#but it became how uncomfortable I am with all our talk about worth and value

[felowtravler]

As I exchange prayers for posts I wonder

If my faith is shifting from God to Word

From Divine to Human

And I worry I am inadequate

That my actions are empty

That my life is valueless.

And I realize that I only know how to examine myself for its value.

Because I have always been taught to mark my “worth”. Do I need economics to understand my relationship with Christ? With God? With what is Holy and Good?

I wonder how much is supposed to be part of my faith and how much of this perspective has leeched into the soil of religious tradition. How much belongs to the illegitimate poisons of economy and greed over centuries and millennia?

I want to be devoted, but I don’t want to be devoted out of fear. I need to understand that my productivity is not linked to my validity as a human. Even my productivity in the context of my divine relationship with God. They care about more than the numbers of prayers. More than the exact percentages of my time spent on what is deemed “worthy” and “holy” by human minds.

I am learning that They are concerned with more than scales. More than technicalities and institutions and anything else. Because that was the point, wasn’t it? To erase the technicalities?

God, let me be enough.

Let us cease our measurements of ability and productivity and efficiency.

Work is a joy, but it is not our god.

You are our God.

God, please. This perspective is corrosive to our spirits.

God, let us be free.

[millers-planet]

The Vice and the Virtue - Part Two

Pairing: Helmut Zemo x GN!Reader (later established as F following more parts)

A/N: this isn’t my best work. i don’t entirely know where to take this series, ngl.

POV: Reader

Warnings: Fluff. Use of “Y/N”. Angst. Brief desc of gore.

Words: 2.1k

Description: How does one live a life of virtue when past vices begin arising after a successful jailbreak with untied ends?

part one

“Are you serious?” I can’t believe he’s doing this. The second he gets back, too. It makes me question the real value of me to him, if my presence is of any substantial worth. I know that he thinks higher of me, but right now I’m having a hard time believing that.

He sighed and looks back to me, away from him new buddies, “you know why I have to go. I already explained this.” By this point, he’s talking to me as if I am a child, and I am having none of it. 

“I know why you’re going and I get that, it’s not what I have a problem with. You aren’t letting me come with you.” I tried to take a step to him, but he backed away, really emphasizing my doubt. “Fine. You left once and didn’t come back for 5 plus years, I’m sorry I don’t want to sit here and wonder when you’re gonna be back again or wonder if I’m going to have to finally move on.” I really didn’t want to have to pull this card, especially in front of his friends, but I will be damned before he walks out that door without me. 

Zemo dropped his bags and closed the gap between us, putting his hands on cheeks, knowing it comforts me. “You’re right,” his voice got softer and more warm, “I didn’t think of it that way when I probably should of. I was only wrapped up in the possibility of you getting hurt.” He placed a small kiss on my forehead and nodded towards out bedroom, “you should go pack, and quickly.”

With a furrow of my eyebrows and pushing my lips into a frown, I snarkily replied, “you do realize I was listening to your conversations last night? I already have a bag packed.” With a quick rush, I grabbed my bag that was resting on the edge of the bed. 

As everyone was checking their rooms to make sure they grabbed everything, or clarifying one thing or another, Bucky walked up to me. “If you want, I can carry your bag for you, you keep adjusting your shoulder strap.” 

With a small smile, I handed him my bag. “Thank you, I really appreciate that.” For some reason, I was thinking previously that Bucky was a middle ground of Zemo and Sam, sarcastic and a little cold, but he seems really sweet. It makes me think that chivalry isn’t completely dead.

Taking a seat next to Zemo on the plane, with Bucky and Sam sitting across from us, the deafening engines began, only muffled as the door sealed itself shut. I don’t remember the last time I was on a plane, let alone on one with him. We used to go quite often on little vacations, dates, or getaways, but stopped once he got busy with ‘work’. Either way, it was nice to be back on one with him, despite the circumstances.

Sam and Bucky looked very uncomfortable, taken aback when people came and served us nearly whatever we wanted. Bucky gave me worried glances when people came up to him and asked him strange questions, to which I helped him out. Zemo and I, on the complete opposite spectrum, got right at home. 

A watched him pull out a small book inside another, one that I didn’t recognize. “I’m fascinated by this, I don’t know what to call it but this part seems to be important. Who is... Nakajima?” Before I could question anything, everything switched around. Sam was reaching out, Bucky was lashing forward, and Zemo had a hand around his throat. 

With a small mumble, Bucky spoke, “if you touch that again I’ll kill you,” and returned swiftly to his seat. Everything fell quiet and tense, with Zemo glaring at Bucky and him staring at the window, plus Sam just eyeing the two of them. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to ignore the rest of the conversation.

All I heard were conversations about Steve, ice, and writing stuff down in the notebook. 

“I like 40′s music.” Bucky’s voice was irritated and drained of emotion.

That was, until, I chimed in with “what do you think about Sinatra?”

Bucky shrugged, “A little past my time. I was too busy being brainwashed to really get into him. Have you listened to anything by Nat King Cole?”

I instantly lit up, it was so nice being able to talk to someone about something light-hearted. “Only a few songs, but they were really good.”

“So, you didn’t like Marvin Gaye?”

“I liked it, Sam.” Bucky just responded emptily back to him

“It’s a masterpiece, James-” Zemo began shortly, until I interrupted

“-It’s complete, comprehensive. It captures the African-American experience.”

Same looked a the two of us. “He’s out of line, and she’s just smart, but they’re both right. Everybody loves Marvin Gaye.”

Bucky kept the dead tone, “I already said I liked Marvin Gaye.”

“Steve adored Marvin Gaye.”

From there, the three of them went on about Steve. I knew brief things about him but I was never caught up in the superhero world. All I understood was that his name was Steve Rogers and that he is Captain America, a super soldier, who was besties with Sam and Bucky.  Other than that, I didn’t really care about this Steve guy or the Avengers in general, it doesn’t sit right with me knowing the conflicts Zemo has had with them.

It was slightly cool out with the rain just about to pass through, along with the open bridge and river allowing for more cool air to travel. Changing out of a t-shirt and jeans into a thin-ass top with matching black thin-ass leggings made the air seem ten times as cold. 

I walked in between Sam and Zemo, wrapped up in his heavy coat and arm loosely wrapped around my waist. “Only an American would think a fashion-forward Black man looks like a pimp, you’re fitting in nicely with your alias,” Zemo’s hand dropped from me and handed his phone to Sam. “A sophisticated man nicknamed the Smiling Tiger.”

Sam just sighed. “He even has a bad nickname. But,” he looked closer at the phone, “he sure does look like me.” Zemo took the phone back and returned his arm around me. “Is that acid?”

“Madripoor.” His voice became clearer and dropped. “Whatever you do, we must stay in character, there is no margin for error, our lives depend on it. Over there is High Town, not a bad place if you want to visit. Low Town is the other way.”

“Let me guess, we don’t have any friends in High Town?” 

I stopped dead in my track as the car came forward. “Oh you have got to be kidding me.” Everyone turned to stare at me. “Look at that car, who the hell is sitting in the middle of the backseat, I know for damn sure it isn’t me.” I walked forward and sat in one of the window seats in the back as Zemo chuckled and got in the front.

Sam and Bucky exchanged nervous glances, until they began shoving each other like from the other day. As the back door opened, I raised my voice to them, “HEY! If you guys want to fight over middle seat, play rock, paper, scissors. I’m not gonna deal with the two of you bickering the whole time. Best out of three, on ‘shoot’.”

They mumbled the saying each time. First, Sam won. Second, Bucky. Third, Bucky again.

Sam groaned like a child, “Man! I hate this.”

I was hyper-aware of everything going on. Specifically, how many people were staring at me. It was just me with three other men going into a bar full of other men and few women. It’s suffice to say I was uncomfortable, especially since Zemo took his jacket back, so I couldn’t hide away into it. But the quiet mumbles of “is that the Winter Soldier?” put my mind slightly at ease.

The bartender looked taken aback by Sam’s approach. “I wasn’t expecting you, Smiling Tiger.”

Zemo entered quickly, “his plans changed. We have business to do... with Selby.”

“The usual?” Sam replied with a small nod, only to regret it--in his eyes--once everyone saw the eel come out. I had to cover my hands with my mouth to not gag as he took the shot, only for a disapproving look to follow from the bartender.

A hand was place on my shoulder and I instinctively turned around, Zemo following quickly. It was some strange man, “got word from on high, you ain’t welcome here.

“I have no business with the Power Broker. But, if he insists, he can come talk to me or...” he motion to Bucky, “bring Selby for a chat.” The man then took that as his cue to leave.

I turned around, back to the bar, and pushed myself closer to Zemo. “When can we get out of here? When can we meet Selby?”

“Soon,” he muttered, until a hand was placed on his shoulder this time, leading to a glance back to Bucky and a command in Russian.

Buckys metal hand met the stranger, throwing him into the ground. Other followed to him quickly, but the ‘Winter Soldier��� took them out without drop of sweat. Following a broken table and someone being kicked into it, another guy walked up next to us, which seemed like a problem until Zemo pushed him to Bucky, who took care of him. His metal arm wrapped around the throat of another, pushing him into the bar, the sound of guns cocking filling the silence.

“Selby will see you now.”

“You’re taller than I heard, Smiling Tiger,” Selby  slowly raised her eyes up to Sam, who kept his face stiff and only spared her a look for a second. She rolled her tongue and focused herself onto me, as I stood behind Zemo’s chair. “You, I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of you. Come here! Take a seat,” she patted the oddly patterned couch as smiled crookedly up at me. As soon as I sat down she pulled me close and let my hair fall into her hand, “I don’t know how he got you to on his hip, what does he pay you?” Her voice was just a loud enough whisper to let everyone interpret, intentionally.

Zemo cleared his throat and stood up, “perhaps we should get back to the deal. I will give you the Winter Soldier,” he motioned to Bucky who kept his face straight, “along with the words to operate him, of course. Only, if you give me information I desire.”

She laughed and let me go, “that’s the Zemo I remember, you were right to come to me. Arrogant, but right.” Selby shifted more to him and let her head fall into her hand. “The serum is in Madripoor, with Doctor Nagel you can thank or condemn. He was making it for the Power Broker until things didn’t go as planned.”

“Is Nagel still in Madripoor?” 

“Aww,” she stood up and slowly inched her way toward Zemo. “The bread crumbs you can have for free but the bakery is going to cost you, Baron. And don’t think you can find Nagel without me, either.” Selby opened her mouth to speak, until a phone buzzing interrupted her.

Everyone’s face dropped, except for Selby, who’s lit up with excitement. “Go on, answer it... on speaker.” Zemo’s eyes met mine, when he carefully mouthed, “it’ll be fine.”

“Hello?” Sam forced himself cool, maintaining a flat voice.

“Hey so this situation has got me thinking, about the boat and the bank.” It was a feminine voice on the other end of the phone.

“Ah, the bank.. we laundered so much money.” He glanced around and was clearly anxious by this point. “Yeah, they’ll come around.”

“If that was the case, then why’d they dog you out Big Time?” Sam’s face dropped to the cool look again, realizing the other person caught onto the gig, until the phone erupted with, “hey! What did I say about those Cheerios? Sam, I’ll call you back.”

Selby furrowed her eyebrows together and glanced around the room. “Who is Sam? Kill them-” her sentence ended as a bullet puncture through her and body collapsed on the floor. The two standing men were taken out by Bucky and Sam, as Zemo ran to me. 

My hand flew over my mouth as I stared at the body. “Is she? She was just-” I quickly started hyperventilating, it was so sudden and I’ve never watched someone die before. “Zemo, she’s dead, oh my god.”

He pulled me into his chest and stood me up, hold me tightly and leading us toward the door. “It will be alright, just focus on me.” He stopped and looked around the room, trying to figure out the plan. “Leave your weapons and follow my lead, we have a real problem now.”

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[livingbythewords]

Theo Raeken, Scott McCall and the concept of betrayal in friendship - a Teen Wolf meta

Recently I came upon an interesting and somewhat subversive perspective on two phenomena that have been occupying my mind for a long time – friendship and betrayal. Because these two themes are not only often present in Teen Wolf, but are at the very core of season 5, I had some thoughts on the psychological concepts of friendship and betrayal in relation to the series.

General consensus in our view on both friendship and betrayal suggests that we tend to view friendship as a natural state of things developing through mutual trust and loyalty with love at its core, whereas betrayal is viewed as disruptive event that causes mostly pain, confusion and destruction. The perspective I am talking about considers the possibility that "the roots of both [friendship and betrayal] may draw their energy from the same deep layers of the human psyche" (French, Gosling and Case, 2009) and that betrayal is in fact not something that comes out of nowhere and disrupts friendship, but rather precedes it and constitutes its inherent part. It also introduces a very interesting concept of "virtuous betrayal", which may be regarded as "betrayal in the service of a higher purpose‟ (Krantz, 2006). Both betrayal and friendship are therefore complex phenomena, which according to the authors are interdependent and have deep impact on each other.

I'm going to start from the concept of virtuous betrayal, which to me is interesting and rather uncommon and puts Theo's attempts at dismantling the McCall pack in a new light (at least to me). In Status Asthmaticus (season 5, episode 10) Theo fully reveals the motivation behind his actions:

I never lied about why I came to Beacon Hills. I'm here for a pack. I came for the were-coyote. The one whose first instinct is to kill. I came for the banshee. The girl surrounded by death. The kitsune, the beta with anger issues, I came for Void Stiles. That's the pack I want. Unfortunately, it doesn't include Scott.

What we see here is something which may be regarded as a fundamental difference in Theo and Scott's understanding of what the pack and friendship as the force that binds it means. Scott's understanding of friendship has its roots in the concept that Aristotle called vera amicitia or amicitia perfecta, a 'disinterested friendship', where the well-being of the others is of primary concern, and he is ready to make sacrifices he considers necessary (for example, his willingness to join Deucalion's pack of Alphas, knowing that there might be no way out of it once he agrees). Meanwhile Theo regards the pack mostly in terms of power and safety, where the element of friendship is non-existent. In his speech, he emphasizes only traits which are mostly viewed as negative, which is very revealing when it comes to his understanding of the world and its rules. He genuinely believes that removing Scott from his position as the pack leader is for the greater good; to him, friendship, love and caring that constitute the basis of Scott's pack are all weaknesses. This is the result of his formative years spent under the 'care' of The Dread Doctors and the values instilled in him, which are the exact opposite of what Scott believes in. Theo views the pack and leadership through the lens of utilitarianism, "to the exclusion of the pursuit of virtue and commitment to the good" (French, Gosling and Case, 2009), which is the complete opposite of what Scott believes in. He knows the Doctors' main goal – unleashing of the Beast of Gevaudan – and wants to get out alive; his main goal is survival. It is worth mentioning that he also operates from the point of a deeply rooted inferiority complex ("I'm not even a real werewolf"). Therefore he believes that what guarantees him survival and safety is securing his position as the leader of a pack by fear and control instead of mutual trust and loyalty.

This perspective raises the question of the degree to which he can be held responsible for his actions. I tend to disagree both with the view according to which Theo is considered only a victim, as well as the one which considers him only a "bad guy" without taking into consideration all the mitigating circumstances surrounding the way he was raised. We all act according to the values imprinted in us in early childhood, which shape the lens through which we view the world. Therefore, I deeply disagree with the view that Theo 'deserved' whatever happened to him. Of course, he does have the ability to make choices, and it doesn't excuse the bad ones he made (for example killing Josh and Tracy). However from his perspective, all the choices he made were necessary for both his survival and his attempts to feel whole, to be a real person instead of an artificial construct he perceives himself to be.

How does this relate to theory I mentioned above, which considers betrayal not only a fundamental part of human experience, but an inherent element of friendship, which in fact inevitably precedes it instead of outside force that disrupts it? Well, at this point it became obvious to me that this is exactly how Theo perceives the world. According to James Hillman and his reflections on betrayal as viewed through the myth of the Garden of Eden, betrayal is a natural and necessary stage in the „unfolding‟ of human consciousness (Hillman, 1975, in: French, Gosling and Case, 2009). Through betrayal, our real self is born, as it was depicted in the myth of the fall of Eden, in which the "death" described in Genesis – „of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die‟ (Genesis 2:16) – means the death of illusions that we as human beings like to hide behind, for example perceiving people as either good or bad without understanding that humans are complex beings with different motivations and initial circumstances that formed them. In the case of Theo, he was already put at a deep disadvantage comparing to the rest of the pack members and had no chance to develop positive and healthy values and coping mechanisms that would enable him to earn what he desired instead of taking it by force, which was the only way he knew for his whole life. Again, that doesn't in any way negate traumas and hardships the other members of the pack went through, neither excuses Theo's behavior and the choices he made. I'm simply pointing out the factors that were a huge part of why he did what he did.

Now, let's get back to Scott. It's interesting to me that Scott, despite the fact that this view of the world and the values he believes in are very different than Theo's, seems to understand his motivations, at least to some degree:

Scared people do things you wouldn't believe. (season 6, episode 12)

Life can’t ever be all bad or all good. You know, eventually, things have to come back to the middle. (season 5, episode 1)

Especially the second quote (regression to the mean theory) is interesting, because to some degree it agrees with Hillman's theory about betrayal being the necessary part of evolving human consciousness and the 'death' of illusions that humanity develops to avoid facing uncomfortable truths about themselves (such as Stiles rejecting the 'shadow' part of himself which then manifests as the Nogitsune). Scott's deeply empathetic and caring nature explain his enormous ability to forgive things that most people would consider unforgivable, which is reflected in the scene of his death:

SCOTT: They're not like you. They never will be.

THEO: Because I'm a Chimera? Because I'm not a real werewolf?

SCOTT: Because you're barely even human.

Barely even human. Even in his darkest moment, as he is dying at the hands of his former close friend and now his greatest enemy, Scott refuses to fully dehumanize Theo. He doesn't call him a monster. He doesn't hurl insults towards him. He still considers him a person. In fact, he never in the course of the whole show acts hostile towards Theo or mistreats him, not even once, although he would have plenty of reasons. The main emotion he expresses towards Theo is deep disappointment. He doesn't even express regret in having trusted Theo. He decides to trust him again by sending him with Mason to the tunnels and by asking him to get to the hospital to take care of his friends, which – if this trust was misplaced – could have serious consequences.

Although perspective on betrayal as a fundamental part of human nature inevitably connected to friendship may seem somewhat pessimistic, it may also seem the opposite. "In our heart of hearts, we carry both experiences together: they coexist, so that if one is dominant, the other is always present as a 'shadow' (French, Gosling and Case, 2009)". From that perspective, we can understand the necessity of forgiveness more deeply and be ready to work on and develop our ability to forgive, which can in time become our greatest strength instead of our greatest weakness. Just like in case of Scott McCall, who – by forgiving the unforgivable – made his enemy, the man who betrayed him, turned his friends against him and murdered him, into his trusted ally.

[mrshenrycavill23]

A Dream to Remember ✨ - PART 2

-Sequel to my last short story, Destiny, featuring Henry & [Y/N] character a fangirl who has met him during a trip to Antalya, Turkey. This story begins where the Destiny finished.

#2 Tangled ✨💘

The ride was rather a short one. But I was all lost in my thoughts while secretly staring at Henry’s curls and temples. While looking at him, I began to relive the moments my soul got to experience while tangled with his the night before. The way he made me feel so small yet so loved, so lost yet so found, he took what was meant for him all this time. I suddenly felt a bit sore down and got a bit uncomfortable sitting in the backseat while he was sitting beside me. I tried not to show my discomfort but he suddenly looked at me, as if he could sense it, sense the soreness, sense the pain, he looked at me, then gazed down at the end of my dress, his gaze alone made me feel as if he could see me naked while I was fully clothed. He put his hand on my thigh and was slowly moving towards me when his phone ringed and it was the Uber app notifying that we had reached the restaurant he wanted me to have breakfast with him at.

