#apparently feeling massively suicidal because of your period is Not normal

[floralovebot]

guys i think i have pmdd,,,

[prorevenge]

Psycho Ex gets my egoless revenge with a side of heavy-duty karma.

The following story occurred over the course of 13-8 years ago, and I apologize preemptively for the length, because it is a bit involved.

I was in a relationship for 9 years with a girl I met in college. We broke up on the cusp of my 29th birthday. While breakups and divorce are never trauma-free, this one was as close to that as I believe is humanly possible to get, there were no fights and minimal drama, and I moved to a new city to get a fresh start and be nearer my dad/stepmom/half sisters, as I'm close to them and it was nice to have family during this. Get an apartment, start over, everything's good. Then I meet "her."

Things with her seemed good at first. She was the polar opposite of my ex. She's quiet yet nice, had her life relatively together (my first wife was very unfocused and horrible with money), physically a complete contrast, wild in the bedroom--I thought I had hit the jackpot.

Anyhoo, I fall for her hard. We have a whirlwind romance, move in shortly, and we have this glamorous life where we make good money (she was a corporate accountant, I had a decent small business, we're pulling in 150K+ combined), renting a luxury apartment, one car paid and the other brand new, no kids. Things are great, except that we drink too much together and some other underlying issues I'm blind to at the time. We get soused one night and drive to Vegas, and get married on the strip after 6 months of dating and 9 of knowing each other. The ink is barely dry on my divorce papers from version 1.0, but no matter, I'm in love. My family likes her overall. Her family loves me. We adopt cats. We talk about trying to have a kid.

We upgrade our life and take on more debt, just as the housing bubble bursts and the economy tanks, she loses a couple jobs due to her inability to show up on Mondays, and I start losing clients as the ones I have start cutting their advertising budget (my field). Things start to get pinched, and she first starts complaining, then gets petulant, because now we can't spend the way we used to, the quarterly mini-vacations dry up, plus we're cooking at home instead of going out to eat 4x a week. We basically stop having sex a little more than a year into the relationship (didn't realize it then, because I was dumb and love-blind, but she cheated on me during this period).seRealizing what we're up against with our normal bills plus our credit cards, I go out and get a job bartending at a posh resort, the only other real skill I have at the time that's marketable. I get two other part time gigs to help make ends meet. She still complains, and throws me an ultimatum before I even start getting paychecks, laying the blame at my feet. I say fine, screw this then. Had we stuck it out even a few more months, things would have started to turn a financial corner. Instead, she goes full two-faced, mean-spirited bitch on me. The night we first fight, she "attempts suicide" by scratching her wrist with a leatherman, then calls 911, gets admitted to the hospital (I arrive home to cops telling me this), and has the security guard toss me when I show up to see if she's okay because she doesn't want to talk to me. I use the quotes because there was a small collection of firearms nearby I bought for her target shooting hobby which were untouched, so it was obviously just a ploy for attention.

We basically fight for the next week, I give her everything she wants, which includes leaving the house, signing over my new truck to her, and only taking stuff I brought into the relationship, basically enough to fill a small storage space. She's financially pinched so I sell my office furniture for cash and don't even touch the bank account, just take my biz money and one CC I got separate from her. I go to the Bay Area for a few months, financially struggle, don't get the job I was sure was on lock. During this time, I have this revelation one evening--I drink too much and that it's caused a load of problems in my life, so I quit, and I haven't touched a drop since.

Broke and realizing nothing I try is working, I come back to town, live with my dad for a month, find a roommate, then a shit retail job (my business has dropped from 7-8K per month at its height to now around 500/mo), I bike everywhere bc I can't afford a car, and my credit is toast partially due to her love of spending on plastic, so I'm facing bankruptcy. I'm 31, and this is really humbling, but whatever, I'm alive, have dealt with hardship before, this won't last forever. She has kept her house, declared personal BK on her debts, keeps her car, and has been dating a series of men starting a couple weeks after we split. While I never asked the details, apparently she's also reached out to a few of my friends and badmouthed me a bit. This would be mildly annoying, but add in two factors--she's dragging her feet on the divorce due to not having money to file, keeps up contact on the pretense of us needing to talk, but plays emotionally manipulative head games during the whole sequence ("I've realized I still love you, that's why you can make me cry so easily," and other bullshit Hallmark movie lines like this). Also, we live in a suburb that's smaller and tightly knit, so multiple places I go to like my church, the bookstore I frequent, and the coffee shop right by my place, she talks endless shit to people. Says I was a cheater and physically/emotionally abusive (complete crap, but whatever), I'm stalking her, I supposedly stole tens of thousands of dollars from her, the whole nine. Some people actually believe her, I even get threatened by a wannabe biker one night that's literally twice my age with violence, itself a funny story but not the point.

Finally, after some more bullshit and back and forth, she leaves town (more falsehoods around this, including her borrowing a bit of money she didn't end up paying back, and sticking me with a massive overage on our cell bill right before we split the account). My dumb, trusting heart hurts but I'm mostly relieved to see the last of her, realizing she's only nice to me when she wants something. She goes to NY to shack up with another guy, gets pregnant 15 minutes later. Finally sends me divorce paperwork. I sign it and send back quickly, all notarized docs, everything organized and flagged. She attempts to be "friends" and I want no part of this BS. I'm businesslike, she gets upset. She screws up filing, blames me. I say "whatever," straighten out the court issues. One week after the divorce is finalized, the kid is born. No word from her after that for two years, thank god. I get a new career, start advancing in it, and start dating a new woman that I'm still with 10 years later. Weirdly enough, they knew each other, and she didn't like her, partially because one of my ex's infidelity partners was her ex-husband, during a time they were exploring patching things up for the kids' sake (though there were multiple reasons for her distrust, apparently she always gave my wife an icky intuitive feeling).

So flash forward two years. I get a call from my current squeeze. She's just talked to a friend who was also a very brief roomie of "her" after our split. She's breaking up with the baby daddy. There's a custody fight. He's saying he doesn't know if it's his. Will I help her? Well, it's the right thing to do, so even though I don't trust or particularly like her, I say yes. I get the call, and a sob story. Most of it doesn't add up--he took the kid, but thinks it's actually mine, to prove paternity I'd need to come to NY and take a paternity test at one of their facilities, also he hit her, put a GPS tracker on her car, brother is a Russian mobster who threatened her, all very far-fetched. Needless to say, even without this fanciful tale, I generally assume if this woman is talking, it's a lie, so I'm suspicious. Her lawyer calls me, and seems like a clueless shmuck. I get a letter from him, very unprofessional and not even on a letterhead (every other legal doc I've seen has "from the law offices of blah blah" on it, but this is literally just off a laser printer), and says, verbatim "I, M___ K___, am the ex-husband of J___ K___, and was married to her from 6/07-8/09. I have no legal interest in the child." Super shady.

Not wanting to end up in a situation where I've allowed myself to be legally fucked over, I make my own lawyer consultation appointment. Before I can even go, the baby daddy finds me on Facebook and sends me a message. Between calls with him, his lawyer, and the impartial lawyer NY state appoints for the child's welfare, I get a very different story. He knows it's his, he had a paternity test done on the sly at birth because she had been promiscuous before they got together, and she was pregnant so quickly he was concerned. They broke up because she was drinking too much, he busted her with a bottle of vodka as she was driving with the kid in the car. She stood up in court, claimed I was actually the father, and she had no idea where to find me (he found me in 10 seconds online, I'm a tech guy with massive social media presence, a tech blog, multiple writing credits on publications, my frigging name as a domain, plus I've had the same cell phone number for 14 years). Also the other BS was just that, he's an IT guy for a university and his brother works for a carpet cleaning chain, plus just like in our relationship, he never hit or stalked her, etc.

So she, not knowing what I know, starts sending me text messages. I say "Filled out and on its way back to your lawyer," and toss it in the trash. I'm so tempted to send her some poetic message about how the truth is coming back to haunt her, but I resist, because I'm not doing this for her, but rather for the sake of their son and his father, so let's keep my ego out of it. I provide legal statements to all in the court. Tell them I know it's not possibly mine because I hadn't been with her since April 15 of '08, kid's birthday is in Sept of '09 (I remember the date because, due to taxes, I got fucked twice that day). Explain when she was in NY, which is the likely dates of conception, prove I was thousands of miles away on the west coast. Tell them to look through her social media, where she meticulously tagged herself and took tons of pictures of even their mundane locations. Provide a blood sample to a local lab. Tell them salacious details about her drinking and occasional drug use, including her abused prescriptions and a previous hospitalization where she was held for psych eval due to taking way too many pills.

Court comes, and she gets blindsided. Stack of depositions and a collection of statements from me were what sealed the deal, apparently, and the incredibly stupid game she was running is fully exposed. Gets no custody, no support, supervised visitation once a week. I run into her ex-roomie, upset, but instead of giving her attitude, I just calmly tell her the scam J__ was running, then let her "pull out of me" the truth about our split. She's flabbergasted, but also a horrible gossip, so it gets around town like wildfire. People I barely know, including the aforementioned biker, all come up to me and apologize for misjudging me. I'm years past the stage of having any morbid curiosity to check her social media, but every few months she pops up as a "suggested friend," and I notice bemusedly the number of mutual friends plummets from triple digits to eventually 3. Baby's father sends me a massive Amex gift card for Christmas, as much as I make in a week at the time. I call and tell him I don't know if I can accept it, I don't want him or anyone to think I did this for a reward. He virtually begs, saying "you helped save my family. This is nothing in comparison. Thank you." We break down crying on the phone, and eventually form an odd, distant friendship based on mutual respect for each other. I even had dinner with him a couple times when I had to go to NY for biz over the years, and I always buy, because the poor guy has done enough and gone through enough having to coparent with this train wreck.

To this day, she's apparently struggling to stay sober (alcohol and other substances), and has minimal involvement in her child's life due to her inability to show up when expected. Baby daddy tells me she's been in legal trouble, financial issues up the ass, and a string of boyfriends that never last more than a few months. I'm doing well, got married again three years ago, raised step-children, am reasonably financially successful, and rather like my life. Granted, a large part of this story is just karma in action, but I feel like I did the right thing, wasn't petty, and what I did do hit her where it hurts.

TL;DR: Ex-wife fucks my life, destroys me financially, tries to trash my reputation, then tries to use me as a scheme in her custody battle years later. I talk to the court directly, work with the baby daddy's lawyers, and get her exposed for the psycho, lying wench she is. She loses custody, struggles, and the good people live mostly happily ever after.

