#because i'm just shy of having a panic attack over my fear that fandom is going to eat itself when their speculation doesn't come true

[noxsoulmate]

Listen, my friend. My beautiful, wonderful friend!

There can never be enough cake!!

@beautifulhigh, please write your cliff fic, I'm begging you! I'm the last person who will go around and be like, "but that was myyyyyy idea, you stooooole it." Because let's make one thing clear right away: accusing authors of such a thing just because you write the same trope is terrible!

Obviously, I totally understand you. Every time someone posts a fic that comes even remotely close to one of my ideas or wips, I feel terrible, I shy away from that wip for a while, I have to let my friends talk me out of a mild panic attack because I fear that now, obviously, people will think I stole that idea - even though I know it's not true, my friends know it's not true, maybe even my tumblr history proves that it's not true. It still makes me doubt everything. So yes, I get your fear.

I had the idea for this fic over a year ago, the first time I talked about it on tumblr was at the start of this year - and then suddenly, there are some teaser pics for season 4 that makes the fandom speculate that there might be a cliff involved in one of the calls and before I know it, the fandom basically recounts the entire plot of my fic and first fics with this idea even appear... I admit, it felt weird - but I would never even think of accusing any of them of stealing from me, just because I already posted my plot at the beginning of the year. On the other hand, of course, I fear that people will think that I stole the idea... It's a fine line to walk - but I won't let it stop me from writing and posting this fic! Because, just like with the cakes, in the end, none of these will be the same and the fandom deserves to taste a lot of different cakes 😉

When will the fic about carlos falling down the cliff come out?

Thanks for this ask, dear nonnie. Sadly, my November didn’t go as planned, writing-wise. My plan was to get a lot of my wips done during my vacation... but somehow, I ended up actually relaxing and hardly writing anything at all.

That being said, the cliff fic is at the top of my wip list for December. I'll start answering the asks from my wip game soon and there where a lot of asks for that fic. So I do know what to focus on 😉

I definitely want it to be done in early January at the latest, better yet at the end of this year. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to make it a Christmas present for you all 🥰

[thevioletcaptain]

i just needed to rant a bit about fandom expectations. 

under a cut because i don’t want to be out here popping anyone’s excitement bubble.

i’ve mostly been staying quiet on this front aside from a few vague tweets. 

but... man. this widespread conviction that cas is definitely coming back, that dean will get a chance to directly respond to his confession, that there’ll be a kiss, etc. 

guys, it’s making me so goddamn sad.

i mean. i get it. it would make sense for him to come back. it would be fair, to let cas finally know that yes, he is loved and wanted and important. initially, it’s what i expected as well.

y’all know that all i’ve ever wanted out of an ending for this show is for all of our boys to be together, and for cas to be told how important he is. so i’m going to be absolutely gutted if we don’t get at least the implication that they’ll reunite with cas somehow.

but all the things people have been citing as “proof” that misha filmed for the final episode are... thin at best. everything that’s come out since 15.18 indicates that it was his last appearance on screen.

and sure, maybe the show is doing an elaborate cover up to keep us in the dark like they did with that bogus abominable snowman movie back when they were keeping jim beaver’s involvement in party on garth a secret.

i’ll be fucking thrilled if that’s the case. though if i’m being honest... if that’s what is going on here, i’ll also be more than a little pissed that they put us through the unnecessary stress when this shit of a year already has us all clinging desperately to our last shreds of sanity.

but i digress.

the point is, fandom seems to have collectively decided to ignore everything we’ve been told by misha and everyone else who has referred to despair as his final appearance. 

fandom also seems to have collectively decided that their hopeful speculation that cas is going to return is not so much speculation, but in fact, a foregone conclusion.

and honestly... that's the main problem. speculation is not foolproof. and pinning all of your hopes and expectations and anticipation on speculation is a one way ticket to bitter disappointment and anger, even when it’s just a random episode in the middle of a series.

doing it now? at the end? oooof. idk. i’m just worried i guess. 

worried that people are only setting themselves up to be really hurt.

worried that a big portion of fandom is going to sour on the show and bail when the final credits roll and we haven’t seen cas come back.

anyway. i just needed to vent all of that, i guess.

given the amount of work that dabb & co have clearly put into this past few seasons in order to push dean and castiel’s part of the story as far as they possibly could, it would really suck to see people bail at the end.

based on everything else he’s done, i do think i’ll personally be satisfied with whatever dabb has written, though i’m deeply unhappy about the probability of cas not being present.

ultimately, i trust dabb to do right by these characters, even if the finale ends up taking a direction that i wouldn’t have chosen.

i’ll be here forever, regardless of what happens tomorrow. 

i just hope that the majority of fandom will be, too.