The driver stopped the car and Henry got out first and quickly moved on the other side to open my door. My God, what a true gentleman. I was no one and yet he made me feel like the most important woman in the world.

The restaurant was very fancy, it was surely a sunny beautiful day and sun-rays spread through the glass doors and windows of the restaurant and glistened the entire room. Henry, wearing a white shirt with denim, looked like a greek god had come to life. There weren’t many people and we quickly sat down and gave our orders.

“So, I’ve been thinking to ask you this. Are you comfortable with me, [y/n]? I mean you don’t feel scared that paparazzi might just bust from anywhere right now and you will be dragged into something you don’t deserve to be in?” Henry asked with those worried puppy like eyes.

I thought for a second. What did I have to lose?

I had nothing to lose as compared to what I was living through in the moment.

“You’re a great company, Henry. I enjoyed talking to you heart to heart last night at the beach. I felt so good after a long time. It’s not about you being the celebrity I adore, but I truly value the person you have turned out to be. I’m willing to risk it all to know you more.”

Words came out of my mouth so easily yet each word made me more nervous than the one before. What was I doing with myself? It’s Henry Cavill. Women way better than me could die for him and here I am expressing how I feel in the most minimal way possible.

“Oh yes, I felt so good. Beach, you mentioned eh? It was dark last night, do you want to go right now? It’s been a while since I enjoyed the waves with someone.” Henry smirked as he sipped the juice he ordered.

Happiness rush through my entire body. What is this? A date? Going to the beach with him? Oh my God. Yes. I deserve this. After all those years of dreaming of being with him. Yes. YES!

“Um, yes sure but what about the media people you wanted to avoid? I’ve been here before and I know a secluded beach, away from the crowds, it’s a bit far though. We’d have to hire a taxi for the day” I said with an overflowing excitement in my face and voice.

“Nah, we wouldnt hire a taxi. We’ll rent a car for the day. I’ll drive and you can tell me the route, what do you say?” He said, smiling.

Oh to see him driving. Was I in heaven or is this reality. We finished eating and walked our way to the nearest tourist-help centre where they arranged a car for us and Henry being the gentleman he is, first made sure I was comfortable in it then he made his way to the driving seat.

He was so big, his arms, his biceps, the same arms that held me down while he fucked me hard last night. I suddenly got flashes of the sex we had and started sweating a bit, just seeing him driving seduced me, I wanted him to do it again, to fuck me again, to ease my soreness or make it hurt more, but I could not make the first move. I did not know if he wanted me again? or was it just a friends with benefits / one time thing? To release myself from my thoughts, I connected the aux cable with the player of the car and played Fetish by Selena.

“This song goes so well with these views, damn Antalya is so beautiful, roads are like butter. The car is pretty fine too. I hope you’re enjoying it? Woah, look at that lake!!”

I was so occupied by Henry’s presence that I almost forgot how beautiful the views were. Beautiful sky, green valleys with sounds of waterfalls and a glimpse of the crystal clear blue water of the beach we were near to.

“It’s so beautiful right? Oh turn right, we’re almost there” I exclaimed.

There was it. The beauty, the seamless waves crashed on the silent beach where there was no one but the two of us. I kind of felt scared, maybe the beach was way too secluded.

“Wow ma’am you really didn’t watch anyone to catch you with me? Eh?” He remarked with a raised eyebrow.

“I just wanted you to enjoy without the fear of being photographed all the time” I said, while blushing.

He quickly unbuttoned his white shirt, threw it on the spot we were sitting and started striding towards the beach when he looked at me and said with questioning eyes while I was amazed by his hairy chest and broad shoulders,

“What?? Get up come on let’s go for a swim!!!?

What are you waiting for??” He shouted with excitement.

Little did he know that I didn’t know how to swim. I have this fear of deep water. I can only get my feet wet and that’s about it. Since childhood I have never been able to go for a swim whether it’s a pool or sea. I can’t breathe if water level reaches above my knees.

“Henry... I.. I can’t swim, I don’t know how to swim, I’m scared of deep waters” I said in a very low, embarrassed voice.

“Oh.. I’m sorry I didn’t know that. But you can come with me? Enjoy the waves as they touch the shore? Can get your feet wet right??” He said with a worried voice.

He slowly came towards me, held my hand gently as I stood up and then hand in hand we walked towards the waves, he then indulged in the shallow waves while I looked down at the wet sand sucking my feet. It was peaceful.

He looked like a beauty, like a small orca, he was so big yet swam so beautifully. He was all wet and I could feel myself getting wet. I had no control over it. For the first time in my life I had seen a man who controlled my body even when he didn’t touch it.

I was staring at him and feeling the waves at my feet when suddenly a large tide hit my knee and I lost my flow. All I remember after it is being swayed away by the waves while struggling to breathe while Henry shouting my name and running towards me.

“WAKE UP [Y/N]!!!!! WAKE UP PLEASE, OPEN YOUR EYES” I heard Henry shouted while he struggled to slowly pump by chest to make me cough out the water inside my lungs. I was unconscious and I don’t know for how long.

The first thing I saw when I gained back consciousness was Henry’s glistening lips trying to resuscitate me and his worried eyes, while my head lay in his arm. I could die here, I wanted to. What a beautiful death it would be.

“Henry ...? I’m sorry.. I didn’t know what happened a wave came..” I said in a low voice gaining back my consciousness.

“Shhh, it’s okay, I am so sorry, it’s my fault, it’s all my fault, I should never have forced you to come near those tides with me, it’s all my fault, i could’ve lost you.. “ He kept mumbling as I shut him up with a deep kiss.

I wanted to make the first move since so long but just couldn’t, and now? He made me fall in love with him all over again. I slowly moved his lips with mine as his words became inaudible. With one hand I touched his chiseled jaw and my other hand was holding him with my fingers in his curls. I kissed him as if he was water and I was stranded in a desert for days. He knew what was happening. He put his hand on my waist and the other hand slowly moved from my neck to breasts. I had lost all control.

He kissed me back hard. His tongue invaded my mouth as if raging war with mine. He pushed me back on the wet sand, as I held his hair and he held my thighs.

“I’ve wanted this for every second since last night” He whispered in my ears as his hand made its way to my pussy. I leaned back

as his fingers slowly circled around my clit from outside of my panty, his palm touched the wet patch. I moaned as he slid his fingers inside and touched my sore clit and layers.

“Fuck me, Henry” I moaned as he put his two fingers inside my newly popped pussy. It was still tight as he pushed his fingers inside, while his lips slid from my neck to my breasts. He first bit my boobs from outside the dress as it was wet and showed my nipples, then from the other hands undressed me partly and sucked my nipples.

My mind couldn’t comprehend which area gave me more pleasure. His fingers vigorously moving in my pussy or his lips slowly sucking my nipples. He quickly hit my g-spot as I pushed my clit on his palm to cum on his hand.

“Yes baby, come to me, fuck you” Henry whispered as he moved his mouth to my neck and gave me a love bite. I moaned louder as he pushed me on the sand, and quickly unzipped his jeans, and there it was. His big, towering, raw dick. I gasped as I knew it would hurt but it was all going to be worth the pain.

He separated my legs with the weight of his thighs and teased my clit with his tip.

“You took my breath away when I thought I almost lost you, don’t do that again, don’t scare me like that again or I am never going to forgive you!” He roared and looked in my eyes with an intimidating stare as he thrust it inside me. I moaned and held his waist as he dug his teeth in my neck slightly moaning. He kept ramming it inside me and pumped at the right spots. It was as if he knew which buttons to press to make me lose my senses.

The sand covered us both, it was sand, sweat, and smoke of lust. I crossed my legs around his waist as he thrusted deeper inside me. It hurt but I liked him hurting me, the pleasure was more than the pain. I want it as badly as he wanted it to give it to me. He felt so big while I was only half his size. I was about to come, I was on the edge of my self control.

“Don’t you dare cum, you can only cum with me” He roared as he pushed me aside and quickly held me by my waist as he leaned his back on the sand, now me on top of him.

Fuck. I wanted to ride him. Back in the car, back at the restaurant, last night. I wanted to ride it. I sat up and slowly took it in while being half undressed. My boobs were out, wet, and sun’s rays falling on my brown skin and my untied long black hair on the side of my shoulder. He looked at me as if I was a feast. He slowly held my arm with one hand and tightly grabbed my both boobs in one hand as I rid him. I pushed myself on his dick as he fucked me while going in harmony with my movements. It was like a song, a wave, a fire. I bent down and kissed him while riding him, as I felt his dick’s veins getting more prominent inside me. I could feel him pumping inside me as he tightly gripped my hair, and kissed me deeply “Come with me, NOW” he growled.

I let it lose, as he filled me up with his cum and mixed up with my orgasm. I felt as if I was being drugged into unconsciousness. He kissed me and I kissed him back letting my body lose itself on his. We were tangled like a rope, like a knot. And I loved it. I loved every bit of it.

He rubbed my back as I hid my face on his neck. He looked at me, with longing eyes, “I love you” He said with a voice that sent trembles down my spine.

[ibringyouasong89]

Self-Awareness Time, Part One:

So I’m reading this article one day, (see article here: https://psych2go.net/6-signs-youll-be-single-forever/), and realize how some of this is true, but also some of it is bullshit. Spoiler Alert: I haven’t had a boyfriend since I was 18.  Is it because I haven’t wanted to be with someone, or be in a relationship, since that one ended? Quite the contrary, actually. I have dreamed, since I was a small child, of a perfect soulmate for me, and that it would be a Disney-movie-ending come true for the rest of my life. Having my first (and since then, only) boyfriend break up with me (so he could go out with my ex-best friend, who in turn, dumped her boyfriend of three years - who was my childhood friend from elementary school - in order to be with him; it was dramatic, stupid, and messy, i.e. we were teenagers who thought they knew themselves but didn’t have a clue) did not, in fact, deter those dreams at all. The problem is that I didn’t learn to love myself. I learned to move on, which is always wonderful, but I didn’t hold myself in any higher esteem than I had before, and while I was with him. It wasn’t a reflection on being with him, but more or less, a reflection of myself and how I saw myself, based on my childhood and certain experiences. Fast forward a couple of years later: my parents are divorced, my father is dead, my childhood friends have disappeared out of my life for the most part, I live with my mother and grandfather (who was close to dying himself), and I am now living in a different state, faraway from everything I know and love and hate everything about this new place. I hated (and still do, for many of these points) the polluted environment, I hated the lack of nature (I moved to a metropolitan-region within the realm of a major city), I hated how crowded it is, I hated how everyone lives on top of one another; I hate the noise, the traffic, and most of all, I hated how alien and out of place I feel. I knew I didn’t belong, but because of finances, and having an ineffective bachelor’s degree (that didn’t come with a lifetime guarantee of having a career, as promised by my parents and elder generations. Though it did come with the nice guarantee of student loans), I was unable to move anywhere else. I was unable to be independent, financially or otherwise, and could do nothing to make my dreams a reality or to improve my life. In short, I was stuck. And hating every minute of it, along with myself. To be fair, I wasn’t an emotionally healthy person to start off with - but I mean, who is by the time they’re 23, 24 years old, and a culminating reflection of time, pressure, past abuse, parental issues, trust issues, abandonment issues, lack of socializing/being ostracized for being different, and self-worth and self-love issues? No one, and I mean, NO ONE, is taught how to love themselves, completely, as a child. I don’t care who raised you or where you grew up. This is a fundamental truth and fact. But I met someone. Lo and behold, there came this divine gift, one day, of someone who was just like me! He didn’t have the same issues as I, but he understood in a general sense (as any individual who has a certain degree of sympathy and empathy can do), and made me feel seen (even if I hated it at times). Someone who, in all honesty, has fundamentally changed me forever. And to think I met him at my job! (i.e. retail). This person...well, I thought he might’ve been THE ONE. I was really, REALLY in love with him. More so than I ever thought I could be with someone.  Our connection was real and based on emotional, mental, and spiritual intimacy (there was none of the physical, which was probably for the best, in the end), and I had never loved anybody before, in the entire history of being connected to family and friends, the way I had loved him. I thought he was truly something special - a gift from the universe that not only allowed to experience this once-in-a-lifetime kind of love, but also because of how OBVIOUS it was that we were meant for each other. (I was so arrogant back then and admit it heartily now). Well, suffice to say, it didn’t end in rainbows-and-sunshine-for-years-to-come. He had already been entering a relationship when I met him, while also having his heart broken by another girl. As the saying goes: wrong place and time. While I was busy pining over him and fantasizing about us being together romantically (after building this incredible connection and deep friendship), he was happily living his life and enjoying his relationship...even though, for a time, he went out of his way to spend time with me and deepen our emotional intimacy further. He told me things about himself, and his life, that he swore he had never told another human being before in his life. But it all came to a grinding halt one day - out of the blue - when he severed our connection with all of the swiftness and severity of a well-placed swing from a sharpened blade. Later he would confess that it wasn’t intentional - it was because he was busy cutting other people out of his life and I got caught up in the “crossfires” of it all via social media and the like *insert eyeroll here* - but that he had also been conscious of my burgeoning feelings for him, and felt “flattered” that I had come to regard him so greatly. He promised to re-open the lines of communication between us again and to be a better friend. Spoiler Alert Part Two: None of these promises were fulfilled. Now, some of you (or whoever reads this long-ass personal post) might say “Well, maybe in knowing about your feelings, THAT was why he didn’t bother talking to you anymore. It made him uncomfortable, especially since he was in a relationship with someone else. He just wanted to make a clean break.” To be completely honest, I was aware of that possibility from the get-go. The problem is that he claimed (during this period of seeking me out and spending quality time with me) his relationship with his girlfriend was “casual.” That he was more than aware that he was her first boyfriend, but that he knew it wouldn’t last. In knowing that, he still pursued a relationship with that girl (though his self-prophecy did come to pass...three years later). Now, there were never any promises made about entering a relationship with ME, as some of you may point out as well. I agree. There are, and never will be, any guarantees when it comes to the heart. Someone who learns to love another is quite capable of also learning how to un-love that same individual, at any time. And hatred, as many know, is not the opposite of love; apathy is its true counterpart.

No, what was truly hurtful was that he knew that truth, honesty, compassion, consideration, and genuineness were core values of mine. Values that I thought he shared...but turned out to be lies when he revealed his regard, or lack-there-of, for me in the end. When he did not confront me over my feelings for him and instead played ignorant for the sake of his own happiness. When he promised that this did not interfere with his ability to be my friend, even after confessing said romantic intentions to him, and probably lying about it all the same. He knew of my past, my issues, and had probably guessed at my level of loneliness and knew about my lack of friends since moving away from my hometown...and didn’t think twice of ditching me, nor of how his sudden “ignorance” about our bond would effect my feelings. That being “one of the guys” was my true status - despite the fact that I have breasts, a vagina, lack a penis, and had never acted in a “masculine way” around him (aside from being intelligent, having common sense, being interested in comic books, music, and movies, having a deep appreciation for classic muscle cars, and a biting sense of sarcasm); i.e. no hanging out in bars with him and his male friends, no doing stupid shit for giggles, no running around in the middle of the night to each other’s houses to smoke pot and drink in the basement, not being into sports and wrestling, recalling the same stupid stories from high school and retelling them, over and over again, along with the same stupid jokes, etc...And I’m not judging any female (or person) who does DO this, or enjoy these things! I’m just simply describing how he, and his friends, acted and what their similar interests are. I was “friend-zoned” (which is a ridiculous phrase, but I can’t think of anything else to describe it as), but was NOT treated like a friend any longer. I was treated like a stranger or an acquaintance that you remember vaguely seeing in the hallways and cafeteria when you attend your high school reunion (that guy who makes you go “Oh, *Insert Name Here*! Omg! How are you?! Wow, it’s been a while! Great to see you lost all that weight! So uh...how’s things?”). In short: I was being gas-lit. For anyone who has experienced this, you have my deepest sympathies and my ear and shoulder, whenever you would like. Of course part of the blame falls on me too: for treating romantic love like a drug I couldn’t live without, for depending on someone too much for my happiness, and for allowing myself to be treated as someone who is less than worthy of real love, respect, consideration, kindness, compassion, and honest, open communication.

So, not only did this guy break my heart, but he also threw me, and our friendship, away like it all meant nothing. It became obvious then that I, and our bond, had never mattered to him at all.  The worst part is that he continued to flirt with me, stringing me along (unknowingly or not), while also maintaining this enforced distance! (Which is also COMPLETELY WRONG TO DO TO ANYONE!) In truth, I think he’s an unaware narcissist who doesn’t realize, on an unconscious level, how manipulative he can really be. It’s sad. But I know, without wishing for it or egging the universe on, that there is a lesson waiting for him in the wings of the cosmos that will enable him to truly understand the lows, and highs, of true personal awareness (if it should come to pass - anything is possible, in any way, shape, or form). But back to the point: In conclusion, my soul was shattered. My heart was a destroyed. I fell into a depression based, not only on this heartbreak, but also my heart being broken by ME. I was so unhappy with everything going on, and not, in my life and it all felt so hopeless and pointless. I could see no path forward, no future for myself, that didn’t result either in me being unhappy or being unstuck. (Hell, even writing about all of this is allowing the phantom pains to rise from their graves in my heart, which makes me realize how much healing, and self-love, I still have to gain). This, however, was the beginning of my awakening for me.

It dawned on me like the rising sun within me that I really SHOULDN’T put stock into having people depended upon so much to MAKE me happy. I should be making MYSELF happy. But then the deepest question, out of the pit of darkness within my soul, arose: Why WASN’T I happy with myself?

[ethelphantom]

What’s a Soulmate?

Heeeeeyyy so I'm here again even though I'm totally supposed to be studying for my upcoming exam week (I've got seven exams coming once Thursday arrives on every single day except for the weekend. Oh well.

This is based on the What's a Soulmate? audio thing that went around a lot more before, and I've been wanting to write something based on it for years now. So. You're getting a Daminette fic based on it.

If you're still HOPEFULLY reading this, here's a little thing. This fic WILL get very angsty (like, heavy angst and grief and death and stuff) BUT it will also get way better later. There's a happy ending, their story will get a happy ending, and this will NOT end like Of Flowers and Strawberries, I swear, seriously. Pinky promise and all that. So, once you get there, just keep reading. You'll get your happy ending.

Ao3 || The audio

This is Maribat -- don’t like, don’t read.

________

“What's a soulmate?”

A girl with black hair leans against a boy around her age, his hair just as black as hers. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and kisses her forehead like the rest of the world didn’t matter. Their intertwined fingers bring them comfort as they watch the sunset on the horizon, painting the world in warm, calming tones of red, orange and yellow.

It doesn’t matter that they know their time is limited. They are together now, and that is all that mattered in the world.

After all, the memories they had together were everything.

“It's a… Well, it's like a best friend, but more.”

“I hope you two have a good explanation for this.”

The girl looks at the boy, both considering their next words carefully. They absolutely cannot let his older brother know how the kitchen and garden caught on fire at the same time as though on cue even though they weren’t even in the house, because everyone else is too scared to do such a thing. Especially with the butler still in the house, prepared to scold them and take away their rights to spend time together for a while.