(source) (story by heymomo7)

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

A Look Back on the Twilight Saga

I have never felt older than I have this year, in which the film adaptation of the first book in the Twilight Saga turns ten. Ten years ago, that movie came out, three years after the book. And what a book and movie they were! They inspired so much rabid devotion and equally rabid pushback, with people gushing over the beautiful romance in equal amounts as people saying how the books were offensively awful and filled with misogyny and romanticization of abusive relationships. Golly, I sure am glad discussion of fiction has improved since then and we don’t have dumb arguments like that anymore!

All joking aside, it is pretty interesting to look back on the series. With the passage of time, and the release of so much young adult fiction in cinemas between then and now, I have to say that looking back… Twilight is a pretty good film and, for the most part, a pretty good series.

Now, such a bold statement could never have been made in that period during the heyday of the series, where the popularity of the series was slowly souring and people began openly rejecting the series as trash. But I feel that rejection was just part of an obnoxious cycle I’ve seen a lot in recent years, where anything remotely popular with audiences (such as Frozen) becomes hated at the peak of its popularity, seemingly because of the sole fact that it is popular and not really due to anything having to do with the actual overall quality.

See, here’s the thing: despite the series having a reputation for being poorly written tripe, it really is a lot better than anyone gives it credit for. Now, I’m not going to say the writing is on par with other young adult fantasy series of the time, like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, because that is just patently untrue. What the Twilight Saga was, and what it always seemed to aim for, was the level of quality of a tacky airport romance novel you pick up while waiting for your flight to kill time. It’s nothing but wish-fulfillment fantasy in which an unhappy young woman becomes the reason for living for several unfathomably hot supernatural men, a sentiment that quite frankly resonates with the modern atmosphere towards supernatural romance and the prominence of self-proclaimed “Monsterfuckers.” Bella’s situation is pretty much a dream come true, is it not? Among tacky supernatural romance novels, Twilight and its sequels are easily the queens of the genre.

Here’s the thing that really sets the Twilight Saga apart, though: there is actually a serious amount of thought and care put into nearly all aspects of the romance’s universe save for the actual romance. Every single member of the Cullen family has a fascinating backstory: Carlisle was a vampire hunter turned vampire who proceeded to venture across the world in the ensuing hundreds of years building up a family and practicing a different way of living; Alice was committed to an asylum and has a past shrouded in mystery; Jasper was a soldier in the Confederate army who was turned into a vampire and tasked with raising a vampire army; Rosalie’s backstory is Kill Bill, BUT WITH VAMPIRES!; and Emmet, while easily the least impressive of them all, still died apparently fighting a bear, and considering how he is one can only imagine what on earth he was doing. Esme is the only Cullen without a deeply fascinating backstory, but even what little we do get is a bit tragic: she lost her child and so committed suicide, or attempted it anyway. There’s absolutely no need for all of these rich, complex backstories for characters in a throwaway romance novel, and yet here they are. And that’s not all.

The rest of the world and overall vampire society is presented in a very interesting way. The Volturi in particular are a fascinating idea, a secret cabal of vampires who rule over all other vampires with an iron fist, but one that is, while a bit tyrannical and unforgiving, seemingly necessary to preserve the existence of vampire society. Hell, their rules don’t really seem TOO harsh, and they only really spring to action when there are vampires fragrantly and blatantly exposing themselves to human society. They wish to keep the vampire world hidden in the shadows, where they can feed in peace away from prying eyes. Their position is understandable in a lot of ways. They also have a very interesting history to them, having apparently wrestled power over vampirekind away from a sect of Romanian vampires. Now, I did say they are a fascinating IDEA; in execution, they always tended to be a bit… useless. Their appearances in New Moon and Breaking Dawn are ultimately wastes of time, as they are never really opposed in any sort of meaningful way and get away in the end with the status quo wholly unchanged. No impact is ever made on vampirekind when they’re involved, which almost makes me wish that they were kept in the shadows and used far more sparingly. Their influence over events in Eclipse, where they only send out their powerful agents, showcases that Stephanie Meyers could use them very effectively when she wanted to.

The werewolves are a bit less effective. While they do have an intriguing backstory, there is something a bit… problematic about shoehorning a bunch of fictional elements onto the real Quileute tribe. On the other hand though, a positive and heroic portrayal of Native Americans in fiction is never a bad thing, and Jacob Black is easily one of the more sympathetic characters until halfway through Breaking Dawn. It’s a very tricky, mixed bag. I kind of wish that the issue with the handling of Native American folklore was the biggest controversy with the series, but there’s actually one far worse and even stupider.

The Twilight Saga has come under fire for being a negative influence on young women, for romanticizing abusive relationships and stalking, and for being some sort of massive insult to feminism. Now, these arguments aren’t wholly without merit, but the issue is that they are being filtered through human understanding and imposed on fictional creatures in a fictional universe. If a real-life human acted as clingy, impulsive, over-protective, and obsessed as Edward is towards Bella, yes, it would be absolutely terrifying. Here’s where I let you in on a little secret, though: Edward Cullen is, in fact, not a human. He is part of a race of ageless semi-undead beings who live off of blood and glitter in the sunlight. He immediately sees his soulmate in Bella and goes out of his way to ensure they end up together, acting on the instincts granted to members of his kind. Trying to fit all of his actions into a human narrative is as fruitless as if an ant tried to explain humanity to his colleagues filtered through his ant experiences. The fact is, Edward operates on a far different moral code than humans. This is not uncommon for vampires in any fiction; Marceline of Adventure Time fame is a vampire who is certainly not above doing some rather sketchy stuff, for example. While Edward’s actions can come off as bizarre and creepy to humans, for a vampire, Edward is actually downright romantic and even benevolent. One also needs to take into account that Edward is a kissless virgin who has spent a hundred years doing nothing but reading romance novels and listening to classical music, which would go a long way to explain his awkward and sometimes offputting ways of trying to replicate human courtship rituals with Bella.

The criticisms leveled at Bella are rather unfair as well; while she often finds herself a damsel in distress, it rarely is something she doesn’t want. When Bella is in danger, it’s because she wanted to be there and put herself there. Yes, she does get into trouble, but that’s mostly due to her being a stupid horny teenage girl with zero impulse control. Recall New Moon, where she constantly did dangerous stunts so she could have hallucinations of Edward chastise her. Bella is, quite frankly, an adrenaline junkie, and I feel she’d rather resent being called a damsel. Even the times when she is in danger, it is no real fault of her own, but rather the fact she is a normal human out of her depth in a supernatural world. Bella is not Blade, she is not Van Helsing, she is not Alucard; she is Bella Swan, normal teenage girl, and she tends to be as effective as your average teenage girl in situations where superpowered monsters are hunting her. Imagine if we applied these sorts of criticisms to other characters in fiction… “John Conner in Terminator 2 is such a worthless damsel in distress character, why does he not just fight off the T-1000?” or how about “Why do the kids in The Goonies not take the Fratellis head-on? Why do they constantly flee from them when they cross paths? And Chunk, getting captured by them, what a pathetic damsel moment.” People not being successful in areas where they are out of their element is not some horribly evil thing. I also resent the idea the series is some horrible, anti-feminist work, particularly because the entire series revolves around Bella’s choice, and when she is not given agency she goes out of her way to take that agency. For all the flaws of Breaking Dawn, and there are many, I will give it this: presenting Bella as being in the right for wanting her choices respected is a good thing. With that in mind, I think the entire series is a lot more feminist than many are willing to admit.

And look, I’m not saying this book is a flawless masterpiece or anything like that. I have mentioned this is definitely a book more impressive for the world it creates than for the actual romance it centers around. But I do feel that, generally speaking, the books never descended to the point many who criticized the books say they did. I say “for the most part” because I cannot even muster up enough good will to say a single good thing about Breaking Dawn. But generally, the writing quality is decent. Even some of the twists on vampire lore are interesting and refreshing.

For instance… the sparkling. This is one of the most infamous additions to the lore of vampires in Meyers stories. When in the sunlight, rather than bursting into flames as vampires tend to do in fiction, their skin sparkles and glitters as if it was encrusted with diamonds. It does sound silly, and it really is, especially when they show it off in the movies… and yet, it is actually far more accurate than just about every depiction of vampires in nearly 100 years. You see, the idea vampires are killed by sunlight is actually a relatively new addition to vampire lore, being created for the famous silent masterpiece Nosferatu because they couldn’t come up with any other way to kill the vampire. In the original novel of Dracula, for instance, the titular count strut about during the day with no ill effect. So, by accident or perhaps by some better understanding of the creatures than most writers, Meyers was more accurate than nearly all contemporary portrayals of the characters. Also interesting – but not nearly so to the point I feel the need to dedicate a whole new paragraph to it – the idea of vampires having a sort of “love at first sight” thing that allows them to discern their soulmate was copied by Hotel Transylvania, so I feel like that addition to vampire lore has its merit as well.

The film adaptations tend to not truly fix the flaws with the storytelling, but instead to paint over them with some truly inspired silliness. The utter apathy Robert Pattinson exudes for his role as Edward Cullen is palpable in how he acts, and it tends to make Edward’s creepier actions actually less threatening than the were in the books – and I’d argue there he wasn’t particularly threathening, despite his angsting. Taylor Lautner’s oft-shirtless portrayal of Jacob Black seems a lot more genuinely, but equally cheesy; his and Pattinson’s onscreen chemistry really gives them the feel of two romantic rivals, which makes it easy to see exactly why there was such a devoted following rooting for one or the other back in the day. Then we get to Bella.

As usual, Bella is a horribly misunderstood character here. It’s easy to blame the books for how one-note Bella appears in the movies – as a romance protagonist, Bella has enough personality for you to care while still being enough of a blank slate that you can put yourself in her position so that you can fantasize about the outcomes – but I almost feel like her portrayal was a deliberate choice. Kristen Stewart is actually a very good actor when in the right role, and I feel like even in the past I’ve been too hard on her portrayal of Bella. I think I might go so far as to say her version of Bella is better than the book, because Stewart actually does inject some vapid, awkward teenage girlishness to the role. That’s something wonderful, especially about the films – the teenagers, more than a lot of other series, tend to feel like real people. They say the dumbest stuff imaginable, but really, is that not what being a teenager is? Everyone was a stupid, vapid idiot as a teenager, it’s just how teens are. So all t hat combined with everything else that has been said, does any part of Bella’s characterization truly feel THAT abnormal for an otherwise normal, brooding teen thrust headfirst into the world of the supernatural? I personally don’t think so; Bella is actually one of the most real characters of the series, an anchor to humanity in a sea of supernatural strangeness, a character that is absolutely perfect in her dull, flawed, overly-romantic personality. She may not be the strongest, or most interesting, or even the most pleasant character in all of fiction… but she has an air of realness to her few other characters can hope to achieve. Perhaps this is why a lot of people rejected and mocked her; it’s so much easier to dismiss and belittle something than accept that it is something real, warts and all. No one wanted to accept the less pleasant parts of Bella, and so she was rejected by all except the fans of the book; meanwhile, seemingly disinterested goth girls would be fought over by two equally strange men for her affection, all while she talks in a sort of half-awake near-monotone.

