuuuust a little bit during winter so the pipes don’t freeze. Don’t want to lock up entirely, see, because ice is 10% bigger than the water it came from. It breaks things. So I’m going to give it a try. And I have to go first, because if you think I’m the uptight one in my family, ha ha ha nooooo. No I am not. So, in my future: a feelsy family talk, pushed into existence by Me, The Soft One.

I may not be afraid of death, but listen, it’s still very riveting. I’ve had my attention on it for months now, to the detriment of most of my other relationships. I can’t pretend things are normal, and I’m not going to try. But I can bleed off the pressure, for everyone’s sake. I need to be soft, sometimes. I want to be soft. It’s such a nice change from everything. It takes effort to remember to be soft, but for my kids, my friends, and my husband, I’ll do my very best. They’re all so worth it.

You’re all worth it and I love you guys. Be safe and be soft!

update: he lived :)