Maybe they would deserve it and all, but it doesn’t matter. The children do not want to spend any less time together regardless of their actions.

“We have three, actually,” the girl says and tilts her head with feigned innocence. All of them know she’s responsible for whatever she’s being accused of this time, just like the boy is, but they don’t really care. If there’s anyone that could pull off looking innocent while covered in blood and then get away with murder, it would be her. No doubt.

“Pick your favourite,” the boy tells his older brother, only to make him exasperated and sigh as he buries his head in his hands. It seems they’re going to get away with it again. Like always. They never have the energy to deal with the both of them at once. Perhaps going over this with one of them at a time wouldn't be too much to him, but as it is, he tried to save time and scold both of them at once.

“Fine, you can go,” his brother finally tells them and leaves, muttering something about children being impossible and him not understanding how they keep succeeding.

The boy grabs the girl’s hand and squeezes it. “I told you, Malaki, didn’t I? We can do anything together, even survive my older brother’s intervention.”

“So you did, mon cœur. So you did.”

—

“What’s the plan for our next grand scheme?”

“I have an idea!”

“That’s wonderful. What is it?”

“Well, it involves fire—”

“Absolutely fucking not.”

After all, they ended up getting along like a house on fire.

“It's the one person in the world who knows you better than anyone else.”

If there was one place in the world where you’d least expect to find either of them, it would probably be under the table in a gala. Yet, times and times again, that was exactly where one of them always found the other. Usually, crying or at the very least uncomfortable with the situation around them.

The year they announced they were engaged to one another to the world was the first (and perhaps last) time this didn’t happen even though they weren’t comfortable in the least with the people around them. They weren’t even allowed to be with each other as people crowded each of them separately, asking how and when and why everything happened. After all, they had kept their relationship secret until now.

From the corner of his eye, Damian noticed the clear discomfort on his habibti’s face. No one was allowed to do that to her. None of them even noticed how horrible they were making her feel — she was on the brink of tears but kept smiling through it. They didn’t give her any personal space, not even space to breathe. His habibti was strong, but this wasn't a situation when she should need to be.

Damian made his way through the crowds to Marinette, not caring for a second if it meant having to push people out of his way with force, if it meant someone might get hurt because of him and his actions. All that mattered (and the only one that mattered) was his habibti and that she was not comfortable.

As he saw someone with a glass full of wine, he got a great idea. He made sure he walked into them, or that they walked into him, and that their drink would spill on him. He detested the feeling of being in wet clothing and smelling like alcohol more than he could even begin to explain, but what wouldn’t he do for his beloved.

The person began apologising over and over to Damian, him being his father’s heir and all, but he just glared at them and walked off to his fiancée.

“Malaki, I am afraid this imbecile spilled their drink on me, and you know how much I hate smelling like alcohol. Could you perhaps help me clean up and change into dry clothing?” he asked, knowing he sounded exactly like the rich, arrogant, self-centered, entitled brat he was raised to be and everyone thought he truly was. It was fine, as long as it was for her and she knew what he was doing.

“Look at him, forcing her to leave such a wonderful event for him. To help him when he could very well do so by himself. So selfish.”

“Shut it! If he hears you, you might get kicked out! He’s the son of Bruce Wayne!”

“Well, if he wanted his only biological son not to be bad-mouthed, he ought to not take him to this kind of places.”

Damian didn’t pay any attention to them and just held her hand, as though ready to drag her away with him. Both of them knew that was not what it was for, though. It was reassurement that he was there for her, that he was going to save her if she so wished.

The squeeze of his hand confirmed Marinette did want it.

“Of course I will. Let’s go. I’ll have Tim inform your father about this,” she said, trying not to look so relieved to get away, but the look in her eyes betrayed it to him easily.

Damian kissed her hand and led her away through the masses, ignoring any and all unpleasant comments directed at him. He knew she was uncomfortable, and for her, he would do anything, he could take anything, he could endure anything.

After all, Marinette was his everything.

“It's someone who makes you a better person.”

A long time ago, Damian thought he could get anything and everything at the snap of his fingers because he was the grandson of the Ra’s al Ghul, and then he thought he could have everyone at his every beck and call because he was the blood son and the legal heir of the Bruce Wayne. Of the Batman. They would start dancing to his music the second he told them so, that much was sure.

And he treated people like one would expect him to precisely because of that mindset no one ever helped him to lose.

He could get anything he wanted, and he was sure that even the most expensive things in the world where obtainable because he had the money. Or, his father had, but it wasn’t like he wouldn’t have gotten anything he wanted anyway.

Dying certainly didn’t ease things. After all, his father and mother had gone to great lengths only to resurrect him. That must have meant he was worth more than others. He was worth more than his brothers. Of course he was, he was his father’s true son. If they had died, the rest would have stayed dead; no one would have desperately tried to find a way to get them back.

People around him didn’t matter, no matter whether they were family or foe. If he didn’t need them, he could simply discard them and show them he didn’t care at all. Because he didn’t. Even if he needed them, he rarely spoke to them with much respect — the only ones that he thought deserved his respect were his father, Alfred, his mother and his grandfather. No one else mattered.

And then…

Then there was a girl.

No, there was the girl.

The girl who saw him.

Someone who took one look at him and decided that no, she was not going to do whatever he wanted her to no matter who he was because she was her own person and he did not own her. She did not belong to him, she did not owe him anything. She looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw how lonely his behaviour and actions made him.

“Marinette. My name is Marinette.”

Yes, Marinette was the first to actually see him and see through him. He kept trying to push her away, but she was determined to see things through as long as she didn’t make him uncomfortable — and she knew exactly when to back off even when he wasn’t able to express his discomfort. Every. Single. Time.

Slowly, as time passed by, they became friends. He started to see the value of his family, understand their lives were worth something. Marinette smiled when talked about his brothers with a hint of respect for the first time near her.

Then best friends. He knew he valued his family a lot, they were worth so much it didn’t take him even half of a second to go to their defense, even if he still hardly showed any of the care he held for his family to them. Marinette beamed when he admitted he loved them for the first time. She threw herself at him and hugged him tight when he made an offhand comment about other people he didn’t even know having some kind of a basic worth because they were human.

It took a long time, but as she snuggled closer to him and he kissed her forehead while they watched the fire dance in the hearth, he knew that there was something he could never obtain with money or fame. There was one thing more precious than any other, one thing that he could only get once he admitted he was only rich in the literal sense of the word.

Marinette had made him understand that he would only be rich once he had something he couldn’t buy with money — something that had a name, a face and feelings. Something that could walk away if he fucked up. Something that loved him and that he loved back with all his heart.

Or perhaps, someone rather than something.

Damian learnt that other people were valuable when he finally let Marinette show and teach him that the world was also a good place that held so many opportunities to learn from if he just knew to look for them.

And truly, Damian learnt that other people mattered, regardless of whether they were family or foe, because they were human. He wouldn’t need to like all of them and he could hold some people more dear to him than others, but no one was worth nothing.

But he knew that Marinette would still be the most precious and valuable thing he could ever have, and god forbid if he didn’t do his damnedest to make sure she knew that and that he wouldn’t lose her.

After all, Marinette was worth everything.

“Actually, they don't make you a better person,”

“I’m glad you came into Damian’s life, Teacup,” Dick told Marinette one day while they were watching Damian and Jason spar. Tim was working as a referee, Marinette and Dick were there simply to enjoy themselves and make sure Damian and Jason didn’t kill each other… or Tim. All of the three were a little too important to them for them to lose.

“What do you mean?” she asked in turn though she didn’t take her eyes off her boy. She was cheering for him, albeit quietly, because she knew there was a chance she could be a distraction and that meant Jason’s win.

“Your love for him is so…” Dick seemed to try and search for a fitting word as he tilted his head, “unconditional . No matter what he does, you still love him and accept him, so long as he understands how his actions may affect others and then does accordingly. You don’t let him push you away, but you also don’t let him walk over you or hurt you if you can help it. You’re good to him.”

“But you do that as well, don’t you?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I do, but it’s more out of obligation as his family. Even I might not be able to tolerate him as much as you have if I were not his older brother. But you, you came into his life and stayed. You’ve changed him and made him a better person.”

Marinette stayed quiet for a while after that, watching the boys solemnly. She rested her head in her hands and sighed before she closed her eyes. “No,” she said and shook her head. “I have not made him a better person.”

“But you—”

“Dick, no. He’s changed, yes, and I know he’s changed the most after I came into his life, but perhaps it’s just that he needed a different perspective to things. He kept pushing everyone away but he was lonely, so the least I could do was to be there and stay there. Or help him find someone else. All that’s changed in him… it was all him. People don’t change that much if they aren’t willing to, but he actively and consciously worked on himself to become a better person. Don’t take that credit away from him and give it to me,” she replied.

Dick huffed with a smile on his face. Marinette certainly was good for Damian. That boy better not fuck it up.

As Damian won and Jason lay on the ground, defeated, Marinette jumped up and cheered before she ran to Damian and tackled him on the ground with a hug. Dick smiled and walked to his family, congratulating both of his brothers. He was glad she was in their lives, in Damian’s life, because she had so much love to give, and while she was not good at taking, Damian was determined to make sure she couldn’t go without receiving a lot in return.

Because after all, she loved him with her everything, and he too loved her everything.

“you do that yourself…”

Changing oneself was more difficult than Damian wanted to admit. Everything had always been so easy to him (or at least it had been far less difficult than this was), so much had just been handed to him.

But this?

Yeah, no. He hated it and he didn’t want to do it. It was annoying, he didn’t want to change, and all of this was so horrible.

The thing was, it didn’t matter that he didn’t want it — for himself, at least. The reason as to why he needed to do it was because there was someone he couldn’t keep treating like he did now. That also meant having to change. He wanted to change for her, he wanted to be able to give her what she deserved — and she deserved so much good. Damian couldn’t let himself keep being like he was now.

Marinette loved and loved and loved, and she kept coming back to him no matter how he was like to her. She didn’t give up. That said, whenever he went too far, she didn’t hesitate to call him out, sometimes even in front of other people, even if she did it politely and didn’t try to insult or offend him in any way — no, she went out of her way to try and avoid it, because, to quote her, “no one, even you, should be treated like that, because everyone deserves being shown respect.”

Well, he was fairly sure she always mumbled something about a Lila not deserving respect, but he decided to ignore it… for now.

And so, he looked up what he could do to change and started doing those things actively. Or trying to do so, anyway.

He found himself biting his tongue more often than he ever had just to keep himself from saying something that Marinette deemed offensive or insulting to other people. He started reading people to find what were their weak points, not because he wanted to hurt them, but because he wanted to avoid doing so. And maybe it was a bit because if they dared to hurt his friends, he would know perfectly how and where to strike them.

Then, once he knew how to do that and didn’t need to pay as much attention to it as he had at the beginning, he started trying to do one kind thing to people every day — and someone other than Marinette, Jon or Colin. To them he managed to be an alright person more often than any other people. Sometimes it was helping them with their schoolwork, sometimes it was defending someone from harassment or bullying, sometimes it was as simple as being polite and thanking them. Like Marinette told him, he didn’t need to conquer the world for anyone — on the days he was too tired to do much, the simple “thank you” or holding a door open for someone was more than enough.

And slowly but surely, he started finding himself feeling better. It was easier to let go of anger, his relationships with other people improved, he didn’t snap at people all so easily. It was rather refreshing to, for once, hear other people say something positive about him instead of complaining about his actions.

All because he had once decided Marinette deserved better than him, but he still wanted to be the one beside her. That had meant working on himself to become the person he thought she deserved, a person worthy of her.

After all, she deserved everything.

“...because they inspire you.”

“Hey, Damian?”

“Yes, Malaki? What is it you’re thinking about?”

Marinette massaged Damian’s hand with her thumb, trying to decide how she wanted to voice her thoughts.

“I— I’m proud of you,” she finally decided. Marinette smiled at her boyfriend, happy she was able to spend time with him. “You’ve grown so much in the past few years and even months I’ve known you. I’m not sure what is the main reason for that, but that doesn’t matter, I’m just happy you seem to be doing better nowadays. Are you?”

Damian huffed and squeezed her hand. “Yes, I am. And you, sadiqti alhabiba (my beloved girlfriend), you were what drove me to change. You deserve so much and I wanted to be worthy of you and worthy of your love,” he replied, pressing a soft kiss on her lips. “And I thank you for that.”

Chuckling, Marinette leant against him and closed her eyes, knowing that she was safe as long as he was with her. She didn’t need to be on her guard all the time.

“You’re a fool.”

“A fool? Perhaps, but then I am a fool in love with the angel who decided I was worth fighting for.”

After all, she thought he was worth her time.

“A soulmate is someone who you can carry with you forever.”

His breathing got significantly faster as he frantically tried to look for his beloved, and once his eyes landed on her body some metres away, they widened in horror. He could only barely see her from the smoke that obscured his vision, but the blood staining the ground and her petite body was more than easy to spot.

He kicked the man in front of him away, with much more force than he knew was necessary, but it didn’t matter to him — he just needed to get to her. Nothing else mattered right at that moment.  

Damian ran towards his beloved, coughing the smoke out of his lungs. He covered his mouth and nose to keep himself from breathing all of it, but his hand fell when he finally saw Marinette in front of him.

Dead.

Her eyes were wide open, red from all the impurities in the air, and the streams of her tears were still visible on her face as ash and dust had dyed them dark. Her mouth was still open in a silent scream that never got out of her lungs, because there was a clear bullet shot gone through the left side of her chest and a blade had impaled her throat.

Why, oh why hadn’t she worn her miraculous suit that day?

Why had he let her go out without it?

And why had he let her come with him — he knew they were up against the League of Assassins.

Damian gathered her small body in his arms, bringing her close to his chest and holding her tight. He’d be damned if he let anything worse happen to her, he’d be damned if he let her body be taken away from her.

“You—” Damian choked out the word and tried to keep his tears at bay, batting them away from his eyes. “You made me love you— you made me let you in and you—” He breathed in sharply and tried to regain his composure, but it was nearly impossible. He clutched her tighter in his arms as though she was just injured and he needed to get her away from there…

But he knew that wasn’t possible. “And then you died in my arms.” The last words were barely breathed out because he couldn’t— he wasn’t able to get his voice out. It was stuck in his throat along with the lump that made it so hard to breathe, so hard to stay up and standing when he would have rather crumbled then and there.

“You’re on your own!” he yelled to his comms, knowing he didn’t need to but he couldn’t help it right then and there. He could only hope Red Robin and Red Hood were alright with it, that they would survive without him and Marinette, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to fight longer than this without needing to kill the ones that were the reason his beloved was dead.

There was no doubt about it. If he stayed, he would kill the ones that were the reason they were even fighting to make them pay.

...And she would not be happy about it.

As it turned out, they won. Both his mother and grandfather were dead, the League was gone from the face of the earth (they would create it again one day, but they were gone for now and that was better than it had been for the longest time now. His beloved’s death wasn’t in vain.

Her funeral was a quiet affair.

It wouldn’t have even been necessary as she had wanted to be cremated, but he had insisted on it. Damian wouldn’t have wanted her to be cremated, but he knew it had been her request so he never attempted to not let it happen. That’s why the least he could do was to make sure there was at least a funeral for her. He dressed up in white and black for the funeral, which was the reason he stood out in the crowd, but he couldn't care less.

He was allowed to keep his wife’s ashes in their home, though he did spread some of them around the Wayne family’s lands since she had enjoyed spending time there a lot. Damian needed to make sure that her last place (or places, he supposed) of rest would be one she loved— no, had loved, because she was dead now — when she was still there in the world with him. She had been too young to die. They had barely graduated from university a few years earlier. She didn’t deserve it.

His brothers tried to console her. They really did. Cain tried her best as well, just staying there with him in silence while each of them did their own thing, letting the other one grieve. It was nice. If there was anything good about Marinette’s death, it was that he ended up getting closer with his family.

Not that he preferred having better relationships with them — he would have chosen his beloved over them any day.

On the first anniversary of her death he crumbled against their dinner table and tried to hold onto the table as he fell on his knees under the weight of his suppressed grief and agony. Damian could feel tears running down his face until he knew all he could do was to let it be, and so he sobbed.

“Oh god, why can’t you be here? I should have been the first of us to die, not— not you.”

He had trouble breathing and he could only take short, sharp breaths. All he needed was to be able to hold his wife, his beloved, but that was the only thing he would never be able to do anymore.

Later that night Drake — no, Timothy, because maybe he deserved that much for dealing with him that night without making fun of him even once — came over and just forced Damian to the sofa and gave him food he had bought before that. After that, he used Alfred’s recipe for an Irish coffee to calm him down a little.

Timothy let him set the pace — if Damian wanted to talk, he was allowed to and Timothy would sit there in silence, listening to him, unless it was clear he wanted Timothy’s thoughts on the matter, or they would both be quiet, and at some point Damian was rather sure they had watched a few movies without really sleeping. Eventually, the coffee had him rather tired and he fell asleep, leaning against Timothy’s shoulder.

Come the morning, and Timothy was still there. He even offered Damian rather sound advice, once he’d thought it over and realised Timothy was, in fact, right and didn’t deserve the blowing up he’d received from Damian.

“With the death of a loved one, you’ve got to let yourself grieve. Otherwise, you will not be able to get better. It’s just a sign there’s excess love inside you that you can’t give anyone because that bit of love was reserved for someone special. It’s… Well, it’s something you need to let yourself feel because otherwise it will make you come crashing down and you don’t want to collapse,” he told Damian after making him sit down and drink some water. It looked like Timothy hadn’t slept at all.

And he looked even worse than he usually did — he looked worse than Damian knew he himself had looked when Timothy had found him the day before.

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to stop grieving, but… It will get better. One day. Slowly. And then sometimes it will hit you all over again, but on those days — well, every day, but especially on those days — I’m here. All of us, all of your family is. We won’t let you go through this alone. She was dear to us all, too.”

Later on (it must have taken some weeks, because by the time he heard it, Timothy had gone missing again) he heard from the rest of his family that it was amazing Timothy had come to him then. They still hadn’t gotten along well at that time (they’d gotten along on any level before his beloved’s death only for her sake as she’d expressed her utter sadness whenever they fought too much), but he’d come to help Damian specifically anyway. Because he cared.

And it turned out he’d been as much of a mess as Damian had, but he'd forced himself to get up and deal with Damian too. It had taken him a while to understand how Timothy could have been as bad as he had, but then it hit him — he and Marinette had been best friends, and losing her had been just as much of a tragedy to him as it had been to Damian.

That was something.

And it was certainly an act to be respected.

Fortunately, they found him within the next few months, alive, because even Damian had admitted he missed Timothy and he wouldn’t be able to take it if more of his family died. Losing Marinette had been enough.

On the fifth anniversary of her death, the entire family got together to remember her. Damian had baked her favourite pastries, fraisiers, for everyone. He had needed to do it — after all, it was her who taught him to bake them.

Every one of them loved them. The children — Grayson’s, Todd’s and Thomas’, though no one really knew where Thomas had gotten his (none of them questioned it because they were too used to Father’s antics, at least he wasn’t training them to be vigilantes) — were just happy they got to eat sweets, though the older ones did notice the sad presence in all of them. That, and there was no way they didn’t know they gathered together to keep the memory of Damian’s late wife alive. It was certain that Todd’s children all knew a lot about the happened and knew that Marinette Dupain-Cheng-Wayne had been close with all of them, but Damian wasn’t sure if they understood why everyone was like that.