I was in that situation myself. It’s all real teenage bullshit.

I feel like this more than anything explains why the Twilight Saga ended up being violently rejected by so many people: too many people saw through the supernatural elements and into the real life teenage angst and did not like what they saw, as it reflected their own experiences. It’s so bizarre to say, but Stephanie Meyers may have been too real for her own good, and her portrayal of angst-ridden teen love triangles may have been just too close to home for a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of older people had negative experiences in high school as I did, so anything that reminds them of those stupid, painful years is not going to seem pleasant. With other stories that feature realistic elements with supernatural settings, such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and so on, they never really faced this kind of scrutiny and rejection as while they also are grounded with realistic portrayals of their teenagers, they also take place in overtly supernatural settings; there is no place where an experience could be like that of Hogwarts or Camp Half-Blood. But there’s probably of plenty of places like the dismal, dreary town of Forks, Washington, a perpetually cloudy town out in the sticks where nothing ever seems to happen. Reading about teen angst in such an agonizingly depressing setting will not go over well with anyone who has had negative experiences in regards to the elements portrayed, supernatural dressing or no.

Looking back at the Twilight Saga, after years of imitators of varying quality and numerous attempts by mediocre young adult franchises to capture this saga’s lightning in a bottle, the stories sans Breaking Dawn seem to have aged quite well, and hold up a lot better. Removed from the rabid fandom, overwhelming hype, ad constant mockery, the series stands as a solid and kind of cheesy young adult romance series, one with superb worldbuilding that I have yet to see any young adult series after it match and an absolutely fantastic ensemble cast that is just rife with fanfiction potential. I find that even the lead trio, be it in the films and in the movie, have a lot more layer and depth to them than initially thought, with Bella in particular a character I feel deserves some serious reevaluation. And while I’d never call the series a masterpiece to rival Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Lord of the Rings, I do think that the series is good enough to unironically be enjoyed. While there is of course plenty to snark at here – it’s a story featuring a rather honest depiction of teenagers, after all, and teenagers are idiots – I think there is a lot more to like than the insane hatedom of the book ever gave it credit for.

And even if you can’t bring yourself to admit the series is genuinely good (albeit cheesy), there’s no denying that it had a pretty good impact on popular culture. Aside from being the basis for Vampire Sucks, which has the honor of being the only genuinely good Seltzer and Friedberg film, it put supernatural romance stories back into the mainstream again. The biggest example of a supernatural romance film that I can see got a lot of mainstream recognition was 1990’s Ghost, which is held up as a romantic classic; while there were plenty of supernatural romance films between then and Twilight, none of them seem to be recalled fondly or even at all, and none of them can even come close to saying they had the sort of cultural impact Ghost did. Twilight, though… it had a huge impact. Without Twilight, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Warm Bodies, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Horns, and honestly? We probably wouldn’t have gotten The Shape of Water, or more realistically, the movie would not nearly be as accepted. Twilight for better or worse conditioned us to see the humanity in supernatural entities and find attraction in them (not exactly a new idea as far as vampires go, I know, but it definitely put it in the minds of young adults). I can easily see the genesis of the modern crowd of people lusting after the Asset, Pennywise, Godzilla, and Venom being the Twilight Saga; it was a gateway drug that put in the minds of youths “Hey, monsters can be really sexy. Like, REALLY sexy.”

The Twilight Saga is truly a fascinating work, for better and for worse. There is a lot in it that I really admire, and there’s plenty in it that I resent, but even at its worst I can never say that the series was boring. For all the flack I give Breaking Dawn, it is still far more readable than any of the garbage Cormac McCarthy has ever shat out, and nothing in the series was as overtly misogynistic as some of the dialogue in Ready Player One. As cheesy as the film series got, the first was a surprisingly effective indie supernatural romance and the third was a gloriously Gothic cheesy delight, with the second being the awkward but still enjoyable middle film and Breaking Dawn: Part 1 being the only genuinely awful film in the series; nothing positive could be said for the slew of imitators that crawled in this film’s wake, such as Beastly, Red Riding Hood, and even some of the would-be successors to this franchise such as the cinematic adaptations of Percy Jackson, Divergent, and The Hunger Games among others, which despite them being based off of books of far greater critical acclaim had absolutely no respect for their source material the way the Twilight Saga films did. As silly as some of the acting in the movies was – and it got very silly, considering the lead three all seemed to actively despise their roles – none of their acting was as painfully bad to sit through as Jennifer Lawrence’s attempts at acting in the first Hunger Games film, or the entire cast of the Percy Jackson movies. I would never say that Twilight is the absolute pinnacle of young adult literature, but I think a lot of us had our judgment clouded back in the day, and with the benefit of hindsight I think it’s safe to say the franchise was a lot of fun; I’d even go as far to say that it is an underrated work of genius in many aspects.

Removed from the climate that created it and put into a world it helped shape, I think the tale of Bella Swan and her romance of the angsty immortal Edward Cullen resonates quite a bit better. So thank you to Stephanie Meyers and everyone involved with the film series, because without your work, the world we live in would probably be a much less interesting place, with far fewer people horny for monsters. I really don’t think I would want to live in that world.

[braindamageforbeginners]

Male Fragility and Male Pattern Baldness

14 months, two weeks, one day post-dx

This week, in addition to The Donald, the big news has been... Gillette shaving products. You might know this company for the various shaving-based products they make, or the catchy slogan, “The best a man can get.” Which sounds a little weird and unintentionally homoerotic, but I dislike bleeding when shaving, and, for travel purposes, they have the market for disposable razors.

In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed and Cadet Bonespurs still not being called for using the word “pussy” on a live mic (okay, so, even if we want to accept the idea that men talk to each other in the locker room - we don’t, it is the most uncomfortable and awkward environment imaginable - you don’t repeat it in polite company, and YOU DO NOT REPEAT IT IN A TAPED INTERVIEW), it has come to light that America has a problem with massive, throbbing male egos that go unchecked until they inevitably screw up and alienate so many of their victims that Americans vote in loads of sensible, moderate people (previously known as “women,” but that was also when we voted based on gender and class lines instead of a person’s public record). Gillette then changed its slogan to “The best a man can be,” which, I have to admit, is almost as good as “The Most Interesting Man in the World” for aspirational marketing aimed at men. The goal of all this was, presumably, to start a discussion on toxic masculinity and gender roles. Now, I may have some misgivings about this conversation being helmed and instigated by a company with a definite financial and cultural stake in the (patriarchal) status quo, but it’s still a talk we need to have in society. My reaction of vague misgivings and semi-apathy was nothing, however, compared to white men on the Internet. They used all caps to rain impotent fury down upon this perceived slight, that, maybe, we should have a discussion about how framing masculinity only as it brutalizes and disenfranchises others isn’t such a good idea. As someone who’s had his country club privileges revoked but still gets passing privilege, I’d think it’s a discussion worth having, especially if you’re under the rather idiotic impression that your good health and luck will last forever. Now, even though I still stand by the idea that Rousseau was right, and that most of us are mostly-good; at the same time, when you’re forced into a position of vulnerability, people you thought you knew well can reveal themselves to be utter assholes. Yes, pain, torture, and crippling may reveal my inner nature to some extent, but how you treat me in this period is a much more revealing test of your character, dear reader. So, I’m fully prepared to discuss this whole “how you treat the least among you” idea, with the acknowledgment that, as the least among you (sort of), I am fully in favor of toppling the patriarchy and rebuilding it with something less creepy and predatory.

Then I got Rogaine. Full disclosure, Mother Dearest actually got it for me, because I still wear my hair in a rather severe mohawk to cover up the weird, radioactive/thin patches that were scalded off by the nuclear fire (undergoing cancer treatments is like puberty - you change pretty dramatically, physically, and you’re left looking almost, but not quite, like you used to, which is disconcerting to see in a mirror). Normally, the word “regrowth” is not a good one for a brain cancer patient, but, since everything else in my life has been completely upended and vivisected, I figured, “Why not?” In a weird way, even though I’m not in a position I’d wish upon someone I despised (well..), I don’t feel terribly emasculated. After all, how many rounds of chemo and radiation have you gone through? I know I can take a severe beating and get up afterward; even if that beating comes in the form of neurosurgery, radiation, and chemo (I realize my framing of that in terms of violence is probably typical of the problem, but we’re working our way toward other, more humorous topics).

If ever there was a physical embodiment of the sort of mindset that would fee attacked by Gillette’s rather flaccid suggestion we sort of talk about problems with traditional masculinity; it’s Rogaine. First of all, it comes with all these warning labels on it - I am not making this up - saying things like “Not intended for women” or “Not for use by women” (that last one is verbatim). It doesn’t actually go full-blown Alex Jones manthrocyte (or whatever male virility cure he’s hocking this week), nor do the words “male jelly” or “He-Man Woman Haters Club” appear on the box, but it’s amazingly close. What’s especially delightful - to me, anyway - is that a female friend of the family (who has issues with hair stress-related hair loss) is the one who recommended it. However, I am trying to be somewhat more sensible about what I put in myself these days, so I did some quick Internet research (that’s enough to make me an expert on the subject, I figure), and it’s a vasodilator - it’ll open your blood vessels (I still haven’t pieced together how that leads to increased hair growth, but I’m willing to take some things on faith). Apparently, you’re not supposed to take it orally. Which opened up a whole new set of questions, like, 1. What was the study where they found out someone was dumb enough to drink hair tonic? and, 2. If you do drink it, is that some sort of suicide warning? Bearing in mind that this is just the packaging - which, again, I get it’s targeting insecure middle-aged men and/or those of use who want our youthful appearance back while we’re still actually youthful; both of which are vulnerable to suggestion and hesitancy, and maybe they’d turn back at the thought that maybe someone would think less of them for using feminine hygiene products (supposedly, army medics have used tampons to seal wounds in combat, so even the most-feminine of feminine hygiene products is helpful to all genders under the right circumstance), let’s go on to what’s inside the box. Which is a series of bland-looking bottles that are perfect for not indicating someone is insecure about baldness. And an applicator. Let’s hold for a moment. In most medical products - even the CBD/THC oils I take (orally, but maybe I should try them on my hair) the “applicator” is either a glorified eye-dropper or more-glorified Q-tip (side-note: you don’t see Q-tips exclusively marketed to women, even though their most  common use is as a mascara applicator)(this is true; you’ve probably been sticking them in the wrong orifice for years). Not so with Rogaine. This comes with - depending on how you look at it - either a miniature turkey baster (perfect for basting Cornish hens), or a Cyclopean eye-dropper. In other words, there’s virtually no way you could screw up where you stick this thing and apply it nasally (again, I’m sure it’s been tried, and they rewrote the warnings and repackaged it). It is, in short, not only catered to male insecurity, it’s designed to completely idiot-proof (I guess they got that one right, most intelligent people wouldn’t be fooled into thinking that fancy, medically-worded hair tonic works)(normally, neither would I, but the woman who recommended it is smarter than me, so I’m willing to try it). It’s the perfect product for Homer J. Simpson.