[heyytalia]

hi Bianca, I read your 'about' page and wanted to reach out to you since it really spoke to me. in 2014 I had a traumatic event and got professionally diagnosed with the same disorders you mentioned, as well as insomnia. I feel like I should be over my trauma by now and I'm just so frustrated at how I feel stuck in place. I always regret not being a stronger person at the time. I think if I'd had a different mindset or a better support system (c.)

Anon, I can relate to you. I can relate so much.

Long letter to you under the “Keep Reading.”

First off, thank you for messaging me about all this. Doing so must have taken so much courage. I know how hard it is talking about these things. It’s scary and sometimes I don’t know how people are going to react when I tell them I have GAD/Depression, even when I’m speaking to another person with a similar diagnosis. Just being able to put words on paper, or in a message, takes every ounce of brainpower we’ve got. I’m going to try to use as much brainpower as I can to convey as best a response I can.

I was also kind of a nervous child as well. Extremely shy, kind of cowardly, helicopter-parented. But never to the extreme, just enough that I can safely say I’m not an extrovert. I wasn’t diagnosed or referred for anything psychological. By all accounts, I was considered “normal” (I hate that word in psychological connotations). But as I got older, I started having a lot of problems with stress. I started having migraines in high school. I started getting severe stomach pains before every exam. The stress got even worse at university when I went from being a straight-A student all my life to an A/B/C one and my self-esteem collapsed. I developed insomnia. I was homesick. I had a roommate dealing with alcoholism my sophomore year, and I was constantly worried for her health. That near-collision I had in 2014 (the one I mentioned in my About Me) was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was driving back from an internship interview (from which I was rejected anyway) when I took a protected left turn on a yellow arrow, and the light turned green and a car coming from the opposite direction at 50 MPH nearly hit me head on. If I hadn’t pressed the brakes at the right moment, I would have gone straight into the front of his blue Honda. I wasn’t the same after that. I don’t even remember driving home, the next thing I remember is sobbing hysterically as I open my front door. My mom was comforting, my dad thought I would just move on, my sister thought I was exaggerating. I didn’t sleep that night. The next few weeks, I almost felt like a zombie. Like I shouldn’t be alive. Like I should have died on that road. Several nights I woke up sweating, and I had this recurring dream of walking up to that same intersection, the site of a crash site, and staring at my dead body. These feelings were real, but I didn’t know that. I just kept getting worse and worse. I was diagnosed with GAD/Depression in August, after a week of panic attacks, hallucinations, and an ER visit in which I had to be sedated with a high Xanax dose. But I don’t think, until I got those first Lexapro and Clonazepam doses, that it really hit me I had GAD/Depression. And then I really ruminated on that, and the first thing was…

Guilt. I FELT IT, ANON. I felt it bad.

You’re not alone in feeling guilty about your diagnosis, anon. I think it’s almost a given to most of us with depression and anxiety. Our society dictates that people should be able to function a specific way, and when we can’t do it we feel excluded, shunned. Not to mention, a feeling of failure to our own families and friends. I had that and more, I felt I let everyone down. My family who I spent my entire life trying to make proud. My friends, my teachers, professors, everyone who ever believed in me. When I was young I felt like a bird, that I could fly anywhere. As if I was Icarus, ready to fly towards freedom and beyond. But that first bottle of Lexapro in my hands felt like a weight that brought me down to Earth. And I burned. And everything I loved, burned.

My love for all my favorite series literally became NUMB. I kept up with them, but I literally felt nothing for them. My archive for this blog for the Fall months of 2014 shows lots of cute Hetalia fanart, OFF fanart, maybe the occasional cute thing. I was a regular (still occasionally am) GIF editor for the Hetalia fandom, and still churned out the occasional one during this time. But it wasn’t me posting. It was my shell. I was afraid to let my personal struggles bleed into my healthy tumblr blog and ruin it, so I kept posting as if nothing was wrong. But it wasn’t the real me. The real me was waking up shaking, in sweat, on nights that weren’t filled with insomnia. The real me was learning how to eat solid food again (which I didn’t do until October, I believe). The real me was crying every day. If my blog was honest that year, every post would have been replaced with ramblings on fear and sadness. But I couldn’t do it, because I was afraid to scare my tumblr friends, and scared that they’d all shun me and call me crazy. And by perpetuating a lie that all was “fine,” I felt guilty. I always prided myself in being honest, and I felt like I was betraying myself as well as them, and the guilt hurt even more.