He could only barely see it from the blurriness in his own vision, but there were tears in Richard’s eyes that he refused to shed. Timothy just smiled that sad smile of his at the dessert and looked like he was talking to himself, but there wasn’t even a trace of tears in his expression. He was doing better.

“It will get better,” he had told Damian years ago. “Not now, and the developement is going to be slow, but it will.”

Maybe that was what had Timothy smile.

Damian didn’t know whether he should be happy for him or bitter.

He decided to be happy for him, because that was what he knew his beloved would have wanted.

Years went by and yet Damian never forgot about her. He knew he could never. He was finally getting better, he could go about his everyday life easily, though sometimes he needed to take a day off when the grief surfaced and he couldn't handle it anymore.

Somehow, Timothy seemed to always know when those days hit (Damian wouldn’t put it past him to have all their siblings and even Father looking after him and reporting his moods to Timothy), and every single time he was there at some point, either offering a listening ear or something to watch or food or just his presence, even if both of them worked on their own projects in silence.

But he got better, and the pain and grief born from losing her loosened their grip on him.

Through all the years, Damian carried a picture of Marinette along with him. He made sure her legacy would stay alive in some way, and ended up founding the Marinette Foundation that technically offered help for young artists and those bullied in school. In reality, they helped anyone they could, because that was what Marinette would’ve done.

Jon and Colin told him he was nothing like the boy they knew at some point, that he had changed, and they were proud of him. They said Marinette would be proud of him too. Damian, in turn, told them that they could thank Marinette when they met her in the life after this one and themselves for showing him the way (and Marinette for getting tired of his antics and shoving him down and onto said way because he refused to step onto it himself.)

Even on his deathbed decades later, he held a picture of Marinette in his hands, refusing to forget her no matter what.

Because after all, she was the reason he was still there.

“It's the one person who knew you and accepted you…”

Damian swallowed — damnit, an al Ghul did not swallow when nervous or anxious, that was a sign of weakness and he wasn’t weak — as Marinette stared him down. He had to consciously keep himself from shifting in place where he was sitting on his bed. Marinette was on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.

The lights in the room were rather dim, the brightest light source being the daylight that made its way into the room through the windows Alfred had had them clean a few days earlier. Something about them needing to know how to do it and being able to be outside the window relatively safely compared to Alfred himself.

He didn’t dare to say a word after his confession, simply waiting for Marinette to speak up. For her to say something, anything. He’d told her everything he could remember, even things he had never told anyone else, and her opinion on it mattered so much, regardless of what he wanted to convince himself of. Her opinion always weighed more than others’ at this point.

Eventually, she opened her mouth. “Alright, so tell me if I got it right. You were born to the daughter of the leader of the league of Assassins, you were raised to become one, you actually killed tens and tens of people, then you were taken to your father at the age of ten to distract him from his work as Batman, tried to kill Tim — my best friend — multiple times, and you never told me until now? After we’ve known each other for seven years and having dated for four of them?”

Usually, Damian could read Marinette easily, but now her face was blank, and the only thing he could hear in her voice was a hint of exasperation and anger. A hint. That meant she was hiding something huge, because his beloved was never this emotionless unless she was actively hiding something from him.

And that was something that had him swallow his pride and admit to himself that he was frightened about what that meant for him, for her, for them and their relationship. He had no idea.

He nodded, drawing out a slow “yes, that’s pretty much it summarised.”

Marinette sighed and ran a hand down his face. For a second, there was a flash of absolute fury and sorrow visible on her face, but then it was already gone. Damian wasn’t sure what to make of it, but he was rather sure that this meant the end of their relationship.

“I am so furious right now.”

“I understand that you’re furious with me. I did hide it from you for a long time. I just thought you deserved to know, even if it came later rather than sooner. Better late than never, isn’t it?”

Yet another sigh. “Damian, love, mon cœur, I am not furious at you. I am furious at your mother and I am furious at your grandfather and so many others, but not you. And yes, I deserved to know that my boyfriend has killed people, multiple of them at that, but I can see why you hid it from me for so long. When was the last time you killed anyone?”

“A bit after I became Robin.”

“Well then, it’s long since that happened. I can’t promise I won’t be a little uncomfortable around you for a while, but I’ll work on it. Your mother and grandfather took your childhood away and it isn’t your fault you became an assassin — you didn’t know any better. You were a child. You aren’t supposed to have to know how to be at that age, especially if you’ve only ever seen one way of living, if you’ve only ever been told that way of living is the correct one. Instead, I’m ready to break this family’s “No kill” rule and go do that to your mother and grandfather. You didn’t deserve all of that. No child does.”

There were tears in his eyes that were threatening to spill, and Damian needed to think about breathing in order to be able to do so.

“I— What is wrong with you? Why do you care so much about me?!” he began with a broken voice, his tone borderline hysterical, but Marinette interrupted him by putting a finger on his lips. She’d crossed the room fast.

“Because you’re my friend above all else. You’re the one I love, and there’s nothing that can change that.”

Damian’s breath came to a halt. Tears burned in his eyes and suddenly he felt like a scared child, clinging onto anything that could save him. Marinette smiled at him so gently, so reassuringly as she reached out to him. She was truly an angel bringing light to his life, being the light in the darkness that was his life. “But I— I killed—”

“Oh love, I don’t blame you, so please, don’t do that either. Children cannot be blamed for the actions of their parents, and they can’t be held responsible for something they did because their mother and grandfather told them to do so. It took, what, ten years before you were even told you were allowed to not kill people. There’s no way I could ever blame you.” Marinette pulled rather limp Damian into her arms and squeezed him, and both of them tried to ignore the tears that were now flowing down from their eyes. Marinette hid her face in Damian’s hair, keeping Damian within her embrace in the way he’d once (surprisingly) admitted felt safe to him, his face buried in her shirt. Marinette said nothing about the tears staining the piece of clothing.

She never would, not with her dearest. Especially not when he was like this.

Marinette wasn’t surprised in the least that Damian had come crashing down like this. Keeping something a secret from your loved ones was tiring. The bigger the secret and the longer you kept it, the bigger the consequences would be once you let go of it.

All she could do now was to be there for him and prove that she wasn’t going to leave, even if it took her a long time. He deserved that much.

Because after all, he deserved the world.

“Believed in you before anyone else did…”

Marinette bend over and put her face in her arms and knees, sitting on her bed. Her sketchbook lied on the other side of the room, some of its pages crumbled next to it. She had no idea what to do. The only thing that could be heard in the room were her heavy breathing and sobs, at least until someone was at the door.

That someone knocked on the door three times, each knock the slightest bit different. She didn’t want to see anyone right now, but the knocks already told him it was either Damian or Tim on the other side of the door. They were the only two she’d told about how to knock on her door to make sure she knows it’s one of them if they needed to talk to her and she reacted to no other means of contact.

So, reluctantly, she stood up and walked to the door, opening it to reveal Damian standing there, wearing a worried expression on his face. Marinette stepped aside and motioned for him to come in before closing the door behind the two of them.

“What is—” she began but was interrupted before she got any further.

“What happened, habibti?”

Marinette snapped her mouth shut. This was not what she was expecting. Damian sounded worried.

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t throw your sketchbook across the room and look like you’re about to cry when you are alright.”

That was enough to make her stop with the excuses. Damian had her figured out. She should have guessed. She swallowed, visibly deflated and dropped on the ground, hugging her knees. Damian was at her side within seconds.

“I just—” It was hard to talk about it and they fell into silence again. Damian put his hand on her shoulder hesitantly, as though he wasn’t sure if it was okay. As she didn’t move away or flinch at the touch, he just let it rest there. Marinette guessed he was trying his best at showing he was there by doing what he’d seen Tim and Dick do before.

“You can take your time, I am in no hurry,” he said, drawing a teary laugh out of her.

“Thanks, Dames.”

Marinette stared at the ground as she started speaking. “I— It’s just that I realised, I remembered that I didn’t want to be a designer, not to begin with. I do enjoy designing, it isn’t that, but… It’s kind of like video games. It was meant to be a hobby.”

“Why did you change your mind, then?”

“I think… I think it’s because of Mlle Bustier. She saw me designing clothes one day and she kept insisting I was good at it and telling me I should become a designer. I did tell her I didn’t want to, but she insisted I should become one for weeks, months, years. Eventually I— eventually I just thought that was what I wanted and should do, I guess.”

Damian growled, like, honest to god growled. “I am going to sue that disgusting, sorry excuse of a teacher,” he all but snarled, but didn’t go anywhere from where he was kneeling next to her.

“Please don’t. You don’t have any proof.”

“Tt. As you wish. At least she cannot do anything to you anymore as you’re now here. Then, what was it you wanted to do? Before that loathsome woman interfered, that is.”

Marinette smiled at him with teary eyes. “I wanted to be a baker, just like my parents. They loved their job and baking was so much fun. I loved trying new things and I always imagined how it would be to either take over our family bakery or start my own,” she said, chuckling. Then her smile disappeared from her face and she frowned a little. “But every time I mention this to someone now, they’re saying I shouldn’t abandon my “dream” of becoming a designer, that I don’t need to worry about whether I can make it. They think I’m just scared of whether my designs are good enough — I know they are — and I do want to do it as a side thing, but I… it’s not what I want from life. I want to be able to bake and make these amazing, wonderful creations and make people smile when they eat them!”

Damian reached his hands out to cup her face but hesitation made him jerk away. Why was he hesitating now? That was not something he usually did. But, when he watched her expressions carefully, the slightest bit of disappointment he could see on Marinette’s face had him reach out again and cup her face.

“Whatever it is you want to do, I support you, and I’m sure you’ll do great. If you want to be a baker and create a bakery, I say go for it. If it makes you happy, I want you to do it, and I’ll be there supporting you through every step of the way, if that pleases you.”

“Yes, it would. Thank you, Damian,” she said, and finally a smile graced her lips again. It was like it lit up the entire room, but Damian didn’t have long to think about it before Marinette had surged forwards and her lips were on his.

Just as soon as the kiss had started, it also ended. Marinette looked embarrassed and ashamed, letting her gaze fall to the side, averting Damian’s eyes. Her sudden movements had Damian lose his grasp on her.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. I simply—”

And then she was interrupted by Damian cupping her face once more, pulling her forwards and claiming her lips in turn. Marinette melted into it and traced her hands along his body up until they found their place on his shoulders and behind his neck. When they broke the kiss off, Marinette simply let herself go limp against Damian who held her like she was the most precious thing in the world.

Perhaps she was.

“I meant that. I will always be here for you because I love you,” he whispered into her hair.

After all, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t fight the entire world for her.

“...or when no one else would.”

“Have I ever told you how I met one of my best friends, Damian Wayne?” Lila asked one day after school when they were all waiting for their lifts or friends on the school grounds. Alya immediately perked up and looked at her friend curiously. She already seemed ready to take out her phone and record Lila talking about it, but Lila simply laughed sweetly and told her that she needed to protect Damian’s privacy from the media. Alya understood and put her phone away.

Marinette mostly ignored it, still waiting for her lift — she didn’t like it when Lila lied about her friends, but as long as she wasn’t slandering their name, she had decided not to intervene because one, it’s not like her classmates would care, and two, why should she care about her ex-friends being lied to if they didn’t believe her when she said so? As long as Lila didn’t bully her or her ex-friends didn’t do it, she couldn’t care less.

“Alright, so it went like this. A few years ago, I was at the Wayne gala with my mother, when this woman spilled her drink on my dress. It was so unfortunate, I had gotten the dress from Prince Ali the last time I’d met him, and it was my favourite one,” Lila explained, making an effort to put shock and sadness in her voice, her expressions no doubt matching the story perfectly. Rose gasped in horror. Marinette was half-listening to the story, ready to start recording in case there was going to be any slander against any of her friends. After all, she would need proof if they wanted to take it to court.

“Oh girl, what happened then? Did she at least apologise and offer to get it cleaned up for you?” Alya asked, grabbing Lila by the shoulders. Marinette could almost imagine her concerned, angry face in her mind.

Marinette could find a slightly bitter taste in her mouth at the nickname but ignored it.

Lila tilted her head and furrowed her brows, looking away for a second as though she were sad. “No,” she sighed. “She was jealous about me and the beautiful dress I had. Then she smirked at me and tripped, ripping my dress. It couldn’t be repaired afterwards. The biggest problem was, when she— when she ripped my dress—”

Lila swallowed and stopped speaking and wiped a tear away from her eye before continuing. “When she ripped my dress, it revealed my undergarments, right there, in the middle of the gala,” she whispered. Marinette would be amazed at her acting skills because she sounded just like she were embarrassed for a second there if it wasn’t for the fact she didn’t like it when people lied.

“What happened then?” Mylène asked, holding her breath.

“Then Damian swooped in and shed his jacket quickly, giving it to me to be able to cover myself. Then he took me away from the ball and got me one of his sister’s dresses. He apologised that it wasn’t the same thing, but told me it was too unfortunate the woman had been like that. He then reassured me that his family would take her away so I could enjoy the rest of the gala. He still let me keep the jacket because I was cold.”

The girls around her cooed.

“Tell us more!”

“Well, alright,” Lila complied, looking like she didn’t want them asking more. Like hell she didn’t, she reveled in their attention. Lila Rossi loved the sound of her own voice more than she loved breathing. “So, a few days after that — as I hadn’t been able to find him at the end of the gala to be able to give his jacket back to him — I was walking outside using his jacket because it was so warm and that way I could return it to him or one of his family members should I see them there. The a dog ran past me without his owner. He clearly belonged to someone because he had a collar and he was groomed, but I couldn’t even see anyone running after him. So, obviously, I ran after the dog to catch him, hoping he had a name tag and the owner’s information so I could return him. It took me a while and my feet were so tired, but eventually I succeeded. That was about when I saw a young man running towards me. The dog visibly brightened and started wagging his tail just as when I was trying to check the nametag, so I guessed it was the owner.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Ooh, was it Damian?”

“Yes! It was indeed Damian! His dog had run away! He was so kind to me because I found his dog and thanked me so many times for it. He asked me if I wanted to come for a walk with him and his dog who was so sweet the entire time. It was so wonderful talking with him — he’s a great conversationalist!” Marinette did agree with her there. “Then I gave him his jacket back and he gave me his number so we could keep in contact. We kept talking even after I returned to Italy and he’s one of my dearest friends!”

Well, Lila had said nothing problematic about Damian or any of the other Wayne family members, so Marinette decided she couldn’t bother to get involved in it. At least she’d done her research for once, because while there were things you could check on the internet, it would be much harder unless you knew exactly where to look and who to ask.

Marinette pulled out her phone to call Tim as he was supposed to fetch her from school with Alfred. Tim was her best friend and they were going to take her to the States for the next few weeks so she could get a break from school and all the stress surrounding it. Well. She was going to go to school with Damian in Gotham to make sure she didn’t fall behind, but it wasn’t like it was the schoolwork stressing her out. It was Lila and all her lies and the lack of anyone she could talk to or rely on. In Gotham, none of those things would be a problem.

But, instead of Tim walking up to her, she got Tim and Damian, both heading straight her way. Once she got over her surprise, she smiled brightly and waved at them before running towards Tim and hugging him. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tightly.

“I’m so glad that you’re coming over for the next few weeks, Cupcake! There’s so much I want to show you. Did I already mention that Lucius and Tam are both looking forward to seeing you at the office during your stay? Because they totally are. They want to show you around the company. You can’t let them down. Bart and Kon mentioned wanting to see you at some point during the week too.”

Marinette laughed and wriggled out of Tim’s grasp. “I’ll make sure I’ll have time for all of them. I do need to set time aside for you especially, but I’m reserving Dames for myself for at least a few days,” she told the two boys and smiled at Damian. She still wasn’t too close with him so she tried to keep away from hugging him or tried to keep the touch contact at minimum because he always seemed so uncomfortable with the rest of the family showing their affection by hugs or ruffling his hair and so on. She didn’t want to do it to him.

(So what if a bit of it was because she had the tiniest crush on him and didn’t want to ruin her relationship with him before she even had any kind of a chance.)

“Oh, Marinette, who’s your friend? Your boyfriend? Or boyfriends?” Lila asked with the slightest smirk hidden behind her smile, the tone of her voice sounding the slightest bit scandalised at the idea of multiple boyfriends. It seemed everyone else caught it too and with wide eyes, stared at Marinette. Marinette scowled, hoping Tim and Damian didn’t catch the mood change in the air.

A pointless wish because both were children of Bruce Wayne and raised by the greatest detective in the world, but a wish nonetheless.

“This is my best friend, Tim, and this is his little brother and also my dear friend, Dames,” she replied, gritting her teeth a little.

“Oh no, your best friend? Isn’t Alya your best friend?”

That drew the attention of the entire class still present to them. They smelled drama and they wanted to see it.

“No,” Marinette said coolly, pressing her nails into the skin of her palm to keep herself calm and grounded. Tim seemed to notice it and put a hand on her arm, rubbing circles on it with his thumb. “Alya was my best friend until she decided to believe you over me. We grew apart.”

“God, Marinette, this ploy of yours isn’t going to work. You’re still my friend, but I’m also friends with Lila! I don’t get where this jealousy and need to have people for yourself is coming from! Are you still mad that Adrien doesn’t like you as much as he likes Lila?”

Marinette inhaled deep. “I don’t even like Adrien anymore. I haven’t liked him in months! I’m not jealous, it’s that you all keep believing and choosing Lila — a girl you’ve known for a year or so — over me, someone some of you have known since we were in diapers! Have I ever lied to any of you? Proved you couldn’t trust me? Anything that could justify any of this?”

She was so irritated and done with them. They weren’t bullying her, but honestly, she would have preferred it over them saying they were still friends before doing a complete 180° and deciding to choose Lila over her every. Single. Time. Not once had they chosen her over Lila since she came into the picture permanently.

“Like hell you don’t like Adrien. You just told me over the phone you do!”

“Alya, we haven’t spoken over the phone in ages.”

That stopped Alya. She swallowed, pulled out her phone and frantically looked through it before paling.

“Well?” Marinette inquired. She knew perfectly well it had been a long time since because both of them were just “so busy” all the time.

“It’s— it’s been half a year since…” Alya choked out. Marinette settled for an expression and an arch of a brow that told her I told you so.

“Well then, that’s settled. Can we go now? I’d like to see the rest of the family as soon as possible,” Marinette said, already turning on her heel when Lila decided she needed to have the last word in. At least she had the good idea of speaking in French because every time Marinette spoke to the two boys, it was in English. Obviously, both of them knew at least some French as she used it around the Manor and they sometimes replied to her, but still. It wasn’t like Lila knew.

“Where are you even going? It’s the middle of the school year. There can’t be any good reason as to why you’re leaving now. It’s not like you’re good enough to just not be here.”

“I am leaving because of stress, not that it actually was any of your concern, and my schoolwork is doing just fine, thank you very much.”

“I haven’t even seen you study, you’re quiet in class — in fact, it seems like all you do is draw while you should focus on what Mlle Bustier is teaching us.”

Marinette sighed. She didn’t want to have to deal with this.

The others in class spoke up too, all of them spouting out similar “facts” that actually weren’t true. Marinette could feel tears burning in her eyes and the choking feeling in her throat was just too present, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Tim looked ready to go full Red Robin on them, but just before he opened his mouth, Damian was already in front of them and at it. Tim returned to Marinette’s side, rubbing comforting circles on her shoulders and arms, wiping her tears away.