After drizzling this stuff onto your radioactive-seared flesh, you’ll notice a slight tingling sensation. Either that or just the sensation of something liquid-y runnning over your scalp, I have a lot of scars, so it’s hard to tell. Then... nothing. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few days, Apparently, you have to use it for a month or two before seeing results, at which point you’re either supposed to discontinue use, or, for the truly brave, drink it. Again, I just went 12 months straight with chemo, it’s not like something as minor as not seeing results will be a major deterrent.

For those of you wondering how I do it - go the full 12 rounds of chemo, radiation, and surgery, knowing I will eventually have to repeat it, and eventually lose - that’s how. You have to be able to look at every miniscule step on the path (and not much further ahead) and chuckle at how extraordinarily weird and fucked up it all is. And realize you want to be around to chuckle at the next weird, fucked up moment, even if you have weird, striated baldness on one side.

[awesome-donut-me]

BIRDBOX

Directed by: Susanne Bier

Written by:Eric Heisserer

Back in the spring, in A Quiet Place, the characters had to keep their mouths shut because the monsters had super-acute hearing. Now, seven months later, everyone has to wear blindfolds if they're outside or else what they see will induce them to immediately commit suicide

Susanne Bier, whose 2010 Danish thriller In A Better World won the Oscar for best foreign language film, serves up an entirely dire world here, one in which people who are normal one minute go bonkers and kill themselves the next. No one knows what's going on or why this is happening, but an early line of dialogue sums it up, even if it wouldn't serve as the ideal advertising tagline: “If you look, you will die.”In the resulting chaos, close to a dozen people wind up cloistered in a private home, hiding away and intent upon letting no more strangers inside.

The film does succeed in building a feeling of oppressive claustrophobia and a last-stand mentality; the idea that you will become contaminated and very shortly thereafter bring upon your own death merely by casting your gaze upon the world is a creepy one, to be sure. At a couple of points, however, evident exceptions to the rule pop up, grungy individuals who have somehow escaped automatic death in ways that remain unclear. The fate of the entire world similarly remains uncertain. Bullock portrays a strong woman who will not be denied, one who will move heaven and Earth and do whatever it takes to survive an arduous task demanding great endurance.

Ultimately, no matter how high-minded a view of the material Heisserer and Bier may have held, this is deep-dish popular material that feels shortchanged in terms of suspense, scares and thrills. For her part, Bullock seems to have placed a foot in each camp, as she has done on occasion in the past, but she's rather underserved by a writer and director perhaps uncertain about how to maximize the piece's genre potential while simultaneously keeping it smart.

RogerEbert

Last year, Netflix dropped the high-budget “Bright” just before the holidays and it turned out to be a pretty massive sci-fi hit for the company, even if critics hated it. So, apparently, futuristic action movies are now going to be what the company gives us for Christmas every year. How’s this year’s cinematic sci-fi stocking stuffer, "Bird Box"? It’s imperfect, but you probably won’t be returning it.Undercooked metaphors about motherhood and a mishandled climax aside, there’s enough to like in Susanne Bier’s “Bird Box,”

Most of its strength emerges from a well-directed ensemble, one able to convey the high concept of a nightmarish situation without losing their relatable humanity. Lazy critics and viewers will compare it to “A Quiet Place” (I've already seen it called "A Blind Place"), but this is a piece that actually draws more from “Stephen King’s The Mist,” another tale of the paranoia that invades a group of strangers when they’re dealing with both the unknown and the worry that they may never again see the outside world or fully understand what's hiding in it.

Based on Josh Malerman’s novel, “Bird Box” intercuts between two time periods—about five years after the end of the world and in the first days when everything collapsed. It opens in the nightmarish present, but actually spends more time in flashbacks with Malorie (Bullock), an expectant mother unsure about whether or not she’ll form a connection with her baby. She expresses as much to her sister Jessica (Paulson) on the way to a meeting with her obstetrician, as the two discuss reports of mass suicides on the other side of the world. And then “whatever” is happening over there comes home as people start to hurl themselves out of windows and into oncoming traffic. These early scenes of absolute chaos are well-handled by Bier and honestly terrifying.

Bird Box” is not your typical horror movie. It’s refreshingly devoid of big action sequences and CGI, relying more on the fear experienced by its characters than actual supernatural interactions. In a sense, it’s a reverse haunted house movie, one in which it’s not the one house that’s haunted but everything outside of it. Most of the problems with “Bird Box” come back to a thin screenplay, one that too often gives its characters flat, expository dialogue and then writes itself into a corner with a climax that’s just silly when it needs to be tense. I haven’t read the book on which “Bird Box” is based, but it seems like the kind of thing that could work significantly better on the page, where our imaginations can run even more wild regarding what the characters are “seeing” and the scope of the mass suicides. Eric Heisserer's script works better when it sticks to the basics, locking us in what could be the last safe place on Earth and allowing us to ask how we’d behave in such a nightmarish predicament. And it does that just enough to find beats that are honestly tense and terrifying. 

Vanity Fair

The movie looks cheap; there’s a drab flatness to Bier’s filming that screams TV movie, even when the story travels outside of its economical one-house set. Eric Heisserer’s script is clunky and off-tone often enough to remind you that, in addition to adapting Arrival, he also wrote Final Destination 5. (No knock on that film, really, but it’s not exactly premium material.) And that fabulous ensemble working alongside Bullock? They’re hammy and ineffectual, giving broad B-movie performances in what is supposed to be serious fare.

From almost the outset, Bullock is stuck in the shallows. Which is a shame, because she gives a bracingly good performance. She plays Malorie, an expectant, and maybe a little reluctant, mother whose life of studio art and playful banter with her sister (Paulson) is hideously interrupted by a sudden plague of violent suicide. Around the world, people are just up and killing themselves, often at great risk to others. These poor souls seem to be seeing something that fills them with immediate, dreadful despair.

All these survivors are scared, but they’re also silly and petty in a way that doesn’t feel true to the circumstances. Yes, people contain multitudes, but I would think that a world-ending horror would maybe pare away, or at least shade, some of their stock-character stiffness. Bird Box doesn’t think so, and badly offsets Bullock’s focused rigor with the goofiness of its under-developed side characters. (Only Rhodes works fluidly with Bullock—please someone pair them together again, only in something better.)

All that said, given that it’s on Netflix and won’t cost subscribers any more than they’ve already paid for the service, I can’t really say that Bird Box isn’t worth a look. The movie occasionally musters up some scares, and a few of the deaths are satisfyingly gnarly, for those who are into that kind of gruesome thing. And, of course, there’s Bullock, doing something good and interesting. Though it does ultimately prove frustrating and sad, watching her so desperately grasp for a finer film—one that lies just beyond what Bird Box allows us to see.

[orangepunkwitch-blog]

I had a dream I only remember bits and pieces of, but I THINK it’s an indication that my grandma is at my aunt’s, now.  The dream did involve her being left at mu aunt’s.  Her back was towards me while she sat in a chair on a back porch of a home I could not recognize (but it was supposed to be my aunt’s home, so that’s what’s important).  I almost said something to her, but I chose not to because I know she never really liked me ever since I was a kid (she was like this with my brother and my two cousins, so I’m not being singled out).  I pulled my aunt to the side to ask her about something involving grandma, but I don’t remember what it was.

After all that, I was packing up a lot of luggage on something like a train (it was like a massive room looking like a train station but that was the train itself?).  Some of that luggage being my brother’s, and I did see him in my dream.  I was wheeling his suitcase from my aunt’s to the “train” and as I passed him, I went, “By the way, you’re welcome.”  Like as if he forgot his luggage or something.  I don’t remember who he was talking to, either, but he was pre-occupied in talking with someone to the point where he was forgetting his suitcase?  Anyway, I looked up “travel” which led to “journey” in my Dream Dictionary and the only thing that stood out today was “moving on.”  This can be interpreted in many ways, and I interpret it as making my grandma move on to another family member to check out.  

I didn’t have to look up anything regarding my brother and luggage to understand what that probably meant in this context (I have the book in my hand right now and will look it up anyways).  In a previous post regarding the hauntings of my grandmother, I mentioned that my brother wasn’t fond of her, either, and that’s why we haven’t felt his presence in this house.  Her presence kept him away.  Hauling his rolling Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine suitcase from his childhood (one that we STILL have! and it’s in the dining room holding some toys my cousin’s kid played with from their visit!) to the train meant “you can come back, now... she’s gone.”  I think I did eventually see him on the train?

Looking up the symbolism of “luggage”, one of the meanings is “emotional luggage” and that can depend on the weight.  These suitcases and all of the lunchbox-like things I put on my shoulders weighed nothing when I got them onto the train.  But reading on, the very last bit says, “Packed bags or luggage in dreams are associated with endings and sometimes, death, while being unable or unwilling to let go of your bags can suggest a desire to ward off aging.  Luggage on a platform suggests a willingness to begin a new stage or phase in your life.”  Aside from the aging bit, that whole last little paragraph spoke volumes to me.  Let me unpack why:

Endings and Death - My grandma’s haunting of this property and house has come to an end.  She and my brother have passed, but I’ve also been dealing with a recent death: a friend that I didn’t know that well who was a friend of my brother’s passed away the other night.  While I do feel bad, I’m not as deeply affected as others because I wasn’t that close, and the last I spoke to him was when I was still in gradeschool (final year, maybe?) and my brother was very little in elementary and had class with him.  And while putting my luggage on this train, it was with a lot of other luggage I didn’t touch, yet my dream-self recognized.  Last night, I wrote a post getting something off my chest on my personal blog about how I’ve ended up dealing with death throughout my life (trigger warning for those who cannot deal with talks of death or suicide either at this point in their life or at all).  I think all of that luggage that I didn’t load up on the train, yet recognized (despite not existing irl) symbolizes the death I’ve had to deal with in my life.  The timing of this dream and the friend’s death and the symbolism of luggage sync up too much for it to be a coincidence.