And when I was in those moments of guilt, I’d always ask to myself, “What did I do wrong?” “Did I do something to deserve this?” “Was there something I could have done?” I used to think that maybe if I’d been a bit more independent as a kid, I’d have thicker skin, and I wouldn’t be going through this. Or maybe if I’d been a better student, I would have had better grades, and my anxiety concerning my future would be lessened. Or, maybe, if I had been a better driver and avoided that near-collision. Or maybe, I could have made myself prettier, or made more friends, or lost a few pounds, or not accidentally hurt the feelings of that one girl on the playground in 6th grade that one time. None of this would have ever happened, and I’d be okay. And my family would be okay. Everything would be okay.

It’s almost like I was digging into myself, trying to justify in my mind why all this was happening to me. Trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Until one day, I heard some words said to me.

“Bianca, it’s not your fault.”

It was my mom who told me this, the first time. I had been crying and apologizing profusely over and over for what I was going through, a few days after my diagnosis. Telling her that I was sorry that she had to put up with an “insane” daughter like me, and wishing she had been blessed with a better daughter with no ailments, because she deserved better. But, my smart mom, instead of agreeing with what my fractured psyche had come up with, told me those words. And I cried. I didn’t fully believe her at the time, but the sentiment did stick in my brain like a seed, and I felt comfort. Of course, the guilt would come back a few days later, still strong, but I’d hear those words again and that seed would grow a little bit. The next time, a little bit more. More when I would hear those words in her arms. More when I’d hear those words from my dad. More when I’d hear those words from my therapist. More when I’d hear those words from my doctor. Until one day, something interesting happened. I realized the value of those words.

It’s not our fault. It’s not something we did wrong. It’s not something we should feel ashamed of. There’s nothing we did in our past that made us “deserve” depression and anxiety. One of the most important things I learned as a Psychology Major in university was that our brains, just like the rest of our bodies, don’t always work or look the way they’re supposed to. All of our brains are unique, and a combination of our own personal experience along with family genetics and the environment in which we live in make all of us different. It’s now commonly believed that some people are more prone to mental illness than others, just as how some people are more prone to heart conditions or diabetes. Nobody really knows why this is the case. It’s not really a science you can quantify or boil down to an equation. Sometimes, mental illness just…happens. There’s really no concrete explanation. You can dig and dig into your heart and mind and soul forever but you’ll never find one. It took a long time for me to realize this. That I wasn’t at blame for my depression/anxiety. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That just because my brain needed some extra help from medicine and doctors, didn’t mean I couldn’t be strong again.

Anon, sometimes our illness makes us feel like less of a person. But that’s just the depression talking. I always tell people, when you have GAD/Depression, there are two sides of you. One side is the real us, the one who loves and laughs and enjoys life as it is. The other side is the anxiety/depression itself. Sometimes, the second side “covers up” the first side and “pretends” to be us. That doesn’t mean the real side is lost forever, it’s just hiding. We just have to, pardon the language, call that GAD/Depression side out on its bullshit. Because the real us is the best us. The ones who fangirl over our favorite series and ships and stories. The ones who care for all of their friends and loved ones. The ones who aren’t afraid to try something new and be creative. Anon, I believe its still in you. You can still do it. You can still do all the things you love.

Your GAD/Depression may be an element in your life you weren’t expecting, but nobody can really predict such a thing happening anyway. Not even the most brilliant minds in the world can predict the future to a T. It was never your fault, Anon. Never. I want you to trust me on this. And I want you to love everything you love even stronger than you did before. Write those stories you want to write. Watch those series you’ve been meaning to catch up on. Draw to your heart’s content. Read some new books. Start a new craft. That love won’t come overnight, it might take months or even years (even now, I’m still learning to re-love all my favorite things again), but it will start to come. Take every day at a time, and don’t worry about the pace. Recovery varies from person to person. I myself am recovering very slowly, on the exact same dose of Lexapro I was on back in 2014, and I’ll probably be on the same dose for an indefinite amount of time. But the more and more I’ve accepted my diagnosis, the easier it gets.

I’ll leave you with some final tips which have helped me immensely:

1. Eat well! Lots of water, and healthy meals! Especially fruits and vegetables.2. Have certain activities to do during your “down” moods or anxiety attacks. I usually crochet while watching a relaxing tv show or movie.3. Exercise, even if it’s simple walks or stretches.4. Find somebody to talk to when you’re feeling sad, or write your feelings down in a journal. I find that expressing inner feelings can be very relaxing.5. Pet therapy! Go and pet a dog or cat. Some studies have found that spending time with cute animals can increase “happy” hormones in the brain, like dopamine and endorphins.

I hope I answered your message! If you have more questions, always feel free to ask. I wish you all the best, and all my blessings.