“I’m not certain if any of you imbeciles have ears. She told you, her schoolwork is excellent. I have seen her grades, Father has seen her grades, her parents have seen her grades, Drake has seen them, and all of us have decided that it is of no problem for her to come with us. And if any of you were the friends you say you are, then you would not question this and be happy for her and trust she knows what she is doing. If none of you are able to do that simple thing, then I deem all of you unworthy of her,” he said, in perfect French, his tone of voice clearly telling them all his word was final. Some of the students paled and backed off when they caught it and understood there was no way for them out of this.

It seemed Lila didn’t.

“Who are you supposed to be? I’ll have you know, I’m the daughter of an ambassador, you can’t speak to me like that.”

“Oh, so you are the liar Malaki has mentioned every now and then.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Well, to say what Jason would love to if he were here, I ain’t calling you a truther,” Tim chimed in, a smile on his face, though none of the others could see it as he was still focused on making sure Marinette was okay. Marinette’s snort mixed with her choked sob as she held onto Tim, watching the exchange take place in front of them.

Marinette could have cried out of joy. Her friends — these friends — were actually there for her and didn’t let her deal with all of it alone. And Damian, well. He believed in her. He didn’t doubt her words for a second about a liar and then the moment he met Lila, he stood with Marinette and didn’t let Lila’s sweet, sugary, false words change his mind.

It mattered more to her than she knew how to explain.

The glare he had on his face, directed at Lila and the rest of them, was definitely the perfect blend of Damian al Ghul Wayne and Robin. It was something all the Bats learnt from Bruce and Batman, but Damian had perfected it and turned it into something of his own. Marinette was glad she was never on the receiving end of it. The faintest ghost of a smile crept on her lips as she watched everything unravel in front of her very eyes.

“Wait. Aren’t you— Lila, do you not recognise him?”

That was Alya.

“Why should I?”

Lila.

“Because that right there is Damian Wayne and you were just telling us about how you met him.”

“According to the internet and my various sources, the two people with Marinette Dupain-Cheng are Damian Wayne and Timothy Drake-Wayne.”

Max and Markov.

“I can’t believe this is how you fall, Rossi. You don’t recognise your so called best friend? You definitely dug yourself into a deep hole. It’s ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.”

And Chloé.

That was all the rest of them needed to pull out their phones and start looking up the rest of the things — thoroughly — that Lila had claimed to be true. It didn’t take too long before Markov and Max started listing off things Lila had lied about.

Damian smirked and turned away, clearly satisfied with how things turned out. He led Marinette to the car with Tim, and once they were inside and had said hi to Alfred and apologised for how long it took, he turned to Marinette and actually, genuinely smiled at her.

“Remember, Malaki, you don’t need to do everything on your own. If anyone ever dares to disrespect you like that again or doesn’t believe you when you’re telling the truth, you can trust that I will be there if you need assistance. I will always be there when you need me. Asking for assistance isn’t a sign of weakness.  Besides, isn’t that what Grayson always tries to remind us all of? That ‘asking for help and helping is what family does’, that ‘admitting to your flaws or not being able to do everything alone doesn’t mean a lack of strength’.”

“I agree with him, for once. We all care about you and you’re family. You could never be a bother. You can rely on us.”

Marinette wiped a tear out of her eye and smiled back. “You’re right. Thank you, Dami. For everything. You too, Timmers.” She grabbed the hands of both her friends and squeezed them, completely ignoring the warmth on her cheeks as Damian gave her a light squeeze back.

She would be fine.

Because after all, he wasn’t about to leave her fending for herself.

“And no matter what happens...”

“I’ll go with you.”

Marinette’s tone indicated her words were meant to be taken as final, but Damian wasn’t having it. He was not about to let his wife come with him to take down the League of Assassins for good because it wasn’t safe at all. That was the one fight where he wouldn’t be able to protect her because he’d be too caught up with fighting those who had gotten training nearly as good and tough as his. His beloved, as good as she was, was not comparable to the League because her training had been so different. His mother would be there, no doubt. Even if she liked Marinette, Mother was not above using her son’s wife against him if she thought it would work in her favour.

“No. You aren’t coming. I don’t want you to die there.”

Marinette groaned and threw a pillow at him with way too much force. It didn’t hurt — it was a pillow, after all—, but it did surprise him.

“Damian, ma raison de vivre, I will come with you. There’s no way I’ll be able to go on if you’re gone, so I will come and make sure you don’t die,” she snapped at him, scowling. It was a rare thing to see on her face.

“You are the one who needs to live if it comes down to that. The world and the family needs you more than they need me, habibti. I—” He was interrupted before he got any further.

“No! Don’t you dare start that! You are my — ugh, what’s the English term… whatever, let’s go with French — ma raison d’être and there’s no way I’m letting you die either! You aren’t disposable, you aren’t someone that I — or the family — can lose! I don’t care what it takes, and if I have to follow you from the shadows, hidden from you, to be able to come along, then that’s what I will do,” Marinette said, snarling.

“But this is the League of Assassins, they are there to kill. I might have to resort to that as well, if nothing else works. I will try not to for you, of course, but the chance still exists. They will definitely try to kill me, and if you’re there, you as well.”

“You know what, I’m coming and I’m telling the family of this as well. They won’t let you go alone either. None of us want you to die.”

She had already pulled out her phone and dialed someone by the time Damian had noticed and tried to stop her. It was too late.

“Fine,” he huffed and sat down at the table, watching as Marinette argued with someone on the phone until she finally put her phone away with a smug smile on her face.

“Tim said he’s coming, I reminded Bruce that he wouldn’t want to lose yet another son — especially not for the second time, yes, I know you died like fifteen years ago — so he’s in as well, Dick was in before I even finished trying to convince him, and Jason is coming as well because he cares about you all and wants to be there to protect you even if he’s horrible at saying it out loud.”

“I know.”

“Cass, Steph, Duke and Babs are in as well. So, you know, the whole family is going to be there. I’m pretty sure Jon and Colin would want to help as well if I asked.”

Marinette walked around the table to him, and slid her arms around him. “Dames, whatever happens, I will be there by your side, just like you told you’d be by my side. It goes both ways, love.” She pressed a kiss to his hair and took his hands in her own. “We are going to be fine, I promise. After all, you’re my other half, you complete me, and that means we’re going to survive and get through this as well.”

The day to fight came, and all the kwamii were tired, so Marinette wore kevlar, just like the rest of them. She smiled at him, holding his hand and chuckled, saying they matched. Damian smiled back and tucked some loose strands behind her ear. Yeah, just like his beloved said, they were going to be alright.

Because after all, they worked together better than any oiled machine.

“You will always love them.”

Those were the words he told her in front of both their families, their friends, but Damian couldn’t care less about them. All that mattered to him was that his angel was there, his angel had promised to give all of herself to him for the rest of their lives, until death do them part. In return, he gave her all that he was, all that he had, and he would never leave her side if it was up to him to decide.

He took her hands in his before bringing them up to kiss her fingers. Marinette laughed, the sound of it like music in his ears. It was the most beautiful sound in the world to him. The red of her dress was elegant and brought out her appearance’s best qualities, it made her eyes shine. The golden accents

When the “You may kiss the bride” came, he lifted her up by her waist, twirled them around and placed her back on the ground before he pressed a delicate kiss on her lips. It made her smile, and Damian was certain she could compete with the Sun itself for the place of the brightest and most beautiful thing in the world and win.

When they finally turned to face their closest people present, they were both smiling and happier than ever. Grayson cheered in the front row, Todd had a grin on his face, Father was smiling at them with such pride in his eyes, and Drake… Oh yeah, he was Marinette’s Man of Honor, so he wasn’t with the rest of the family — he had been standing at the side on Marinette’s side, with Brown, Tsurugi and Cain, who were her bridesmaids, and Couffaine, her bridesman, all standing behind him. Damian had given Colin and Jon the honour of being his Best Men (because he simply refused to choose only one of them.) Right now, Drake looked ready to run to Marinette and hug and congratulate her, but decided against it because he knew it was her and Damian’s day, and the right to be there by her side at the ceremony was Damian’s.

(It was clear he was going to spend as much time as possible with her at the wedding reception, though. Damian had no problem with that — his wife should be able to be with her friends, especially her best friend, as long as she didn’t forget him. He knew she wouldn’t. There was a reason she’d married him.)

Marinette smiled at him and gave his cheek a quick peck as they intertwined their fingers and walked down the aisle. It was strange and oh so wonderful how this amazing young woman had decided she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, no matter what kind of a person he had been, no matter how many other suitable people that liked her were there, no matter how difficult life together would be because of how stubborn both of them were — she still had chosen him over everyone and everything else, and Damian would be damned if he didn’t treat her with all the respect she deserved and make her as happy as ever possible.

Because after all, if soulmates existed, she was definitely his.

“Nothing can ever change that.”

A woman perks up as she hears someone call her name, seeing the black hair and the tan skin of the one she’s always loved. The one she’s loved since the day she saw him and until the day her heartbeats ceased and even beyond death. The one she had loved, the one she still loves, the one she will always love. He’s standing there, shocked, tears in his eyes, but there’s so much adoration and love in his eyes that she doesn't even know how to react. Then she rushes to her feet and runs to him, throwing herself at him because it’s been too long since the day we lost each other.

Her treasure got to live a life decades longer than her own, he got to grow old, but she can’t find it in herself to be bitter about it — he always deserved to live a long life, and besides, even though she would have tried to be happy for him if it had happened, he never fell in love again or remarried after she was taken away from him. He’d stayed hers and hers only until death, and now they’re back together, finally. Even if it took nearly seven entire decades of separation first.

Basking in the warmth of sunlight, the young woman with black hair leans against the young man just about her age, his hair just as black as hers. He wraps his arms around her shoulders tightly and presses her against his chest, more than grateful he can hold her again after being separated for so very long. She chuckles and tilts her head backwards so he can give her a kiss on her forehead more easily.

The rest of the world no longer matters. It’s no longer “as though it doesn’t matter”, because now it is “it doesn’t matter”. They have both lived and they have both died, and now that they’re together again, they don’t need to care about the world. It isn’t like they can affect it anymore either.

They intertwine their fingers, a gesture that brings both of them comfort, a gesture that has brought both of them comfort for decades now, and they watch the sun set down below in the world they can only see as outsiders anymore. Even so, the sunset paints the world in warm tones, and the peaceful tones of red, orange and yellow fill their vision.

Their time is no longer limited, for they’ve found one another in the life beyond. They are together again, and that is all that matters to them. Their family is there as well, all of them are waiting to see them, and that’s why they don’t need to worry anymore.

The young woman stands up and offers her hand to the man, and the man takes it, letting the woman pull him to his feet. She cups his face and pulls him down to a kiss, smiling into it as she murmurs her confessions of love to him in all the languages she knows and even the languages she doesn’t. In return, he tells her how she is all that he needs, how she changed his life, and how he will keep his promise of staying by her side until the end of time in all the languages that have ever existed and even the languages that don’t yet exist.

After all,  to one another, the two of them were everything.

Because what’s a soulmate, if not the one person you love more than anything, the one person your life would crash without, the one person that gives you strength in the darkest of times even when they aren’t there, if not the one you choose to love until you run out of air to breathe and until your heart ceases to beat?

What’s a soulmate, if not the one who will keep coming back to you over and over again, no matter what happens, until the end of time and will find you even beyond death?

________

@kris-pines04 @thethirdwheelfriend @daminett4life

_________

Did you find the only two connected scenes in this one because there's totally one scene that leads straight to another (and as the fic isn't in chronological order, the two scenes aren't either, it’s easy but not that easy.)

If you guess what were my favourite scenes to write or tell me what were yours to read, I'll give you a cookie.

[light-of-the-damned-stars]

The Exchange of Courtesies

https://ficbook.net/readfic/6544987/22311870

Translator's here 💝👇

'If you think that we have nothing to discuss, you're seriously mistaken.'

 'Words have spreaded as shatters of the former glory of Ñoldor people in the hall, and, alas, no one would be able to to collect all of them now.'

'Are you allowing yourself to say these bold words of yours whilst being so confident in my generosity and forbearance?'

'You depend on me, thus you'll have to forbeare quirks of mine. Sadly, I suppose.'

'You can't even imagine to what extent.'

Two Ñoldor were not looking at each other whilst pointedly looking only at patterns on columns and at the view behind windows. Two voices: one that was faint and husky and another one which was beautifully flowing, — were appearing one by one after each pause.  

'Aren't you afraid to be at one place with me without any guards?' Maedhros snarkily remarked whilst he was approaching the painting of Narnis.

'The necessity of this conversation without witnesses is outweighing my possible irrational fears,' Ñolofinwë was still looking at nothing happening behind the window when he indifferently replied.

'However, everyone knows that I'm here. What's the point in secretiveness?'

'Yes, everyone knows that you're here. Don’t you have a clue what is the reason?'

Maedhros gave no answer while he was still looking at the picture, examining the painting of his daughter and then the elegant frame.

'I want those who are loyal to me to know the person on whom they’ll take revenge after my death,' the king explained.

'It's very presumptuous to proclaim that there’ll be anyone who would like to risk their life for a deadman,' Fëanarion's voice unpleasantly changed.

'For the one who is alive — just a few will make a heroic act either,' High Ñoldoran still was not looking at his nephew, 'yet, heroes exist.'

'Alright,' Maedhros laughed with malice when he looked upon Finwë's portrait, 'I'll keep in mind that I need to secretly kill you and avoid bragging about how I freed the people of Ñoldor from shameful authority of usurper.'

'And what kind of authority do betrayers and brother killers deserve?' Ñolofinwë innocently wondered while deadly staring at one and the same point somewhere near the fountain at the square.

'I would've asked why do you, such a bright shiny ruler, need these disgusting people who possess no honour,' Fëanor was again mocking him, 'who are stained with the blood of innocents and who rejected wondrous Valar. However, the answer is clear for me.'

For the first time, during this painfully long and tense conversation, the king turned to the one with whom he spoke. Ñoldoran's eyes were blazing with hate, though he was smiling.

'You're wrong,' Ñolofinwë said in an unnatural voice. 'Again. And it's nor the first nor the last time. You ain't right if you think that I have so much lust for power, that I am eager to rule over anyone, as long as I could conquer more lands. You might not believe me though you more than anyone else know the value of a manuscript, and I'm willing to make one of those for you. Right now.’

High Ñoldoran seated himself at the table and smarmily straightened paper by pretentiously pressing its edges with copper soldiers to the table; he leisurely put a beautiful quill, that was shining with blue and green, in ink and started to slowly write tenguas along with reading out loud what he has written.  

'So you want to tell me,' Maedhros's lips that were crossed by almost invisible scars stretched his mouth corners in a smile though the upper part of his face remained emotionless, 'that you're not going to claim Morgoth's lands after winning? What an interesting state of affairs.'

'You'll be able to live there and name yourself as you would like,' Ñolofinwë explained calmly.

'Dor-Daedeloth, the Land of Fear and Terror, will obtain a new ruler,' Fëanorian came extremely closely and put his hands, one of which was a real hand and another — a mechanical one, even though they both looked identical in gloves, on the table, 'the Lord who is servant of High Ñoldoran. Are you still trying to convince me that lands of Morgoth won't become yours?'

'Are you so sure that I need the North domain, behind the Iron Mountains?'

'I guess, no. However, by widening borders of your domain on the world map you won't be the second by size of kingdoms in Beleriand anymore.'

High Ñoldoran looked up with a tired glance.

'Aren't you capable of speaking with me nicely?' he asked his nephew. 'Maybe, you could at least try?'

'Try to force me,' Maedhros was still terrifyingly teething, and Ñolofinwë shook his head.

'That is why, Finwë The Third,' Ñoldoran signed, 'I wanted to talk with you in person: were any witnesses present here, I would've had to force you to be polite and respectful with your king. But when we are being heard by no one, the main thing for me is that you learn what is necessary for you but how you will respond to this will stay between us.'

'Or, you are just ashamed to say in front of witnesses that you want to send me and other war heroes along with their families to the uninhabitable lands.'

The glance of the ruler expressed the sincerest confusion.

'It was only a poor joke, Maedhros,' Ñolofinwë explained even calmer than before. 'You were telling me that Morgoth's army will be crushed in the Battle Under the Stars,however, yet after ten years…' Ñoldoran laughed with sadness. 'One day, I will get used to counting years by the calendar of new luminaries but now there’s no time for it. Just imagine, Maedhros, within just ten years these beasts multiplied behind the Iron Hills to that extent that they wiped out Kano's army and flooded the North of Beleriand. You think that something like this can possibly happen on the hollow frozen ground?’

'Morgoth is one of Valar,' Fëanorian reminded this as soon as he noticed that the conversation was getting uncomfortable.

'Manve was saying that Morgoth can't create life by his own will: he requires the use of existing shapes and only then can he change them. Distort them. Turn them evil. He can't create an horde of Orcs and provision for them out of nothing.'

'For this, Morgoth needs help from Mother of Plants and Animals, am I right?' Maedhros asked a question whilst enjoying the effect that he made: Ñolofinwë became really scared and could not pull himself together. 'You don't like the thought of us battling against all of Valar, do you?'

'But you, I see, are entertained by your own exclusive braveness,' Ñoldoran gathered the courage. 'However, if you're right and Morgoth is only the tip of the spear that directed the whole Aynur army at us, then what's the point of the siege? If we’re lacking resources...'

'Valar aren't almighty,' Fëanorian repeated his father's words, 'otherwise, Orcs wouldn't settle down outside of the lands of their precious protector.'

'Or they're as insane and lusty for power as I'm,' Ñolofinwë smiled widely, 'so they're also drawing extensive non-existent borders on maps. But we got distracted. If the siege won't bring us victory through starving them out, what'll be your plan, the future king of the most dreadful lands of Arda?’

'We'll be defending the borders whilst at the same time working on creating weapons that can crush mountains. There'll be no other way to reach Morgoth.'

'We'll be wasting time, and Orcs will again multiply in numbers.'

 Maedhros nodded though in truth he was concerned by another matter: Himring’s Lord imagined how he would be walking through burned down by war, soaked in blood and covered with corpses of his friends and enemies — Land of Fear that would be devastated and dead and uslovno belonging to him. He realised that it was not the future that could have been a goal worth to be earned by fighting.

'Brothers of yours aren't joining the siege?' High Ñoldoran asked the question at the most right time. 'Are they withholding their armies until your victory? What is the reason, in your opinion?'

'Silmarils are three in number but there are seven of us,' the unwanted thought reminded him again about the inaction of his family during the capture.

'I would've advised you to insist on them joining your army,' Ñolofinwë continued to speak whilst looking in the eyes of his nephew. 'And then, on leaving them at the most dangerous frontiers. Though, of course, only wicked usurpers will do this, whereas honest followers of fratricide will never stoop to such plots.'

Maedhros made a sound of annoyance but remained silent and just walked away from the table.

‘Is the exchange of courtesies finished?’ High Ñoldoran asked. ‘Will we be able to discuss our plans and prepare lists of required resources in presence of advisers?’

'Perhaps,' Fëanoring responded while glancing again at the portrait of his daughter, 'Ard-Galen needs me, and the sooner I’ll return it’ll be better.'

Arts by ~Letavia Gayle

[ourrightside]

10 Reasons Why Carrie Bradshaw Wasn’t THAT Bad...

Sex and the City is the most elite series I’ve ever watched - and I was so excited to purchase the first season when I turned 18.

I would listen to my mom and my sister gossip about the show when I was younger and feel so left out. But, my mom would refuse to let me watch it until I became an adult. Thank god.