Luggage on a Platform & New Stage/Phase in Life - Or at least the willingness to start a new stage/phase.  Again, the “train” also doubled as the waiting room or platform, and I was supposed to leave and go somewhere (with my fussy cat, Luna, who apparently would rather hang with someone else rather than me? except I woke up and she was laying by my hip rather than my legs so I’m guessing she senses my worry about how she feels about me).  And I do want to start a new stage or phase in life.  I’m just not quite sure what this could be referring to.  Maybe it’s growing my pumpkins and sunflowers in my parents’ field?  Maybe it’s advancing my art and trying to become better at paleo-art and trying to make hadrosaurs look fuckin’ bad-ass?  Or the fact that I’m trying to recreate my wardrobe DIY style to the clothes I’ve always wanted to wear?  Maybe it’s a combination of all of these?  The point is, I’m ready to move on and move forward more in life.

I’d also like to go back to the luggage and death symbolism.  I’ve grabbed my brother’s, for-sure, actually his suitcase and hauled it onto the train/platform.  It’s me dealing with his death, and wanting his spirit to come back now that grandma is gone.  I remember also hauling a suitcase that looked vaguely similar to one I used to have before we moved in with my parents from Pittsburgh.  It was largely brown, but the floral design wasn’t on it.  I can’t tell if this symbolizes the friend’s death that occurred recently, or if it’s not symbolizing death and it’s actually symbolizing me going, “Okay, time to move onto the next thing in life.”  I saw lots of other luggage, some being brown, a couple of large ones being black (my paternal grandparents’?  before my brother’s death, theirs hit me hard as a child), but there were the lunchbox-like ones that I carried that weighed nothing.  And I think they symbolized all of the animals I’ve lost on this farm; the deaths that have affected me to some degree.  I’ve lost four dogs: one that was with me since I was in first grade, one that died because of being a purebred with health issues and died from a seizure, one was shot after attacking our guinea fowl, and another was taken to the pound with her puppies because my parents feared she’d be the same way.  I’ve lost the guinea fowl, several chickens, a couple of ducks, two baby pygmy goats, and countless cats and kittens because we couldn’t afford to take care of our feline friends (or catch them; not all are people friendly).  My mom has also lost one pony who was sweet but had to be put down because of a broken leg, and my mom’s horse, Paige, currently has a couple of swollen spots on her face that disables her from consuming food properly, so she’s essentially starving, but she is also missing back teeth from having a neglectful owner in the past and she’s also so old she can’t be put under for surgery we can’t afford (and we’re waiting for a guy we know to become available to bring his back-hoe so we can bury her before we put her down).  There’s a lot of death in my life.  It’s so common that it’s normal, and the only ones that would affect me badly would be people or pets that are very close to me.  This would include my mom’s dog, my cat, my husband, and several close friends, plus two cats that I’m very close to that live outside.

Back to the luggage, I wonder what would happen if, after of course finishing up with cleaning and de-cluttering my brother’s room, if I took his suitcase back to his room?  Maybe that would symbolize to him that we’re ready for him to come back and make his occasional visit?  It’s worth a try.  I’d continue cleaning, but I’m about to start my period, and stress and such has been off-setting it, so my body’s all kinds of fucked up right now.  I’ve also got carved pumpkins to bury outside, too.  Which I’m gonna go get ready to do that, now.

[scioscribe]

on writing depression, writing while depressed, fantasy, and utility

I’ve been in a mild depression lately and most of the writing I’ve done over the last two weeks has been disorganized and incomplete: snippets rather than stories.  None of it is for anyone else and none of it even could be for anyone else, because it’s all disgustingly well-tailored to my own sloppy emotional needs and, even beyond that, thoroughly rooted in intensely designed AUs of canon that are vivid to me and undoubtedly ridiculous and unrecognizable to anyone else.  Even my wife thinks they’re self-indulgent.  But what they all are, when you come right down to it, is a very particular brand of hurt/comfort.

I’m especially brutal to my favorite characters when I’m depressed, because, dammit, I just want to read about well-deserved comfort, and I don’t have the time or even the emotional complexity in these periods to work out how to do this in any kind of subtle, plausible way that would actually be consistent with good, emotionally nuanced writing.  This isn’t the time for that.  This is the time for “the characters have inexplicably been kidnapped by torturers with some random and likely unmentioned motivation.”  It’s the time for impractical kidnappings, for (at least feigned) betrayal, for public humiliation, for strange magical harms done to people in decidedly non-magical canons.  I find this soothing.

[More real-life depression talk under the cut, as well as discussion of fictional/literary CSA, domestic violence, death, bereavement, suicide, self-harm, car accidents, sexual trauma, and medical trauma.)

And I used, I think, to be able to write about a kind of fictionalized depression that way, in a manner that I can’t do now that I have an unfortunately close personal relationship with the fucking thing.  For the record, I, at least, have no problem with fictionalized, simplified, and even sentimentalized depression: different stories fill different emotional needs for different people.  (And it would, in any case, be massively hypocritical of me to rail against it even if I wanted to, because nobody is fonder of fictional, soap opera-style amnesia than I am.)  But I can’t write it myself now, because it feels like I’m breaking some kind of inner logic.

What breaks it isn’t the portrayal of the depression as it’s being suffered but rather the way in which the depression is exited, which usually happens when some other character notices how deeply, horribly sad Character A is and provides comfort and support.  And Character A then starts to make their way out of the murky, muddy emotional place they’re mired in.  Something at last feels sort of good.  Something doesn’t hurt.  And then, thankfully, beautifully, they’re pushed down a greased slide to a place of greater emotional stability.

Whereas in my experience, someone notices I’m depressed and extends sympathy and support, and I... I don’t know.  Say it helps?  They are good people for trying to help and I am, when depressed, fundamentally aware of my utter lack of good personhood, so I don’t want to be a trial, which will only make me feel worse anyway.  So I end up in this weird pattern of opening up to someone and then panicking because I realize that there is nothing they can say that will actually help me, that I will in fact move the emotional goalposts on what I want to hear anytime they say what previously seemed like all I needed, and why would I put them in that position?  Why am I so awful?  The solution is to pretend like they have, in fact, totally fixed me, or at least pushed me up onto dry land where I will gradually fix myself, and in the meantime, I make a mental note to try extra-hard to seem normal and happy around them, because I don’t want it to be weird.  I don’t want them to have to keep expending effort and worry that will do nothing.

At the same time, of course, I desperately want them to expend effort and worry, because I’m an asshole with no currently functioning barometer of self-worth, so the only way I know how to feel even marginally better for even a minute is to provoke someone else into telling me I matter.  Provided I can convince myself for at least five minutes or so that they really think that and that they aren’t just saying it to be nice.  They’re probably saying it to be nice.

So I say the thing, I express the self-loathing, I get comforted, and then I tell myself to never, under pain of death, ever mention to that person ever again that I hate myself.

I had this thing at work a couple months ago, when I was doing okay, where a coworker and I were mourning the fact that we’d missed a chance to attend a particular conference.

“I can’t believe we both forgot to register,” she said.

“Well, you had all those meetings around then,” I said, “and I think I had something going on, too, but I can’t remember--oh, yeah!  I was super depressed.  I was really busy trying not to kill myself.”

We actually had a pretty good laugh about that, because I have an unusually cool workplace.

But I get one of those things--one disclosure that I’d sat at work trying to talk to someone on a suicide chat system--and then I’m done, then it has to become a joke.  God knows I haven’t told anyone here that the same thing is happening now.  (Not nearly as bad, though, thankfully.)

People don’t make me feel better.  Love hasn’t fixed me.  So if I tried to write that story now, Character B would bring Character A a blanket and then nothing would change.  In the morning Character A would be the same.  And Character B would try again.  And try again.  And then start to get a little impatient: I mean, fuck, I gave you the fucking blanket, didn’t I?  I hugged you.  I told you that you mattered, that I loved you, that there are so many people who love you.  Why do you not feel better.  How long am I supposed to do this.

...And then one day Character A would either get a prescription that worked or for some other reason come out the other end of the tunnel blinking at the light, and Character B would be like, “What changed?” and Character A would just shrug, especially if it’s the second kind of situation.  I literally once had a terrible, suicidal bout of depression and right at the end of it I watched The Hateful Eight, and it was the first thing I was conscious of enjoying in a really, really long time.  It is probably not true that The Hateful Eight, which I genuinely (and, in addition, a little superstitiously) love, cured my depression, but it did kind of feel like that. This is not a satisfying resolution to a story unless your story is ad copy for The Hateful Eight and you are marketing it exclusively to the mentally ill.

A satisfying resolution to the story is that pain that is felt by someone else--love that bridges the fundamental loneliness of suffering--cures things.  I like that.  It’s the kind of thing that should be true even if it’s not, and it’s the kind of thing that I consider myself lucky to still be able to enjoy in other formats.  Keep writing those stories, if you’re doing that, because they matter.  (And some of them are probably written by people who are depressed, or who have been depressed, the world eerily enough not being endlessly composed of carbon copies of my experiences.)

But where I was going with all this is the kind of ridiculous depression story currently living in bits and pieces on my hard drive, and also the ridiculous, professionally published, over-the-top depression story that I find oddly convincing as a fantasy of suffering by the suffering.

Me first, because it’s simpler.  In addition to the blatant, implausible hurt/comfort I talked about way up at the top of the post, I also keep writing this incredibly weird thing where I can write the traditional depression story by making it a magical depression story.  It makes no sense.  It’s a character who trades a year of happiness for four years of his little brother’s tuition, that’s the level of WTFery we’re talking about here.  But.  It’s about the idea that the sadness has some kind of profundity to it, that it’s been incurred for a reason, and even a noble, self-sacrificing reason.  It’s about how eventually his brother will find this out and figure out a way to fix things, so love will cure the sadness after all.  It’s about there being a comprehensible, emotionally valid reason for why the sadness just won’t leave: buddy, your contract’s not up yet.  This is gloppy, sentimental wish-fulfillment wrapped all around characters I love and want to be okay.

The over-the-top, professionally published fantasy of suffering story is Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life, aka, the Story of How Literally Every Awful Thing in the World Happened to the Beautifully Sad Jude St. Francis.  (Spoilers follow.)  A Little Life gestures vaguely in the direction of being an ensemble story where the narratives of its three other primary characters--Willem, an actor and part-time Norse god of handsomeness; JB, a talented avant-garde artist and eventual acclaimed photographer and part-time drug addict who suffers way less beautifully than Jude and so consequently gets shit on by everyone; and Malcolm, a successful architect and the group’s resident normal--will actually matter, but it gives up on this after not very long.  Which it kind of has to do, because you almost literally cannot tell an in-depth story of even a ridiculously glamorous and successful life alongside Jude’s life, which will dwarf it to the point of making it seem ant-like in its insignificance.

Oh, boy.  Jude.

I was going to summarize it, but the Wikipedia summary is hilarious in its Perils of Pauline approach to it all and is recommended reading, so I’ll just do bullet-points.

* Jude is an abandoned child with no knowledge of his parents (the novel dwells at slightly discomfiting length on how no one can even tell what race he is, which... gets a little weird after a while).

* He is raised in a monastery, because apparently that’s a thing that can happen, where he is treated mostly cruelly and routinely physically abused and neglected, until he reaches an age where the abuse becomes sexual and widespread.  If not every monk participates, no one actually does anything to prevent it.

* The closest thing to kindly intervention he gets is from Brother Luke, young Jude’s only source of comfort, and, naturally enough for this kind of novel, also interested in raping him, just with the illusion in place that they really love each other.

* Brother Luke abducts Jude and takes him on the road and then--oh-so-tearfully--explains how they’re going to have to start paying their way by renting out time with Jude to a series of strange men.

* Mentally disintegrating under the weight of all this, Jude begins to brutally harm himself by slamming his head into the wall; Brother Luke decides to teach him to cut himself instead, as that process is more controlled.  This habit will last the rest of Jude’s life.

* When Jude finally gets away from Brother Luke, he’s put into a group home where the sexual abuse continues.  After a chance at living in a more stable and less horrifically traumatic environment (of course) falls through, Jude succeeds in running away.

* He is picked up by a doctor who promptly imprisons him in his basement and rapes him for months.

* Then the doctor runs him over with his car and leaves Jude for dead.  In fact, Jude is not dead, but he has acquired a lifelong limp and significant nerve damage, conditions that will a) worsen over the course of his life and b) keep him in nearly constant pain.

* Then handwave-handwave, Jude finally finds where the non-rapists live and receives just enough therapy that the novel can vaguely indicate how he’s still functional after all of this.  He gets into a prestigious college and makes a group of lifelong friends, named above, but is especially close to Willem, because Willem is a Perfect Human and Endlessly Patient Best Friend.  They move in together while Willem looks for acting jobs and Jude attends law school.

* Now, not all of this backstory is revealed at once, which is good, because even when spread out over seven hundred pages, there’s still an “oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me” feeling when you get to the part about the doctor.  The novel actually begins with Jude and Willem moving into their first post-grad apartment, and for a while, it seems like this will be a novel primarily about living on and trying to make a life in the aftermath of a horrific past.  Jude’s life is good for a while, though understandably enough continuously shadowed.  He still cuts himself, and he still has mental breakdowns that lead to him making gourmet catering and desserts for everyone (the BEST kind of mental breakdown, bar none), but... he’s doing okay.  He becomes a lawyer.  He acquires A Perfect Father Figure Who At Last Does Not Want to Sexually Abuse Him, a wonderfully kind law professor accompanied by his wonderfully kind wife, who are always ecstatically happy to invite him into their home and in fact even adopt him, formally, when he’s thirty, and start calling him their son.

* If you’re thinking it sounds like the other shoe is about to drop, you are correct.

* JB becomes addicted to crystal meth, but this is not Innocent Suffering Like Jude’s but instead Something He Brought Upon Himself, so when Jude tries to help him and JB lashes out by imitating Jude’s limp and occasionally slurred speech, both Jude and Willem find it unforgivable and sever relationships with him, though they’ll drift back into contact later on.

* After years of everyone talking about Jude’s possible sexual orientation behind his back instead of just fucking asking him like any normal person would do (especially since no one has any real idea of his past), Jude finally ends up in a relationship with a high-powered fashion executive named Caleb whom he meets at a party.

* Caleb promptly begins showing creepy danger signs--he’s especially critical of Jude’s increasing need for a wheelchair and thinks it’s a sign of weakness and Jude “giving in” to his deformity--and before you can say “many survivors of childhood abuse find themselves in abusive relationships later in life,” Caleb has become the abusive husband in every Lifetime movie ever made.  When Jude--with kindly law professor and surrogate dad’s help--sort of succeeds in severing things with him, Caleb breaks into Jude’s apartment and rapes him and throws him down a flight of stairs.  (Actually, Wikipedia tells me this is the second rape in their relationship.  That’s how often Jude gets raped in this novel.  I have forgotten entire instances of it.)

* Jude then tries to kill himself, which prompts Hollywood star Willem to move back in with him.  Jude cherry-picks a few of the less cataclysmically awful stories from his childhood to finally tell and Willem is horrified by them while the reader leans back and smokes a cigarette and says, “Will, you wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen.”

* Willem, despite having been straight to this point, then begins to fall in love with Jude, and you know, I’m all for flexible models of sexuality and sexual desire that proceeds from romantic connection that proceeds from the realization that this person is closer to you than anyone else in the world, but also: come the fuck on.  This could not get any ficcier if it tried.

* Anyway, Jude of course loves Willem back, Willem being a Perfect Human and all, so they begin an honestly very touching relationship, marred only by Jude’s continued self-harm (which he can’t bring himself to stop for good, though Willem does provide him with enough stability that he’s able to minimize it) and their problems in bed.  Willem is highly satisfied with having sex with Jude, but Jude’s life has left him entirely sex-repulsed, and his continued assent to their encounters and his continued concealment of the pain and distress they cause him leads to escalated self-harm.

* Willem finally finds out and Jude at last reveals to him at least 90% of his childhood as an explanation for his hatred of sex.  They cut it out of their relationship entirely and have a honeymoon phase--Willem goes back to sleeping with women in no-strings-attached arrangements that don’t bother Jude in the slightest, and their life together is exceedingly happy and romantic.

* AND THEN WILLEM, MALCOLM, AND MALCOLM’S WIFE ALL DIE TOGETHER IN A CAR CRASH.

* Also at some point in here, Jude lost one of his legs.  I don’t even remember when.  There was a medical reason for it, related to maybe the initial damage or the subsequent damage from Caleb throwing him down the stairs or him burning himself severely on his leg, it didn’t just fall off like the legs of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm, but really, in the wash of all this trauma, who can keep track of the odd leg or two?

* Well, Jude practically starves himself to death, gets help temporarily, and then finally succeeds in killing himself and leaving his devastated adoptive father behind to close out the novel.

It’s actually a good novel if you like this sort of thing.  There’s no real character depth to anyone, because all you need to know about Jude is that he suffers beautifully and nobly and all you need to know about anyone else is that they either love and admire Jude or have raped/are currently raping him.  (The one exception to this is JB, who seems to have escaped from a more complex novel, as he is allowed the occasional spot of selfishness and realistic misreadings of situations, and I seriously considered requesting post-Willem Jude/JB for Yuletide just to see this story travel towards a more nuanced, textured view of life going on and people reconciling themselves with imperfections.)  But Yanagihara writes well and there is a melodramatic but genuine emotional intensity to it all.  I was involved throughout.  But just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, I have to admit that my reaction to Willem’s death was a combination of raw sobbing and horrified laughter.  But again, if you like over-the-top hurt/comfort, this is your kind of thing.  It’s my kind of thing.  I mean, I did finish.  I do actually own this book.  It’s sloppy and hyperbolic, but I like crying and can cry around my criticisms of the text.

I laid all that out, though, not to defend or condemn A Little Life but to contextualize why I think it has an odd power as a fantasy of suffering by the sufferers themselves.  That it’s a voyeuristic fantasy of suffering is pretty obvious.  But it works inwardly, too, or at least it works inwardly for me.  (I’ve talked about this elsewhere, so forgive me if you’ve seen it before.)

No one in A Little Life ever loses patience with Jude.  His pain never exhausts them; his refusal to explain the cause of his pain never genuinely frustrates them.  They wish he would tell them, but his not telling them doesn’t get on their nerves, doesn’t strike them as unfair emotional withholding.  In fact, everyone loves Jude.  His professor adopts him.  His friends stay loyal over decades.  His doctor continues to treat him even after giving up the rest of his practice.  His straight best friend considers him the exception to the romantic rule and has no problem at all at adjusting to a romance without sex.  Anyone who is cruel to him is judged harshly by the other characters, even if it’s the cruelty of a moment.  No one ever tells him to get over it.

It’s not that none of these things never happen, or could never happen, but the unalloyed kindness with which Jude’s suffering is largely received is the melodramatic counterpoint to unalloyed evil and pain that slowly destroy him.

And I’ll go on: there are proximate and instantly comprehensible causes for Jude’s pain.  There are even physical and undeniable signs of his pain.  His trauma is so profound as to justify, for any listener, a lifetime of suffering expressed however he likes.  His depression and self-loathing does not descend randomly, leaving him poleaxed by feeling awful and feeling worse because he has seemingly no reason to feel awful.  He doesn’t talk to people about it, generally--he has nearly perfect self-control around his friends, his pain makes him ungenerous and unfair and snappish on really only one occasion--but if he did, they would concede, automatically, the righteousness of his pain.  They would be amazed at how well he’s doing.

A Little Life provides, for its readers who are hurting, a story where suffering doesn’t come from nowhere, where their emotions are an understandable response to a history of terrible trauma, where loved ones are never tired of dealing with them, where debilitating emotional and physical pain is never enough of an inconvenience to interfere in providing the markers of success and even glamour, where you don’t have to cry your eyes out in a shitty apartment, where you will never lose your job because you don’t show up for three days, where everyone would understand how you feel if only they knew, and where they really do want to know.

And, for that matter, where you don’t have to strain yourself into saying that yes, all of this has helped, yes, you feel better now.  Jude never separates himself from this hypothetical reader by recovering, which would seem, in this light, not like a victory but a hateful cheat.  That bastard--what does it say that he can get better and you can’t seem to?  How, after this steamy bath of melodrama, are you supposed to wrap your brain around normalcy?  His interlude with Willem is an interlude, its happiness so complete as to signal its coming downfall, its happiness so complete as to signal that we have not left this fervently emotional Expressionism.  The car crash is devastating, but it’s also, come on, total confirmation.  Yeah.  That’s how it goes.  It’s okay not to recover--you don’t have to worry that there’s something wrong with you, or weak in you, for not recovering--if you’re Jude, whose every escape is another fall off the cliff.  It lets you indulge in the fantasy of not having to do the exhausting and difficult work of trying, because each effort, on its failure or collapse, only further justifies the preexisting pain.  It’s okay to stay down if every time you stand up, someone punches you in the face.  Just lie there a while.  Just breathe.  People will admire you for it.  People will love you.  No one will say that this has gone on long enough and they just don’t know if they can do it anymore.  They know what’s happened to you.  If they don’t, man, won’t they have egg on their face when you tell them.