Being an avid fan now, I sometimes scan through Sex and the City articles on the net, and can’t help but notice dozens of articles filled with ‘Carrie’ slander - which kind of makes me nervous.

Although it was true that years ago girls were labeling themselves as the ‘Carrie’, ‘Samantha’ and ‘Charlotte’ of the group - the serious and less glamorous friend got stuck with being a ‘Miranda’; it is kind of an insult now to be deemed as a Carrie. 

As we all matured, we realized that being a Miranda is amazing and we should all strive to be just as successful - but Carrie Bradshaw is still a valid character and I’m here to prove why the “sexual anthropologist” is not all that bad. 

Now before I dive into why I totally get Carrie Bradshaw, I would just like to point out before hand that I am aware that she is just a fictional character and hopefully you are too. If you are not informed, then I apologize for this harsh revelation. However, let’s continue. 

1. She was average looking

While we can all agree that her physique only gets stronger and leaner throughout the series, she was still not exactly perfect looking. Despite her fit body, she was not model like or necessarily tall. She did not have a perfect nose. She did not have the biggest ‘lady parts’. She did not have the plumiest lips. She did not have perfect facial symmetry.

But, she was okay with it. And has mentioned that by the age of 30, she was over being uncomfortable with her looks and decided to move on.

Despite constantly bumping into models and having to accept that men can be total “modelizers” - especially in the capital of the world aka manhattan, she chose to embrace her natural beauty, which in turn has allowed her to walk the runway in her underwear.

2. She was selfish 

Yes, the new trend is to be selfish and say no - because that is ‘self love’.

If that truly is the case, then there was no denying then that Carrie was selfish throughout the series.

As human beings, we are selfish by nature. But since we now identify ourselves in societies with expected norms and values, being selfish disqualifies you sometimes from your environment. To avoid being lonely, we try to let go of being selfish or at least hide our selfish traits.

Unfruitfully so, our selfish instincts at times fail us - exposing our true colors. And whenever that happens, people aren’t too afraid of pointing out what you did wrong. It doesn’t make us necessarily evil, just makes us human.

To avoid being Freudian in this post, let’s just sum up that Carrie is harmlessly selfish at times - that includes being late to every event, asking her friend Susan Sharon if she could trade in her cashmere sweater birthday gift for cash, accepting a pair of 600$ shoes from her other super rich friend, and cutting off Charlotte’s possible infertility problem discussion to talk about her Manolos.

The list goes on, I mean - this is just classic Bradshaw behavior. However, this character cannot be deemed as bad. She was just under the spotlight, and if we were under it too, we would find out that we do have these moments as well without realizing it. We are not perfect. However, Carrie does reflect on her mistakes often, which is something we should be doing more. 

Sometimes, her selfish tendencies can really get out of hand. 

It was not okay when she got angry at Charlotte who did not offer to lend her money after she blew it all off on Manolo Blahnik shoes instead of rent. It was not okay when she threw away Aiden down the drain. It was not okay when she slept with a married man, even if it was ‘Mr. Big’.

We cannot shame her though because we all have hidden skeletons in our closets...it’s up to you however to peak in and see which faults make it or break it for you. 

3. She was a working woman 

No offense to chastity ball princess Charlotte, who wanted to be a housewife to any rich man who crossed path with her, Carrie Bradshaw was by all means an ‘all star’ business woman. Despite being unconventional unlike Samantha Jones (PR executive) and Miranda Hobbes (Harvard-graduate Lawyer), Carrie Bradshaw was a restless woman that worked in multiple fields all at once despite being so undermined.

She had so many tasks to tackle all at once while juggling multiple projects. She ran around between the fields of Journalism, Content Marketing and Public Relations. She was able to get invited into all the ‘fabulous’ events and meetings because of the hard work she invested in all by herself as a freelancer who lived in a huge place like New York. Carrie finally reached her goal at the age of 40, which was working at Vogue. She even wrote multiple books as well.

4. She was unconventional

Despite the show running in the early 90s, Carrie Bradshaw decided to be a sex columnist. She never gave up on her weird unconventional job and was proud of her career despite the looks or comments people would make. She had a weird exterior in addition to how upfront she was about the physical makings of life.

In addition, Carrie did not believe in marriage until she became a fiancée at the age of 40. She traded in a ring for a pair of shoes and a walk-in closet, unlike most women, who would rather get married in their mid 20 to early 30s with a huge rock on their finger. 

5. She was struggling at adulting

Carrie Bradshaw had a deluded concept of adulting that at least most of us had or still struggle with. She was not a healthy adult with financial stability and a well thought out regime. However, she still managed to be fabulous.

She had poor dieting habits, which made her sometimes skip dinner to buy Vogue instead. She believed that shopping and gossiping were the best types of cardio. She was not the cleanest and had a messy apartment at most times. She did not care about the way her living space looked like, which she later on freaked out about in fear of being judged as an imperfect adult according to Mr Big. She paid so much on shoes that she could no longer afford her rent. She believed that investments must be seen in her closet. She drank at least six dollars worth of coffee per day. She would smoke and drink way too much for a thirty year old woman.

6. She was a good friend

Carrie Bradshaw had so many friends that it almost put her PR bestie Samantha to shame. To be honest, Carrie may have not been a perfect friend, but she was as good as it gets realistically.

What made her so realistic in her friendships was her ability to be there for most of her friends’ hardships. She had her ups and downs with her empowered female group because sometimes they would feel like she was too problematic and vice versa. For the most part, it is impossible to be as passionate to your friends as you once were the first time you guys met. But what makes a friend a good one is that they never voluntarily try to find excuses to leave you behind.

Carrie’s love towards her friends in her good and bad times showed that she valued them like family. 

7. She was lost

Carrie was probably more lost than she would have liked to be. She had a tendency to dwell on what should have been and could have been. We all have regrets and sometimes she voiced hers out more than other characters within the show. She would sometimes yearn over the years that passed by her. She even went to extremes such as dating a college boy just to remember what it was like to ‘just kiss’. Rookie Mistake, Carrie.

Just like Carrie, as time goes by at any age, we look back at the spur of events that created our timeline and take note sometimes of which events we deem as either life-changing, traumatizing or both.

8. She was experimental 

She may not have been as promiscuous as her friend Samantha, but she was unarguably adventurous in all aspects of her life. Although the most obvious aspect may have been her outfits, her wild colors and funny textural accessories were just a preview on how eccentric Carrie Bradshaw truly was. She mentioned that her younger years were a genuine pursuit of fun in every shape or form, which most twenty-something-year-olds cannot deny.

She emphasized that she fears living life as a cautious person because of the hurt she has endured. However, she truly defined throughout the show what it means to be eccentric, empowering the ones who fail the experiments of life to get back on their feet. 

9. She was flawed

Carrie Bradshaw believed in the glass half full rather than half empty throughout the series. Despite being unbearably flawed to the point where her friends no longer wanted to listen to her problems, she decided to see a shrink which is something that would have been especially socially-unacceptable in the 90s. Carrie still overcame her mental issues and found other remedies which in turn has led her into accepting the way things played out. 

As we grow up, we, like Carrie, need a little bit of help in order to realize that temporary issues will fade away into lessons and the permanent ones that are out of our control can be accessorized into our lives accordingly to the way that we want it to look like.

10. She was in love

Her love towards Mr Big was illogical - almost completely insane. But what made her character so special was the fact that she never continued her relationship with Aiden because she knew deep down that it was Mr Big all along and never gave up on it; despite all the signs that kept telling her that he was bad for her. He was at the time indeed bad news, which made her feelings towards him fluctuate between love and hate.

Now, the psychology behind her and Mr Big does not justify why you should call your ex right now so put your phone down, but it is something to think about. 

Carrie took the road not taken for most women, especially during the 90s where gender roles in love where still a bit rigid. While it is true that it is always easier to date lovers who make the effort to chase you rather than pursuing it yourself, the easiness does not create the ‘fairytale love’ that most of us strive for.

Carrie once described her love towards him as a crash rather than a crush. But if something deep down is telling you that someone is your person, shouldn’t that account for something? Shouldn’t we all just go for ‘ ridiculous, inconvenient, time-consuming can’t-live-without-each-other love’, and get it right just like she did?

- Nina xx (yasminasayyid)

[adapembroke]

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition (Poly Sci Edition)

I have gotten requests for a version of my essay “Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction: Nobody Expects the Inquisition” with the astrobabble removed. I have also made some small changes to the three suggestions in response to feedback.

-AP

I recently had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Christof Niederwieser, who discussed the similarities between the 13th century and today.

The 13th century was a wonderful time for knowledge in Europe. Many of the most illustrious colleges in Europe opened. The church stopped being the gatekeeper of knowledge, and education became accessible to people who were not clergy for the first time since the fall of Rome. Literacy rates soared. Cities boomed. Europe dropped roman numerals in favor of Arabic numerals making math much less cumbersome. All of these developments represent an amazing moment for intellectual freedom, but this time period also gave us the inquisition, making this simultaneously a time of sparkling wonder and terror for free-thinkers and intellectuals.

The Inquisition was a judicial branch of the Catholic Church tasked with trying and prosecuting heretics. It was concerned with thought crimes. People were not put on trial for things they did but for things they believed.

One of the more famous victims of the Inquisition was Galileo who was put on trial twice for the crime of believing in heliocentrism (that the earth orbits the sun). The first time, he was forced to recant and was released on the condition that he promised not to talk about heliocentrism anymore. The second time, he was threatened with torture during interrogation and was sentenced to house arrest. All of his works were banned, even works that he might write in the future. He lived under house arrest until he died nine years after his second trial.

I don’t think I need to make a prolonged argument for why the 13th century resembles our time. We have the rise of the internet, the urbanization of society, and the transportation-oriented gig economy. Gatekeepers are being put out of business, and calculators have become so ubiquitous there is serious debate about whether it’s worthwhile to teach children to do math by hand anymore.

Mirroring the Inquisition, we also have totalitarian movements, cancel culture, and internet flamewars.

Intellectual freedom matters.

The idea of living in a society that criminalizes heretical thought is distressing on many levels to me. I am a person with an emotional need to swim up stream and think for myself. A society that punishes divergent thought has the potential to be deadly for me.

Intellectual freedom is, also, the cornerstone of a free society. It’s not an accident that totalitarian regimes are infamous for banning books. Writing tends to make people better thinkers. Journaling is such a powerful practice because physically seeing your thoughts on paper (or screen) forces you to confront and evaluate them in the physical world.

Reading the thoughts of others challenges your assumptions. A well-formed argument (or an emotionally impactful one) can change people’s minds. It can even help them to be better people.

As the critical theorist Hannah Arendt pointed out in her analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, the inability to think allowed ordinary human beings to commit crimes against humanity at a gigantic scale. Without the ability to reflect on the reasons for their actions, they had no need to justify their actions to themselves. They functionally lacked the ability to tell right from wrong.

There is value in reading ideas that are uncomfortable, or even problematic. Developing critical thinking, or the ability to evaluate arguments, necessarily requires you to engage with ideas you don’t like. The brain is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to be at its best. If you are surrounded exclusively by people you agree with, it is easy to become intellectually lazy. Problematic ideas are like resistance training for the mind. They give you the opportunity to think hard, to wrestle with nuanced arguments, and (most importantly) articulate exactly why you think the ideas in question are right or wrong.

This isn’t just important for people who want to think of themselves as intelligent. The ability to evaluate ideas and articulate why certain ideas are right and wrong is necessary if you are going to have a consistent moral system. Feelings are flighty and group-think is easily mistaken for intuition. Evaluating morality based on feelings alone is not enough.

Even if you are certain that you’re right and have weighed the arguments carefully, the choice to use violence or intimidation to force your will on people is problematic. The Inquisition used those techniques, too. It also canceled people.

Ultimately, intimidation isn’t even effective. Punching Nazis in the face isn’t enough. If it was, World War II would have settled the issue. The only way to kill an idea is to slay it with a better argument.

What are we going to do about this?

At this point, you may be panicking. When I realized the implications of potentially living through another Inquisition, I was not at my emotional best.

However, one of the reasons history is worth studying is because it gives us the ability to choose how we are going to respond consciously to the issues of our time.

Not many of us have the power to overthrow despots single-handedly, but we can still make choices about the types of behavior we will put up with in the communities we belong to.

These are some of the things I’m doing to make sure that I don’t support the next Inquisition:

Learn (and practice) critical thinking. Having a college degree (or even a graduate degree) does not guarantee that you learned critical thinking, even if you studied the liberal arts. I know many people with graduate degrees whose preferred way to solve arguments is with verbal intimidation and social violence. There are better ways to fight bad ideas. If you don’t know how, learn.

When you disagree with someone, fight fair. If you are not able to fight fair, and you are able to escape, walk away. It is better to be a noncombatant than to fight without honor. An honorable fight over ideas means engaging with ideas, not insulting people.

Cancel ideas, not people. The enemy that fights the fiercest is the enemy that is trapped and has no path to retreat. I have seen more people become extremists because they were humiliated by people who thought they were wrong than for any other reason. People can change their minds. They should always be given the opportunity to do so without losing their dignity or social standing. Even the Inquisition gave people that right (occasionally).

[moonshinemornings]

in my skin

i’ve been thinking about writing this for a long time, and I think I’m at a place where, more so than being comfortable talking about it, putting my thoughts down might help me continue to chip away at my complex.

I want to preface this by saying that my fixation on how my body looks is infuriating to even me. this is for 3 reasons:

1) there is an endless list of more important, broader existential crises to be concerned with instead of how I look (what am I heading towards? am I genuinely happy pursuing a capitalistic, societal definition of success? what is purpose or value in my life???)

2) even on an individual level, so many other aspects of a human make up their person and make them interesting other than how they look and its stupid to be so concerned with this one thing that means so little if anything at all

3) I’m not even that stupidly far away from societal beauty standards anyway wtf like stfu

regardless, I think my thoughts about my body are reflective of how I think about myself relative to the world in general. I’ve also found that the relationship I have with my body is often a symptom about how I am feeling about my self worth at a certain point in time, and also manifests in how I see and treat the people around me. for these reasons I think it can be valuable to unpack these feelings even though they may seem asinine.

the first time I became conscious of my body was in my primary school dance club, when we had to get measured for our costumes. most of my friends were generally skinny and I wasn’t significantly larger than any of them. but the nature of (chinese) dance and the kind of girls that joined it made the general impression that it was better to be lithe and delicate - the moves just looked better that way. the revelation that I wasn’t as thin as I could be was not groundbreaking. it didn’t trigger any immediately toxic thoughts either. it was just a thought I hadn’t had before, that my body wasn’t perfect. It also didn’t affect me much because I had a lot of good stuff going on in school; I had great friends, I did well in school, everything looked good on paper and in real life (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I peaked in primary school). so it wasn’t a huge trigger for anything, just a planting of a seed, I guess? dormant.

as I grew into my teens my body was often too busy serving its intended purposes for me to be concerned with how it looked. I played sports all the time, I woke up early and went to bed early (when possible). I ate well and I was active. It wasn’t difficult to be relatively fit, so I wasn’t really that concerned with how “good” my body looked. like all teens, I did become more concerned with standards of attractiveness and whether or not I conformed to them. I noticed how people’s bodies differed and what people liked. I was aware that I was not on the top of my teenage male acquaintance’s who-would-you-bang list, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. I wasn’t super pleased with my body but I definitely wasn’t unhappy with it. and frankly speaking, I didn’t think I was unattractive lah like ya I might not be hot shit but I was definitely not ugly and I was pretty confident with what I had to offer. this was probably also due to the fact that I did well in school and extra-curriculars, so I found my validation elsewhere. 

for a short time between high school and college I had a body goal I wanted to work towards, time on my hands and a motivated support system, so I started working out for an aesthetic. It wasn’t super serious and there were no hard and fast rules, plus it was genuinely fun to work my body. I had been an athlete for several years at this point and I knew I felt good when my body was well-worked and maintained, so it was never difficult to bring myself to work out. the results were a happy bonus. looking back that was probably the time when I had the healthiest relationship with my body. I liked using it and spending time on it for the sake of doing it, I liked how it made me look but never to the extent that it became my main motivation for working on my body. if I had the luxury of unadulterated, stressless time, I could probably do it again. when I started college I was healthy, I looked good and I didn’t even care (we’ll come back to this).

when I started college things started to fall apart. my time in university was, overall, pretty shitty for my mental health. it was great in a lot of other aspects, and I can say with little doubt that it’s helped me grow into a person I not only want to be but am comfortable with. but the process was a shit show to put it lightly. when it comes to my relationship with how I look in particular, I think my years in London have unfortunately left me with a considerable amount of trauma. to make a long story short, I had an ideal of what I wanted my college experience to be like, but half a year into it I found myself severely unsatisfied with every aspect of my life. I wasn’t doing well in school, I felt like I was underperforming socially, I was conscious about the difference in affluence between me and the people around me and I was generally unhappy with the space I took up in my own and other people’s narratives. amidst all this, I put on some weight because (1) I wasn’t working out anywhere as much as I used to (2) the weather, my mental wellbeing and the food readily available made me eat a lot of junk. but instead of acknowledging and focusing on the underlying inferiority complexes that were eating away at me, I sought alternative validation through things I could seemingly control i.e. how I looked. it became the case that it was no longer that I looked a certain way because I worked out, but that I worked out because I wanted to look a certain way. and when I didn’t look a certain way because I was eating shit or going out or because it just plainly was not realistic given my living situation, the lack of validation would further aggravate the inferiority complexes and unhappiness with my person that started this toxicity to begin with. i ended first year treating the people around me like shit, not having anything to show for the hours of studying i put in, and a lot heavier than when I started it. family and friends pointed it out and i was pretty chill about it whenever it happened. i honestly thought i wasn’t that affected by it (again, brushing under the carpet the problems I had with the expectations I set for myself), and that i could lose the weight if i put my mind to it.

then in second year i developed an eating disorder. a couple months into second year I hadn’t made much progress with either my mental or physical health. I often ate till I was physically uncomfortable because I had a general problem with self control (I had none, in fact I didn’t want any, but that’s a story for another time). One night after eating too much, I went to brush my teeth and I was so full that when I gagged lightly from brushing my tongue, I involuntarily threw up the food that was filled up to my gullet. A normal person would’ve registered this as a cue that they should be more conscious about how much they’re eating. I saw it as an opportunity to eat as much as I wanted (for what?) and still be (or at least feel like I am) in control of how much weight I put on. and so I developed bulimia. the bulimia was closely followed by a binge eating disorder - seeing that now there was a mechanism to keep my intake in check, I could let my eating habits, which were in fact reflective of my control problems unravelling, go crazy. I told a couple friends about it because I thought maybe I needed help, but I never really told them how bad it could get. some nights I would go down into the kitchen in the middle of the night twice. thrice. seven times. I would look for anything I could inhale. cashews dipped in peanut butter. seaweed with a cup of yogurt. three packets of chips and a large slice of cake. instant noodles and jam straight out from the jar. it didn’t matter. it all ended up coming back out of my mouth and into the toilet bowl anyway. I would go out for meals with my friends and we would over-order. the paiseh pieces would be left on the plate and if no one wanted them, i would eat them. immediately afterwards I’d go to the restaurant washroom and throw it up. and all this time while I treated both food and my digestive tract like they were toys, my fixation on how I looked grew. spoiler: i did not lose weight from being bulimic. but I very much did lie to myself about it in order to keep at what was actually a coping mechanism for the rest of my life that was falling apart around me. I threw up everything I ate today, do I look different? I didn’t throw lunch up, but I worked out, so it should cancel out, does it show? I ate a salad but because for dinner we had baked rice I threw half of it up, it didn’t make me bloat did it? 