If my snippets of self-indulgent fic are about the fantasy of suffering that says that the suffering is somehow profound, that there is concrete proof that the person suffering is good and kind and undeserving of this, that everyone will worry and love you, and that the love will fix things because magic, A Little Life is the fantasy of complete and utter validation of seemingly endless agony.  What I’m writing right now is what I can write because, though I’m not doing great, I’m on medication and I’m doing okay.  The book, on the other hand, is a fantasy for the times when it does not seem like there is any possibility of okayness anywhere on the horizon, when you could not believe in recovery or even treatment and all that will comfort you is a story where it is 100% fine to feel like that because it’s true.

It’s not hard to see ways in which that fantasy could potentially hurt someone--that there could be someone who sees, in that story, not comfort but an awesome rationale for making the same eventual decision as Jude himself does--but life and literature are complicated.  Umberto Eco said that “a novel is a machine for generating interpretations,” and that’s something I find true as well as heartening.  No story runs only in one direction.  People interact with narratives in messy, challenging, lopsided ways; we respect stories, we fall in love with stories, we curl up with them, and we also hit them over the head and leave them to wake up in a bathtub of ice with their kidneys missing because we’re just going to take what we need from them and go, thanks.  I say this because this has been, for me, an oddly utilitarian look at literature--it’s not my normal approach to textual analysis--and I want to pull back from that at least a little.  To draw attention to the complexity and weirdness of people’s relationships to art: that things can work on us in unpredictable and uncanny ways.  And that also, for that matter, you can probably read A Little Life purely for the bits about cooking.

Utility is all you can see, and all you can properly care about, when you need the fantasy.

And then you get better.  And your relationship to those stories changes.  Maybe you come back and say, “Okay, in the clear light of day, I cannot stand this, glad it was there for me earlier, but yikes.”  But maybe, and beautifully, you get Erich Fromm’s mature love, in a literary sense: not “I love you because I need you” but “I need you because I love you.”  I’m in the tunnel between those two places at the moment, and this is the view, looking back and looking forward.

Also, I just wanted to tell everyone how batshit A Little Life is.

[dolphinsdancer]

Maybe you’ll be nicer..next time..

Or maybe there won’t be one.

..if there EVER is a next time. IF I give you another chance..

..IF you deserve one.

The thing is..I know I do. I get ALL the chances.

Because I’m STILL here, because of me..not you.

If it was because of you, I’d be gone..the horrible things you’ve said and done, or just simply not done..at all..have rattled through my brain on those dreadful weak moments..of struggle and pain. I’m still here. Because of me.

Not you.

Because I fought for myself, when no one else cared.

(NOTE:  Before I dive into this..jungle.. I started to write this ~a week++ ago, before this past week of the tragic deaths of Kate Spade & Anthony Bourdain. I’m still sharing it, because I wrote it for the PMDD peeps out there..that sometimes face this struggle with their “demons” monthly, or sometimes daily, or sometimes randomly, because it’s like that..vague and individual, and not consistent..even month-to-month. I’ve had stretches of feeling just amazing, just fine.

And..I’ve had a couple bad “episodes”.

Last month (April/May) was horrible. 

Physical pain was back.

Extreme.

Worse I’d had in ~3+yrs, since before my surgery.

Which is discouraging.

Pain like that.

Makes you want to just give up. 

Because you don’t want to live with it.

Again.

In any way, shape, or form. Outside stress makes PMDD..(and PMS..and endometriosis) worse.

This past month has been a bit “lighter”, but still challenging. The toughest moments in the past ~2 months were when I have had to take HEAVY pain meds..

I could take just one, to deal with the moment, and breathe through it, or I could take them ALL, and then maybe the pain, the physical at least..which is real..and mental, which is not (I’ll explain this..below) would just be gone.

Forever. But..I’m still here. Because I fight for me. 

When no one else does. And I share this for those that have felt that pain, on any level, wondered those thoughts, even for a minute..and need a moment, to have someone tell them, to let them know they are not alone.. And I share it, even though it may not be perfect, and may not be finished, because it is too important to wait another moment..to help someone, if you can

..if I can.. I will. I can and will fight for others struggling. Like only one person (my sister from another Mama) has fought for me.. I will fight for me. I will fight for you).

So here goes. How do you explain something that most people don’t STILL believe even exists? How do you explain something that has judgements so deeply rooted in horrible misogyny & people, both men & women (but I’ve seen & heard it more from men)..make nasty comments..like “she’s ‘PMS’ing’, or “she’s being a bitch, it must be that ‘time of the month’..”, or the other endless statements..  The funny thing is..I more often than not, am totally biting my tongue, simply because I don't want to be called "angry" or "bitchy", or "that angry uncontrollable bitch, etc.." by that person who doesn't understand 

(and makes no effort to do so..), because then it only proves their point/opinion about me..(even though in truth they quite frequently deserve to be verbally eviscerated..)

YET..I restrain. Even though their point/opinion about me is also totally wrong.

Because they’ve never bothered to find out anything about me.

So..I bite my tongue.

Why..

Because.. People don’t know..yet..don’t understand..YET. 1 in ~20 women on this planet deal with this disease (in varying degrees, from mild to extreme), and yet there are almost no treatments, and most doctors, psychologists, medical professionals, etc even deny it..still.

It can not only be a daily struggle with symptoms, mental, emotional, physical, with yourself, but also with medical professionals, and attempting to find REAL help, having people believe you, being afraid to tell anyone, a friend, a boyfriend/husband/potential lover, people at work/your boss, because of how they WILL view and treat you differently.. Like you’re a porcelain doll filled with lava that might explode all over them at any second..utterly fragile and yet volatile (beyond volatile in many eyes), and always at fault..

..and they will always be quick to BLAME the “PMDD” for everything. Whether it is not. So, you hide. That’s why most people who deal with ANY degree of mental health concerns, issues, or diseases, HIDE. Because that is all they become then. But they are not just that, they are so much more, and deserve so much more. And know you are much, much stronger. You are NOT a fragile porcelain figurine.

And..hopefully folks out..the ones that scoff, or doubt, or juggle you like that porcelain doll..all, will READ..and learn.. What PMDD is.. And even then, ask you, talk to YOU, because it truly is different for each woman, and usually different each and every month. And it takes strength beyond ANY strength they even know to function sometimes, to go to work, to be with family, to go grocery shopping, or the gym/workout, or do anything that feels “normal” at all. KNOW you are much, much stronger that PMDD, PMS, Endometriosis, or any physical or mental or emotional conditions, illness, diseases.. You are enough. So..I bite my tongue. Why.. Because.. I personally deal, and have more regularly dealt with the “physical” symptoms of it. You can also have/deal with PMS and PMDD..and more..

(..lucky me..I have both, plus endometriosis, which I’ve had 2 surgeries for..and which I still have, apparently, with a whole lotta scar tissue behind my uterus..so some of the pain might even still be from that..who knows..)

Which meant for YEARS..I didn’t even notice the PMDD, as the pain from severe bleeding, and massively painful periods over-ruled everything else.

Once I started taking a drug a few years ago now (Visanne) for the Endo (and sorta PMS), it took several years for things to “settle down”, and become clearer what symptoms were from what exactly.

I still “cycle”, but without a period, because the Visanne stopped the bleeding part..(good thing, because I was literally bleeding to death every month, bad thing..because I still cycle, but don’t really know where it is, beyond where my PMDD symptoms start and stop and fall..and I track these quite closely, so I know.. and where I know my period was from before I started the Visanne)..so I have a somewhat vague idea of what is going on for me. But stress makes it worse, and I’ve had some brutal stress in the past couple months..that has put thing into a horrendous flair of both physical pain (almost as bad as before my surgery) and mental symptoms - which have been the worst they have ever been.

Good times. As they say. So..WHY then did I decide to start to write this.. I felt it was time to speak up. To say something in support of the PMDD, & PMS & Endo women (or folks that identify as women) out there..because hardly anyone does. And because I was, I am tired of certain people’s judgements, inaccurate perceptions, without bothering to even know me, or ask me if “I’m ok”..or if I needed help, or people who have pretended to care, or give a damn about “mental health”, but really don’t. Because their actions don’t match their words. And it became even more important this week..as I had to briefly stop writing, and wasn’t sure IF I’d finish..because of the deaths in the “celebrity” realms.. And then I realized, it was more relevant than ever to “finish”..

and share. Because MOST people that face mental health issues are NOT celebrities. They are just regular everyday average people. And when they die by suicide, it’s not all over the news, it rarely even gets a mention in a local paper, yet there are 1000′s of people, not celebrities at risk everyday. And because I had someone be so utterly UNkind to me.

(..more about that below..2 examples in fact)

And I knew I had to be better than that..

So..I bite my tongue.

Why..

Because.. Because..as the saying goes.. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

Or some variation, or order of that. It doesn’t matter. Just be kind. So..yet. I demonstrate unimaginable restraint.

Most the time. I speak my mind, I speak my truth, always with kindness And IF I’m really a bitch, I know it. I own it. And I apologize. Every time. And they are UNkind.

The other..funny..but not in a “hahaha” kinda way..thing is..

I can remember the times that people have been...UNkind.

In those moments of my own struggles. MUCH more vividly than I can recall any moments of kindness.. So it matters. Being UNkind is like handing someone a razor, that they will play over and over again in their mind, shredding and finding the holes in the logic to live..in a place that is already shredded and feeling tattered beyond repair. So be kind. (Or just stay away. Being UNkind is worse). So it matters. Every. Single. Time.

It REALLY matters when people make an effort.

Also..I have to sadly speak to this.. As there are people out there who *CLAIM* to be “mental health advocates”, but are actually the worst..but when someone reaches out, they are rude, dismissive, or simply don’t respond.

At all.

So they are liars..they do the “mental health” thing, posting about it on their social media for show..for RT’s, to feed ego, or whatever other reasons..than the real ones. I had an horrid experience with a woman named Stephanie..last year.

IF you read her twitter feed..

OY..This is one disillusioned, dishonest person..

She claims to be a Ph.D..but of course, the Uni she went to suddenly has no record of it..and other stuff..SMH. I might have believed her, if not for the way she acted in private, and how she clearly and blatantly manipulates people to attempt to get them to feel sorry for her.

She claims to be a part of the “#SickNOTweak” team, but a few CRITICAL times last year, when I reached out to her, she blew me off, was beyond incredibly rude in her responses on Facebook (we had been “friends”), and then she randomly flipped out on me and blocked me. Probably because I started to see through her lies, the inconsistencies, and I started to ask some questions, and call her on things.

Perhaps her own mental health issues are far worse..I attempted/still attempt to be sympathetic, but not when someone is lying.

I hope no one else gets taken in by her..but she uses “celebrity” names to prop up her stories, and name drops and tags them to garner attention and perceived support.

I mention her/that situation only because when I was REALLY struggling last year, she was beyond decimating to me.