towards the end of second year I had a rude awakening that forced me to drag myself out of the shit hole of a mindset I had casted myself into to address the personal issues and the lazy, irresponsible, selfish attitude that had gotten me to this point. luckily, when I dealt with the underlying dissatisfaction I felt towards myself, my problems with food disappeared along with it. right now I don’t have an unhealthy relationship with food. if i were being generous, I’d say it could even be considered pretty healthy. my relationship with my physical body is also pretty good. I eat balanced meals, I sleep well, I work out when I want to and lay in bed and eat junk when I want to. I don’t force myself to get activity in, I don’t force myself to eat more or eat less. in fact, I think I am really inching towards getting the intuitive eating and living thing down. I’ve lost some weight and I definitely don’t hate how I look anymore. so I think I am in a good place for the most part.

my relationship with body image and the validation I feel from how I look however, has been (permanently?) affected. as it stands, I am scared about two things.

first. I like the person I am right now. my life is not super in check, but I’m holding it down pretty well. but in the past two years, when i had nothing under control, the way I looked was the only measure with which i valued my worth. do I only place less emphasis on how I look right now because, like when I was in high school, I have other things going for me? if, come one day, life happens and the going gets tough, will I once again come down on myself because I don’t look perfect, even though I don’t look shit? will how I see my body and how I feel about it be affected every time something else in my life causes anxiety or unhappiness, and if that happens is there a risk of it starting a vicious circle of self-toxicity?

second. like I said, I don’t hate how I look right now. but I also don’t love it. since coming back home, after a shower or when I’m changing or whenever I’m deciding what to wear, I stand in front of the mirror, and I look into it for what I can tell is longer than I would like. I don’t give myself shit for how I look or dislike what I see. but why am I looking anyways? am i checking to see if i like my body any more or less today? why do I care? why should it matter how close or far I am to society and my own definition of an ideal body?

recently I watched a video that said despite the positive intentions of the body positivity movement, a better approach would be radical body acceptance. body positive says that even though I’m fatter or shorter or flatter or whatever-er than the beauty standard, I am still beautiful. radical body acceptance argues that words like fat or thin or flat or short or thin should just be neutral words. there is no good or bad linked to them and there is no good or bad body type. bodies are not “beautiful however they may look”. they are just bodies. I’m trying to strive towards this idea of body perception, to go back to a place of not caring how I look in and of itself or relative to anything else. how I look will just be how I look. to be clear, I don’t think this mindset is the best one that should be universally promoted. I do however think it is the best method for me. this is because I’ve found that ever since developing a fixation on my body and how it looks, sometimes when I see other people the things I take notice of most are their bodies as well. I don’t think I go as far as to assign worth to their person or character because of how their body looks, but I can tell that I’m developing a fixation on other people’s bodies (even if I don’t compare it to mine) and I feel like it subconsciously blocks a clear, genuine perception of them as people. and, of course, it feeds into my obsession about how I look. the more I care, the more I care. so I want to focus on caring less, and eventually not caring.

I would like for a day to come where I can put on clothes and not feel the need to change out of it because I don’t like how I look in something before leaving the house. I would like even more if I didn’t feel the need to look in the mirror before leaving to begin with. I would like to be able to not feel badly if someone points out I gained weight, but I would like even more to not feel happy because someone says I’ve lost weight. I would like to stalk fewer girls on instagram to see what their bodies look like in different photos. I would like to stop being concerned about how my body looks in different photos. I would like for a day to come where, whenever I’m not actively thinking about it, I forget how I look. slowly but surely, I will take steps to make this happen. it took a while to rebuild a healthy relationship with food, and then a healthy relationship with my physical body. surely it will take longer to rebuild the relationship with the image and idea of my body in my mind. I think the moment I forget the image exists will be the day I manage to do so.

[star-anise]

i was hoping my last ask would get me a free rant without having to make a dreaded choice uhhhhhhh do maybe washcloths or fake smile?

Hahaha no you have to specify what white person thing you want a rant about, or else I’m paralyzed by too many choices. And nb. by “white” I generally mean white Anglo-Saxon Protestant; WASPs have traditionally been held up as the cultural standard everyone else n North America or other British colonies should follow, and the “whiteness” of different European ethnicities in those colonies is generally judged by how assimilated they are to the WASP ideal. So my observations will not apply very well to, for example, other European ethnicities, or people from areas colonized by those other European groups.

WASHCLOTHS. Related to another trap, Guest Towels Guests Must Never Use. Which are usually distinguished by their elaborateness and a thin layer of dust. As a certified White Person (Anglo Canadian) I can say: This is a real actual literal thing my family does. If I stay at an aunt’s house, I don’t use her guest towels; I walk past the guest towels on the towel rack and ask my hostess, “What towel do you want me to use?” and she fetches me a new, less nice, towel out of the linen closet. 

The actual washcloth meant to be used is hung somewhere separate. When I was about 13, I rebelled against sharing a washcloth with my brothers, bought my own washcloth from a department store, embroidered my name on it, and zealously defended it against all comers. These days, my older brother has four children. When we go to his house to eat dinner, his children all wash their hands before they eat… and then wipe them dry on a single towel hung in the downstairs bathroom, which his guests also use. So we all wash our hands and then share germs. I… think? There might be a bar on the opposite wall with guest towels hanging on it?  But my eyes have been trained to skate right over guest towels. They’re decor, not things we actually use.

Why White People Do This:

1. Washing and cleanliness… have not traditionally held a central place in European life the way, say, wudu does in Islam. Although priests ritually wash their hands before performing the consecration of Mass, nobody else in the congregation has to. This is partly because in Christian Scripture, Jesus says that if something is ritually pure but spiritually suspect, it should be treated as impure, which Christians kind of took to mean “ritual purity and cleanliness rituals are things non-Christians do.” 

So in the 19th century, a German doctor discovered that you could reduce the rate of infection dramatically when doctors washed their hands and instruments between dissecting dead bodies and attending in childbirth. Doctors were OFFENDED and APPALLED by this–partly because the guy pointing it out was an asshole, yes, but partly because there was a feeling that “a gentleman’s hands are always clean”, so it was offensive to say their hands were dirty because it impugned their class and education.

Cleanliness is hugely related to class and status–I could go on a LOT more here about how in the 19th century, British and American attempts to “educate” and “civilize” poor white people and people of colour included imposing standards of hygiene on them that felt cruel and punitive–scrubbing skin raw, using caustic soap, delousing with kerosene–partly because white people didn’t have a very advanced idea of what chemicals made good cosmetics, and there wasn’t much awareness of the need for oils or moisturizers. (For a long time very few sources of natural oil, like canola, olives, or sunflowers, or even petroleum products, were available in Britain, so until somewhat recently they only really had pine tar and animal fat, which they used for everything from making soap to lighting lamps to greasing cart axels.) And the 19th century cleanliness movement did not have a good opinion of traditional bathing methods like the sauna, banya, or steam room, where sweat was scraped off the skin. So people who HAD hygiene rituals that worked for them, when they emigrated to western Europe or North America, got shamed and discouraged from using them. It was just expected that part of “civilizing” a child who hadn’t been “well brought up” was forcefully ducking them in a bath and scrubbing them while they screamed and fought you.

So for white people from everything but the highest classes, if you go a few generations back, there’s this feeling that cleanliness is something unnatural and unpleasant, something imposed by a punitive authoritarian force, and not something intrinsically desirable. Old men used to talk about “taking a bath once a year, whether I need it or not,” and fear of losing their “protective coating of dirt.” Which makes sense when you realize how awful old cosmetics used to feel.

I mean, as I type this, I’m applying Vaseline to the hangnails on my fingers, because when I use soap in the bath or do the dishes or wash my hands after going to the bathroom, the soap strips oil from my skin and dries it out, leading it to crack and bleed. This is a really common problem but the current solution seems to be “women carry tiny bottles of moisturizer everywhere in their purses, and men… suffer if they want to seem manly, and then post memes to facebook about how rough and terrible their hands look to emphasize their heterosexual masculinity.”

This also relates to why white people say racist things about people of colour being “dirty” when they use natural methods of keeping their hair or skin clean. The white conception of cleanliness is honestly really fucked up.

2. Cloth holds an especially weird place in white society. I mean, lots of cultures everywhere like their cloth to look nice! But in Europe and American colonies in the 1600s there was an extra special movement to restrict women economically and bar them from business and public life–so while a rich woman could run a business outside the home and buy and sell in 1400, that freedom was disappearing in 1600. Only women of the ~lower classes~ did real actual work. And the religious sentiment at the time really emphasized Purity, Hard Work, Productiveness, and No Fun. So women were supposed to stay inside all the time and not participate in industry! But they were always supposed to be busy. The saying was literally “Idle hands are the devil’s tools”. 

That turned embroidery from an aesthetic, decorative art into a moral act. You didn’t embroider to make something pretty; you embroidered for the good of your soul. Fancy embroidered pieces displayed in a home were meant to demonstrate a) that the house was rich enough to have idle women, and b) the moral purity and obedience to gender norms of the women of the house. (This also extends to things like quilts, lace doilies, hooked rugs, etc.)

So towels used to be made of linen, a plain flat cloth, and then embroidered and otherwise embellished. My mom, in the 1960s, learned how to do embroidery where you painstakingly pull a few threads out of a piece of linen, and then embellish the place where the threads have been taken out.

Linen, incidentally, is a strange and amazing fabric. When new, freshly starched and ironed, it is flat and crisp. But pressure and moisture can change it really easily. When I sew with linen, I just have to lick my fingers and fold it over, and it stays like that–something most fabrics don’t do. So if you actually use a linen towel to dry your hands, you will crumple it in a way that is very hard to reverse.

Therefore: Fancy linens were displayed prominently in the home as a status symbol, but a guest who wanted to stay on his hostess’s good side did not use them. There are a lot of ettiquettes around using linens when you absolutely have to, like just gently wiping your fingers on a towel, that diminished the damage the fabric would take.

So, I mean, actually rich people used their good towels, because if they ruin them, they can just get new ones. Fancy linens were intended for high-class guests who knew how to keep from damaging them. So using someone’s guest towels sent the message, “I am so high-status that I’m WORTH potentially ruining something that took a ton of work to make and maintain.” Or, if you obviously weren’t that high status, “I don’t know about the work that goes into making nice things, or don’t value the work you did and don’t care how much effort you’ll have to go to because I wanted to wipe my face.”

But that was in the days of linen. Guest towels are going out of fashion, partly because modern terrycloth towels are almost impossible to crease or ruin, so it doesn’t really matter if guests use them. But even with terrycloth towels, homeowners sometimes like to create really elaborate towel displays. I don’t know how those people feel when guests use them, but as a white girl I feel really uncomfortable taking a towel display in somebody else’s house apart, and try to wipe my hands while causing the least disturbance possible.

Oh, I guess I should mention that invisible tests no one will ever mention if you fail are absolutely a white person thing. Like, if you watch costumed period drama movies, there’s often a scene where someone is really unbearable and rude, and everyone is super polite and awkward and just sits there and says nothing. That’s not consciously an exclusive practice; from the perspective of white people it’s just an ingrained reflex, “Freeze and smile when something awkward happens and then later cut them out of your life.” 

That reflex comes because the Industrial Revolution and colonization (1600s-1800s) led to a lot of class mobility. Ordinary men could get involved in business and become wealthier than the hereditary landowners! Which the hereditary landowners felt super threatened by, so they went out of their way to cultivate manners and standards that were very unlike those used by the common people. Upperclass accents became more marked and exaggerated; dictionaries decided to make English spelling and grammar especially hard to learn; manners got super weird and unintuitive. They wanted to make it as hard as possible for common people to fit into high society.

Therefore, to enable that system, the rule became: Never tell someone when they’re fucking up. If they know what they’re doing wrong, they’ll FIX it, and then they’ll fit in better! And that would lead to the absolute downfall of Western civilization! Which would of course be a bad thing! And that got codified as The Right And Desirable Way To Do Things. A low-class person might say “Hey, you just insulted me, I’m upset,” but someone with aspirations of rising higher in life learned to freeze and say nothing. That was how you defined “polite”.

So like I said, if I, as a white person, point out to other liberal white people that the freeze-and-smile-awkwardly response is really exclusionary to people from different backgrounds, they go, “Oh my gosh, you’re right!” and we can talk about changing it. It’s why white people invented assertiveness training. It’s a thing white people have to unpack and decolonize. But it’s not commonly a conscious attempt to exclude someone by not letting them know they’re breaking the rules.

ANYWAY. Towels.

So IF someone has guest towels taking up their towel rack in their bathroom, there’s very little room left for the actual towels. (Unless they’re like my aunt, whose bathroom literally has a second towel rack to accommodate her guest towel arrangement) Therefore: The entire fucking family sharing a single washcloth because that’s all they have room for, and it doesn’t feel that important not to share.

WHITE CULTURE IS WEIRD AS HELL.

And if you come to my house? You’re allowed to use my guest towels. It’s what they’re there for.

[purplecloaks]

Custom Made, Part Sixty-Two

Pairing: Bjorn x OC, Ubbe x OC, Lagertha x OC, Alfred x OC

Warnings: vomiting, anxious OC, almost talk of rape but they don’t actually say it

Words: 1775

A/N: I’m struggling with where I want this to go in season 6A. Where do you want Ingrid to be? In Kattegat or to Kiev? Let me know!

Everything tag: @squirrelacorngliterfarts @kawennote09 @sherrybaby14

Vikings tag: @hvitserk-ragnarssons-slave @geeksareunique

Custom made tag: @kingbouji3 @maybe-a-winchester @sdcyumyum @saucysuazo @chynagirl13

           As we get out of the cage, the people around us start yelling things. I can’t understand them because so many are yelling.

           Bjorn holds his chained hands up and helps me down. I lean into his shoulder briefly before we get shoved inside. We are thrown into a second cage immediately. I feel like the walls are closing in on me; I’m nauseous.

           How easy it proves to fool people, hm?” Ubbe asks. He leans away from the door of the cell. “Look at us!” he shouts, holding up his shackled wrists. “We sailed into a trap.”

           “Bishop Heahmund has betrayed us,” Bjorn says.

           “I can’t believe that,” Lagertha says. She rubs my back soothingly and I try to get lost in the sound of her shackles jingling.

           “How else was he going to get home, hm? He needed a ship. He needed a crew. We just gave him both.” Ubbe’s voice grates on the inside of my head.

           “Imagine how famous King Alfred will be when he shows the Saxons our heads. And the best part about it is we gave it to him on a plate!” Bjorn is yelling now too. I lift my hands to my head.

           “I still cannot believe that he has betrayed us.” Lagertha is calm.

           “And I cannot believe the famous Lagertha has proved to be a fool for love,” Bjorn says darkly.

           “Well, you have never been a fool for love, have you, Bjorn?” Torvi asks.

           I lurch forward suddenly and vomit into the corner of the cell. I feel cold hands and metal pulling my hair back. Words are whispered to me, but I can’t hear them. I have barely anything in my stomach, but I still heave. When it is finally over, I let out a sob and wipe my mouth with a shaky hand. Lagertha pulls me into her chest and shushes me.

           “Please! I cannot take the fighting! The walls are already closing in please don’t make them faster!” The words come out of my mouth shrill and jagged. I feel pitied looks on me.

           “This is where Ragnar was imprisoned and betrayed. And now we will all die here, too.” Ubbe speaks much softer now.

             It feels like we’ve been in this cell for years. I have barely moved except to vomit up nothing. Lagertha holds me close to her and tries her best to comfort me.

           Suddenly the door is kicked open and Saxon guards fill the small room. “Get up!” one yells. “Move!” another shouts.

           Ubbe is grabbed and so is Bjorn. Torvi next. When they get to Lagertha, they throw me off her lap and to the side.

           My breathing quickens. “No!” I scream, my voice is hoarse from not using it.

           Lagertha digs her feet into the ground so they can’t drag her away as easily. “Not without her! Bring her with!” She sounds fierce, like the shield maiden she is.

           The guards pause for a moment before one drags me to my feet. I whimper at the gouging of his fingers in my arms.

           We are lined up before who I assume is King Alfred. My head swims after the rough treatment.

           “I’m aware of who you are. I am not foolish enough not to recognize your potential for my kingdom, if you were willing to fight with us against the armies of your countrymen,” Alfred says.

           “We may. On the condition that you allow us to settle in the part of East Anglia King Ecbert gave to us,” Bjorn agrees.

           Panic fills me. I can’t fight. I am not a shield maiden.

           “I have every intention of honoring my grandfather’s pledges. But first you must demonstrate your worth and your loyalty to our cause, in battle,” Alfred says.

           Bjorn scoffs. “We have a legal right to that land.”

           “We accept your offer,” Lagertha speaks up. Everyone’s eyes shift to her.

“I am glad. It was Bishop Heahmund who proposed this solution, which seemed to me wise,” Alfred says. Heahmund nods to Lagertha and she nods back. “So as long as we are allies and friends, you are free to use the royal villa as you wish. My servants are also your servants. My kitchens and cellars are there for your use. We have fought against you and now we shall fight together, with you.” A guard comes over and starts unlocking our shackles. “I know my grandfather, King Ecbert, would approve for I know the love he bore King Ragnar.”

           When my shackles are taken off, I sag and nearly fall to the ground, but Torvi quickly helps me to stand. As soon as Lagertha’s hands are free, she helps as well. She pulls my head to her and whispers that everything is okay.

           “What is wrong with her?” I hear Alfred ask.

           “She is with child,” Torvi speaks up when Lagertha doesn’t offer any explanation.

           I open my eyes and find the King’s. He’s looking at me curiously. “What is your name?”

           I try to voice my name, but no sound comes out.

           “Her name is Ingrid,” Lagertha says softly.

           Alfred looks off to a guard. “Escort her to the healers.” The guard nods and takes us away.

           I don’t pay much attention to what they give me. I trust that Lagertha will say something if they make a questionable decision.

           After they finish treating me, they lay me on a cot. Lagertha sits beside me, holding my hand.

           “Why must I be punished? What did I do?” I sob.

           “How are you being punished?” Lagertha asks softly.

           “The vomiting and the dizziness. And everything else this wretched child has brought me.”

           “Some pregnancies are harder than others. You should know this. You were there when Aslaug was pregnant with Ivar and this is his child. One would assume that his child would be like him.” She brushes my hair back and cups my face. “Perhaps this child needs to be born. Perhaps he or she will be a part of the gods’ plans for us, hm?”

           We sit in silence. I start feeling better eventually and sit up.

           “I…need to bathe,” I say suddenly.

           Lagertha laughs. “I think we all do.”

             The next day, I sit next to Bjorn as he talks to Alfred. Ubbe is standing behind Alfred across from us.

           “You told us that you would honor King Ecbert’s pledges. That you would hand over the lands that we are entitled to,” Bjorn says.

           “If you recall, I said you would have to prove your value to us first,” Alfred says.

           “We don’t have to prove anything! We have the legal right!” Bjorn raises his voice. Ubbe pulls out a document. “Here, signed by King Ecbert, in our presence!” Ubbe lays the document on the table in front of Alfred.

           Alfred looks at it briefly. “My grandfather had no authority to grant you any land. He had already relinquished the throne to my father, who was crowned here a few days before you arrived.”

           “So, it was all just a lie?” Bjorn asks darkly. I grip his arm.