There is nothing quite as awful as reaching out to someone who claims to be a mental health supporter, advocate and “understanding”, and have them use that information against you, gaslight you, and in that time-frame, it was quite a shock. I actually came really close at that time to taking my own life, to be struggling, ask for help, and have someone be so dismissive. I know now, who she is, how fake it all is, and it doesn’t impact me. Not any more. And it is interesting to find out your/MY own strength, in moments like that.

I got through those moments, because of me. And I only mention here, because is it hard enough to reach out, it is hard enough to know who to trust with a deeply scary part of yourself, a part of your psyche, to hand yourself over so vulnerable to someone, and have them be so awful, and dismissive, and actually down-right cruel. And because others have told me of times they have reached out, to different people, and have had similar, dismissive, or judgemental experiences. The saddest thing, is people REALLY struggle to reach out.

And usually don’t at all. I want to make sure they do it with the right people, someone who will reach back..(so I can and will share in private who this person is, if you feel you have been taken in and manipulated by her, as I don’t want anyone else to be hurt by her lies..) I will post a list of professional contacts at the end, as I recommend that more that anything else now.

The other person..

..hard to say. I’ve essentially given up hope that they’ll be decent. They have been deeply, hurtful, impactful when I’ve struggled though.. As I can hear their words, sometimes, mean, sometimes mocking, sometimes cruel, sometimes just disconnected, uncaring and vague.

Someone who claims to be a “friend”, but has never acted like a friend.

Who has been awful, and dismissive.

That person that ALWAYS thinks the worst of me, or any message I send.

Reactionary, and angry..and always blaming me, and turning it around on me, instead of taking any ownership of their actions.

Instead of believing that I always speaking from a place of kindness, and curiosity, and genuineness.

But I guess if someone pretends to be genuine, & they are lacking in it, in some way..

When faced with someone who is..genuine, they’d be threatened, as they know I see through the BULLSHIT and masks.

That person that claims to “not judge”, but is the most judgemental person I’ve ever encountered..

or maybe they just treat only me that shitty..

..it seems so.

That person that called me a “categorical liar”, when I simply asked an honest question.

And many other things I’m not at liberty to share. (..or who this is unfortunately..I can confirm/deny if directly guessed, that is it). So..WHY do I share this then..? What I do know..despite my own experiences of encountering some distrustful, hurtful people out there, is TRUST YOURSELF. Even if you struggle with any kind of mental health diseases, illness, issues, or concerns, there is always a part of you that CAN find a way through to light. Even if it’s what I had to do, which was just not die, only because doing so would stick it in the eye of those that abandoned me and didn’t help, when my requests for help were out there and real. And I can say, in truth, that I am here to help, or to at least point you in the direction of help, if what you face is beyond my scope. Sometimes ALL it takes is someone listening, someone who responded to you when you struggled, someone making just a tiny effort that makes the difference in someone’s life.

As to the person I addressed at the start..

From what I’ve seen..and my eyes are even more open now..everyday, I don’t believe you do care. Despite what you say. Your actions will have to speak louder than your lack of words. And there are neither, so..

IF it ever happens, it comes from you. For me to believe again.

But I am here.

Because I fought for me. Because you never did. I will fight for me. I will fight for anyone that needs that reminder to stay alive.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain

RESOURCES AND CONTACT LINES: Canadian Suicide Prevention Line: 1-833-456-4566 Website: suicideprevention.ca (VERY oddly, this site was “offline” when I visited it to confirm the link, hopefully it’s fixed by the time anyone - not like 3am isn’t a critical time for it to be online or anything - needs to access it). Direct link for local/provincial numbers: http://bit.ly/2sSBZiL (US)/National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 (US:1-800-273-TALK) UK: 116 123 Australia:  13 11 14 AND..this one gets a graphic too..as I know of so many transgender folk that have struggled with suicide just because of who they are, or gender dysphoria. Canada: 1-877-330-6366 US: 1-877-565-8860

[auqre]

rrRRrrRRrrRRrrRRrr

Today I started to unravel. I think my interview went swell but I felt strongly negative about the entire thing because, as a receptionist job at a retinal doctor’s office, I would expect them to not only not hire me because I’m a dude, but also because the position would most likely be given to someone who would be much more inclined towards ophthalmology - like a student or something, hoping to get experience working for the doctors they will soon become as they work at school. 

Getting to work everyone complimented me on my bow-tie. I felt pretty good but like, too good. I became practically manic an hour or two later. Then it was full blown panic and depression because I was freaking the fuck out over the rent, even though I wasn’t being paid until tomorrow, and it wouldn’t (potentially) be due until 4 days from now, but still I wanted to make sure that I made it - so I stress the fuck out about it. I didn’t at all relax until I called State Farm and told them to suspend my account until I could pay it on Thursday of next week. Then I started to calm down because then I wouldn’t be starving for the rest of this week. Maria told me about her friend who tried to attempt suicide, and my shirt felt super uncomfy in the hot building. Also I had a disgusting sandwich at arbys.

Okay that’s enough bad things - time for the three good things for each :P

In the interview, I did a fantastic job telling her how much everything that I do at my current job can easily be transitioned into this one, and despite my doubts I need to understand that this was a great experience in figuring out what I do, how I feel, and how I think when it comes to “before the interview, after the arrival” kind of thoughts. I thought I was going to go in unprepared so I kept reading notes but the thing that I really had to do that helped the most was to calm myself the fuck down and not be terrified of where I was and fight my self-doubt about me not belonging there. I did belong there - I wanted this job and despite what I think those people in that lobby didn’t give a flying fuck who I was or what I was doing there. I wrote that app she handed me all the way out, and did my best to get that information in there, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t give me the job, I know that I can at least do this easily. I can impress others with aplomb, and I believe that I can convince others that I am more than capable of handling most situations. So what if I’m not a perfect fit for the position, I’m sure the other candidates are going to have a harder time speaking as well as I did during the interview - and they will remember me easily because of my bow-tie! So, when I call back, I’ll be remembered!

Also why should I doubt that they would want to talk to me again, the damn interviewer even fucking asked me if I would be interested in a second interview at a later time and what days would be good for me. The negativity is real! She was very receptive and smiled a lot at me, and we had a lot of casual discourse between the two of us - she seemed to enjoy my company not only professionally, but socially, which is a really good sign because obviously people are always looking for those they can get along with.

Why the heck do I feel “too good” at work? I wasn’t overdressed, and this outfit was handpicked by someone I love. I should feel proud and happy to let her know that everyone enjoyed my outfit very much. It was totally my imagination that the smiles I got for my dress were not in finding me clownish, but in finding me appealing. I received several compliments along the lines of “sharp” “nice” and “professional.” Taking them at face value, these are nice things compared to the whole lot of nothing I receive from everyone when I normally dress for work. I was annoyed with everyone asking about my interview, but in retrospect they are all interested in me doing something different. Something new and interesting being brought into their lives - someone dressing up for work, trying to better themselves, and of course the young ladies said they liked it as well <.< but don tell maria that. Besides, I personally felt attractive just by myself, and let out a lot of my stress today not only through music singing as well…so much so that I was hoarse when I got to work today. Woo rock music.

Superbrothers music by Jim Guthrie almost made me cry because I started to look at screenshots from the game and it made me feel really good inside to tear up at that amazing piece of artwork. I really would love to get Maria to play that sometime, possibly after we are finished with Psychonauts. It makes me really happy that she wants to play a game I enjoyed, though I know the rage is real lol. The music is mostly what makes Superbrothers incredible - it’s neither positive nor negative, it’s just there. But the part that made me tear up was when they started playing the music with those sprite things - it was a good kind of tear because that game makes you feel really good inside for some reason, it’s disarmingly-charming. Disarmcharm.

As for the rent, no one is dying of starvation. I postponed two bills that are coming up due, and I will be able to make them in on time with no penalties. State Farm told me that they are only allowed to permit this kind of suspension twice a year, so this is the first one, and I get one more and no more for the rest of the year - so I think I’ll be fine, unless I have to make major expenses again. Essentially everything will be fine, I’ll budget and things will be ok. If they start to not be I can always opt to turn off the internet and save an extra $28, because my 2GB Data, all the books I have to read, and the videogames on my computer/Wii/PSP will keep me well entertained. I couldn’t say the same for Ethan though - he loves his Netflix. As for the rent the positives are I am not in the red - I postponed two bills which were under no penalty and totally allowed to save myself $50 in the green - which means I can get groceries that will last me until the 4th of May…on top of this Tiffany told me she wouldn’t let me starve and would go with me, which prompted me to bring that up later as a thing I could do with her as a normal thing one day. I can learn how to better save money, make that a new skill. Also there’s no way in he’ll Gary is going to do my check first out of Allllllllllllll of the fucking tenants he has first thing in the morning at 9:05 am before Ethan and I get there. But he will be there early to begin, so what I can do in the meantime is get up at 9am (which is when Huntington opens) tomorrow, and tell them that I would like my account unlocked from the emergency overdraft thinger so that if, on Monday, Gary cashes the check and IF he cashes it before Ethan gives me the money, I will know the overdraft limit (I’m sure $200 is okay, but I’ll double check because the website says it has to do with your “account history,” and I was a FirstMerit person before I was a Huntington person, so they had better know how much I can overdraft and it better be $200 - I’ll just explain to them the situation) as long as I make sure that money is in there within a 24-hour period, which it will be, because Ethan had better get that fucking money to me before the bank closes. I know he will because he normally doesn’t work Mondays and I work at 12 so, he can get up with me. I just set my alarm to wake me up that early so I can get down there and ask, and I’ll be sure to ask for all the rules and such so I can now TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND JUST CHILL BECAUSE THE RENT IS GOING TO BE OOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH KAYYYYYYYYYYY because I just set all of the alarms and calendar notifications that the most autistic person would never forget - besides you won’t forget because you stress the fuck out way too fucking hard about this shit. To top it all off Ryan, it’s 4 days away - if shit goes wrong, parents and friends will bail you out because they know you are doing everything in your power to make sure it all works out. You’re going to be okay. You just need to worry about grocery shopping this weekend. Text Tiffany asking her to go with you this Friday after work maybe.

Maria’s friend doesn’t ruin her life, but you stressed out sure will. Chill, you being yourself is the cure for her and that it will make her feel better too :P The shirt isn’t the coolest and comfiest around but it sure will get you a job, make you look sexy, and works really well with 3 of your pants and your bow tie. And I think that one tie, but I’m not entirely sure. The silver one.

Finally, Arby’s sandwich was gross (pork belly, *vomit*) but your stomach stopped feeling massively in pain and alleviated that stress. Also you are going home now. To Maria apparently. Yay!

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