           Alfred sighs.

           “But now, you are the King.” Ubbe taps Alfred’s arm excitedly and makes his way to a desk behind Alfred, grabbing ink and a quill. “So, you can sign it over to us and you can grant us those lands right now.”

           “In theory, yes, I could,” Alfred says.

           “What does that mean?” Bjorn almost sneers.

           “There are important people here who do not want me to grant lands to those who, in the past, have attacked and raided us,” Alfred admits.

           “So, why would we fight for you, when everything you say is just a lie?” Ubbe asks.

           “I am not lying. I am being more honest with you than you’ve any right to expect! You have thrown yourself upon my mercy! So, do not presume anymore upon my charity. When I can, I will grant you that land. In the meantime, I must go and meet my future wife.” As Alfred walks away, he takes a long glance at me.

           We all make our way into the dining room and pause to look at the King greet his future wife. Lagertha pulls me towards the table. I notice the young woman staring at Bjorn as we eat. I narrow my eyes at her. She glances my way and her eyes widen before she looks away.

           Lagertha leans close to my ear. “You must eat and keep your strength up.”

           I sigh and take a bite of some meat. Feeling eyes on me, I look up. Alfred is staring at me. Our eyes lock and he smiles shyly. I look away, confused.

             Later on, a guard finds me. He tells me that King Alfred requests my presence. I meet Bjorn’s eyes, he nods, and I stand and follow the guard to where Alfred is waiting.

           Sitting across from him, he studies me. I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “What did you need, King Alfred?” I finally ask.

           “I want to know more about you. The others, I have heard of, but you…I haven’t heard your name before,” he admits.

           I lace my fingers over my swelling stomach. “My gods created me to serve Ragnar and his sons. One of his sons…Ivar…would be my soulmate.” Ivar’s name tastes like poison.

           Alfred rests his head in his hand. “So why are you here if you were meant for Ivar?”

           I suck in a deep breath. “Ivar…became angry with me…and did something I could not forgive.”

           “And it is his child you are pregnant with?”

           “He is the only man that can get me pregnant,” I almost skirt around saying it.

           “Fascinating. How long have you been with Ragnar’s sons?” Alfred’s eyes are locked on mine, like I’m the most interesting thing he’s ever seen.

           “Since Bjorn was very young. He was just coming into manhood.” I look away from his intense stare.

           “You look quite young.” He sounds disbelieving.

           “I did not start aging until recently. When…Ivar…become of age.” I gag around his name. “I do not wish to speak of this anymore.” Tears threaten to fall from my eyes.

           I hear Alfred lean forward. He brushes a stray tear away just as it starts to fall. “He did something horrible to you, didn’t he?”

           I nod slightly.

           “And it resulted…?” He doesn’t finish. I nod, knowing what he meant. He takes my hand in his and squeezes it. Another tear falls down my cheek as I think of Ivar. Alfred gives me a strange sense of safety. He makes my chest feel warm for the first time in a long time.

[pan1418]

Happy Holi

When I told people that I was traveling to India they would always ask me the same question; "What are you going to do there?" My answer was always the same. "I don't know" I would say. I knew that I was being guided to practice living life in a different way. A way in which my mind did not think it knew what was going to happen because it was not actively involved in planning any preconceived ideas of what I imagine would unfold. This has left me very much open to follow synchronicity and allow my journey to be experienced from a place of curiosity and pure awareness.

The interaction of explaining to others that I didn't know what I was going to do or where I was going to stay, lies at the heart of my experience here. I can see that we as humans are very much conditioned to believe that we should know, ahead of time, everything that we are going to be doing and why. I've been challenged by this dynamic inside my own consciousness. A good example of this is that I felt as though I should at least have a hotel reserved and idea of what to do when I landed in the middle of the night in Delhi. Then my training began. What I had planned to happen completely changed and I was immediately thrust into a present time situation where I had to redirect my energy and follow the path that felt most harmonious in that moment.

There are many other smaller circumstances that have been occuring in the same way. I get an idea that I should go somewhere or do something, and when that is not what ends up happening, I have watch myself get down on myself and come up with some reason why I wasn't strong or brave enough to do the original thing I had planned. I can also feel the amount of energetic resistance that appears in my body and how uncomfortable I become.

This has led me to an internal investigation on the nature of this inherent relationship with mental control and the fear and resistance that is connected to the preceived lack of achievement by enforcing this control. That is why when people ask each other what they are doing and why, they expect there to be a sound, logical, and explainable reason for every action or behavior. The longer I have been here in India I can feel these inner forces losing their controlling influence over my behavior.

There is a story that over two thousand years ago, India had a ruler they called a demon king. He was obsessed with power and control. He commanded his people to worship him as if he were God. Failure to give him the respect and admiration he was commanding resulted in death. People were by and large too afraid of him to stand against him and therefore the ruler was worshiped as God. The demon king even commanded his own son to worship him. However his son would not. His son maintained his own connection to God. This enraged the demon king. He tried to kill his own son many times. He made him jump off a cliff but he was unhurt. He poisoned his son but the poison turned to nectar in the son's mouth. The king commanded that he be trampled by elephants but again the son remained unharmed. Finally the demon king made his son sit on a bonfire pyre with him. The demon king had a magic cloth that would protect him from the flames. As they sat together and the pyre was lit, the magic cloth flew from the demon king and surrounded his son instead. The demon king was destroyed and the people celebrated. This celebration continues to this day. It is called the Holi celebration and it celebrates the victory of good over evil. On the full moon towards the end of February or beginning of March, the celebration begins and carries through the entire next day.

I have made some unexpected changes in my daily life since I have been here, such as only eating one meal per day. Given how the food is so delishious and the culture is organized around cafes, this was very surprising. Another change has been to limit my travelling by rickshaw or taxi. My intention has been to walk everywhere I can. This feels like it keeps my awareness open to more things in between destinations. I find myself feeling what my attention is attracted to. For instance if I am hungry then I will head in a certain direction and see what sign I may be drawn to. Sometimes I think I am heading to a certain place and I find myself drawn to another.

This practice has led to being more aware of where I am in the moment and who happens to be around me. It seems that this practice would just parcipetate random circumstances but my experience is just the opposite. It feels that there is stangly more orginization and orchestration to the flow of events then if I was to construct and follow a plan. For instance I was walking down the street with my friend Lukas as we were heading to his hotel for a warmer jacket. On the way he spotted his friend Rick that was sitting a local cafe and we decided to stop in. After a couple hours of great conversation another man walked in. And based on the content of our conversation the newcomer, who also was named Rick although much younger, joined in what we were talking about and we became aquatinted.

The following day I was headed out of my room at the guesthouse I was staying, and I ran into my friend Leizel who recommended me the room. She was headed out for lunch, as was I, so we decided to go together. The last time Liezel and I went out for lunch we could not get into her favorite cafe because it was too busy so we went somewhere else. On this day we decided to go to her favorite as there were less people today. As we were chatting and having lunch, in walks young Rick! He was promoting a Holi party that his friend was throwing on the following day. I took a flier from him and felt how the synchronistic connection brought me a opportunity that I otherwise was not considering. (On a side note, as I am writing this, I feel that I have to go to the bathroom. As I peer around the corner to look for a restroom there is the older Rick! The chances of seeing the same people in different places so regularly is astronomically low. There is obviously another force at work here.)

On the day of the Holi celebration I hear children outside squealing and hollering as if it were Christmas morning. The main tradition connected with this holiday is that everyone procures bags of different brightly colored paint powder. As they pass by each other on the street they throw clouds of the different color powder at one another. There is also the tradition of squirting each other with water guns. My fist image of this event as I emerged from my room was smiling people in every direction, young and old, completely covered head to toe in an exploding rainbow of color and chaos. I will never forget the first stranger who walked up to me and smeared a handful of the paint powder right across my face! It was amazing! Any care or concern of my own cleanliness and appearance instantly dissolved into pure joy as I entered the citywide festival. All of the normally consistently operating shops are closed on this day and every one takes to the streets with their friends and family. They shout Happy Holi in greetings to one another. With no regard for color or ethnicity they greet one another with the most vibrant enthusiasm. Ironically there does not appear to be any acquisition or goal of the holiday apart from ceasibg the normal daily routine in favor of singing, dancing, squirting water from unknown locations, and smearing each other silly with color. I think this is my favorite holiday of all time! I had the thought that once everyone's head and features are completely covered in paint, you could not tell if people are of a different ethnicity at all.

As I made my way to the pickup point there was a caravan of shuttle taxis to take people to the Holi party. It was said to be situated along the rivers edge about 6 miles outside of town. They ferverntley packed as many people in each SUV sized taxi and we all hung on for our lives as the taxi sped off towards it's destination. After a few weeks of aclimating to the Indian style of driving I have developed an implicit trust in the fact that if they had been driving their whole life and not killed themselves yet, then they would, most likely, not kill me now. Then it really chocks it up to the adventure to surrender and let go into the flow of what is happening. Life can be so fun!

The party was amazing. It was set inside the grounds of Riverside resort. They piled up the biggest speakers they could find and put out plates full of powdered paint in every color. What ensued was raging trance driven dance party where everyone was dawning their biggest smiles and a face filled of different colors. Many people I met had either travelled from other parts of India or neighboring countries to take part in this celebration because they claim that the culture of which they come fron is not as able to let go and have this much fun! The reccuring theme that continues to impress me is how the common intention to be open minded, open hearted, and open to new connections and experiences is what generates the amazing synchronistic energy that unites us all in this place.

Every day, more and more, I awake with the fresh feeling of optimism in the face of the unknown. Simply allowing my intuitive feelings guide my movement and my curiosity to turn each corner and explore the next step. More and more I am feeling victorious as my Heart and my Soul are receiving my attention and directing the movement of my life. More and more I am able to observe the inner workings of my mind and allow it to surrender it's ideas about the way things should be. My mind is a beautiful tool and loyal companion. But I see now that my mind was never built to know what is going to happen next. Nor can it truly protect me from unforseen circumstances and events. It cannot possibly aquire enough understanding to finally fill any void of value or self worth. It is just meant to be a recording device or rather and administrative assistant to the Heart. It takes notes. It follows along. It creates stories. It plays with meaning. It contemplates purpose. But by itself it cannot control life. It can only watch.

This is what I feel is hidden in the story of the origin of the Holi celebration. In the story the demon king was obsessed with being worshiped. He wanted to believe that he was God. He believed that if he forced everyone to treat him as such then he would finally achieve the reality he was wanting to create for himself. But no matter how much control he had and how many people did treat him in the way he wanted, his son was not convinced. His son knew of his own connection and followed his own path. Even when the demon king tried to destroy his son and prove his authority, ultimatly he could not. And his attempt to eradicate his son on the pyre only resulted in his own demise. I see this as a metaphor for these unconscious workings within the mind. The mind is unknowingly attempting to conquer the world and dominate it's circumstances. It attempts to aquire what is wanted for itself and seeks to eradicate what it feels threatened by. It secretly wishes to wield the power of God. To be seen as God. The son in the story represents the Heart or the Soul. It knows it's true connection with God. Nothing can separate the Heart from God no matter how hard the forces of control may try. And in the process of the demon king trying to solidify his own power, he finds he is only bringing about his own destruction and the release of control.

This struggle that occurs within each human being is also being played out on the larger scale of political, economic, or social events. Anytime we are seeing situations of injustice, victimization, protesting, or mass epidemics, what we are actually seeing is the battle between the Heart and the mind of each of the people involved. The mind of these people are scared. They are terrified of losing their illusionary sense that they are in control and can keep themselves safe. The mind will try to eradicate what it preceivs as the cause of the threat. The Heart already knows that there is no conflict. The Heart knows it is truly indestructible and that everything that is occuring in every experience, without exception, is proceeding according to a very divinity orchestrated set of circumstances designed for it's own evolution and expansion. There is a perspective shift underway. Each conflict is guiding every person more and more out of the fearful perspective that their mind is holding, and into the peace filled perspective that resides in their own Heart. What is being asked for is a willing sacrifice. That each individual sacrifice and let go of what they believe should happen and why. To truly surrender to the Divine Grace of God's truth and walk into the eternal corridors of the Soul where life unfolds unexpectedly and is full of unknowns. Each person is learning how to make themselves feel at home in this realm of uncertainties. Only then will we be as children again and ready to enter the kingdom of heaven. When children come to live on Earth, they open their eyes wide in wonder and marvel at every small miracle that occurs for them. They may be upset one minute and completely joyful the next. They have not yet developed a fully mature mind and they have no need of reasons or justifications for how their behavior. They are innocent and authentic. No expectations or agendas. This is our training and return to the innocence of the Heart. It may not look the way that we thought that it would, but every Soul is incredibly excited for the new opportunities of our long awaited reunion with God.

There is one more teaching I recieved this week that I would like to share. As I was laying in bed one morning before rising I was shown the clear vision of how energy is playing out in our lives at this time. This vision showed me that the pure energy that moves from the source of all Creation, through our Soul, and expresses into our human consciousness can be felt as inspiration, passion, or excitement. It is our driving force and let's say it is the language of the Soul. The word inspiration is based on the word Spirit. When we are connected with our Source and our Soul we can feel the excitement and inspiration move through every experience we have. Even if that looks like relaxing into a bathtub, going to a dance party, or buying flowers for your partner, it is all the same inspiration coming and it is all coming from the same Source. Now as this vision continued it showed me that when passion and inspiration is not flowing into the expression of human consciousness, it is turned inward and becomes compassion, or compressed passion. It is the same energy flowing from Source but expressed in it's passive state. What this vision showed me is that when we see someone else suffering, or we ourselves are suffering, what we are actually seeing is how the energy and the language of the Soul, the passion, is not able to flow through the consciousness of the individual and is experienced as suffering.

Now as I have said many times there is no mistake in this. Every experience in both expressions of polarity can and will be experienced by consciousness. We will all live each story through for better and for worse. We are amazing in our ability to gather information and expand our conscious awareness through the experience of contrast. That means that the more of one side of a situation is experienced it is actually making way for more opening of the other side. Experiences of sadness make openings for more joy. Experiences of hatred make more openings for Love.

Experiences of compassion make more openings for Passion. By seeing this clearly we can more fully understand that the challenges we are to face in our own lives and the challenges that we watch others endure, are opportunities to stimulate and activate our relationship with compassion. Instead of flying off into the story that the mind will create about why we don't understand that challenging things are happening, we have the ability to see the higher perspective. We can see that the suffering of another, or ourselves, is an opportunity to connect with the light and language of the Soul. We can feel how the passion and excitement has been surpresed and denied within the individual, and the experience of feeling compassion is making room for the inspiration to return. The experience of going inward and connecting to the compassion, without telling a victimized story that there is a good guy and a bad guy, nurtures and activates the passion within them and within you. There are not two or more different kinds of passion/conpassion in different people. It is all the same passion/compassion in everyone. We have many different Souls and bodies but there is only one Light and one Love that flows through us all.

As we face the uncertainty of the coming experiences here on planet Earth we need not fear. We can utilize all challenges and challenging emotions to our advantage of nurturing the seed of new life that is breaking ground towards the sun. Just as the compost of dying material is fertilizer for the growth of plants or the catapillar is in the process of transforming into a butterfly, there are many analogies to describe what we are seeing happen on our world at this time. But the one that I've been shown is that the pure Light, Love, Power, and Inspiration of Creation is returning. And it is moving through our Heart and our Soul. Any place that this energy cannot move into our lives will be experienced as suffering and act as an inclination in an attempt to control our lives. This suffering stimulates great compassion within us as a means of nurturing the dorment Inspiration untill we have completed our experiences of being separated from the Universal language of the Soul, passion. Through the power of contrast we will have purified our desire to follow the path of dillusion, and surrender the controlling tendencies of our mind and activate the dorment Passion waiting to move more fully into our lives. This will feel as if a a cosmic springtime has come. We will watch ourselves as we explode into new growth and burst into brilliant colors like wildflowers erupting in the medeow. Joy will ring from the highest mountains and we will meet one another in Love and joy. A great celebration will ensue in response to our victory. Children will laugh and play in the streets. All we will need is the magical Now moment in all its simplicity and synchronicity. Everyone will be excited to be there, expressing their passion, together. Happy Holi ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤

[davidcoopermoore]

Transcript from “Shape of Education to Come” podcast

I was recently a guest on the Shape of Education to Come podcast hosted by Devin King. I like to transcribe these, especially when I'm talking in a semi-professional (as opposed to formally professional) context. (It turns out that when I'm not transcribing audio for a living I find it relaxing in small doses.)

This is lightly edited for relevance (I snipped some Taylor Swift content that wasn’t related to teaching, but kept in the Taylor Swift content that was) and coherence. You can listen here.

SEC: 

David Cooper Moore, tell me what you do.

DCM: 

Hello, my name is David Cooper Moore. I am a media literacy educator in the United States -- I’m based in Philadelphia. 

The past four years I was the media and blended learning coordinator at an alternative high school for kids who had become disconnected with high school, dropped out, or were in danger of possibly dropping out or failing out of high school. Before that I worked in media literacy enrichment mostly with the Media Education Lab, which is now at the University of Rhode Island, but that I got connected with when it was in Philadelphia at Temple University. 

I’m a certified English teacher, so I teach English but I also teach media arts, and I just got a consulting gig to do a digital literacy curriculum with the Free Library of Philadelphia, so I’m taking a year off of teaching to do that, plus a lot of other life stuff going on with kids and houses and things. So that’s kind of my general log line.

SEC: 

What would a digital literacy curriculum look like?

DCM: 

That’s a great question. The classic framework that I go by is one that Renee Hobbs at the University of Rhode Island uses, which is: access, analyze, create, reflect, act. 

Media literacy is this really big tent movement and academic field of study that encompasses questions like how do we access information? How do we use things in both digital and non-digital media worlds? How do we make meaning out of it through analysis? How do we compose -- how do we make stuff? But also how do we reflect on its impact on our lives and how does it inform the way that we take action in the world? 

So any digital literacy curriculum to me goes back to that kind of a framework, especially those first three, access/analyze/create. I think reflection and action are imbued in media literacy practice but the access/analyze/create part is what a lot of educators and folks that are in education don’t always know how to do, so I’ve always been attracted to the media literacy field because of the way that it really is non-negotiable that those three pieces of accessing information, making meaning out of it, and creating with it are really fundamental. It’s such an expanded view of what counts as texts, how we make meaning, how we communicate in the world.

SEC: 

We’re definitely going to come back to that. What you’re talking about is really huge, there is a ton to that, which is why there’s a curriculum for it. So we’re gonna come back to that but first of all, I wanted to think back to when I think I first became familiar with your work. It would have been over a decade ago, when you were doing music writing. 

DCM: 

Oh yeah, that’s right! Those are my two non-education things, I’m a filmmaker and I’m a music writer, and those actually are the things that got me interested in the intersections between media and education, which led me to do this kind of work. The work I’ve been doing for the past ten years is just the synthesis of the media stew I’ve been bathing in my entire life since I was a little kid, culminating in my young adulthood with making movies and writing about music. But you know, for my professional life, it turns out they don’t really give you huge paychecks to make movies about your family or write about underrated pop albums. 

SEC: 

So I know that you started out as a critic. I don’t know if you’d say you’re a critic.

DCM: 

Yeah, I was a formal music critic for a couple of years. I actually wrote for real publications.

SEC: 

Do you think that good critics make for good teachers?

DCM: 

I think that there are overlapping skills. 

I taught in the classroom for four years. I took a position as a full time teacher because I really wanted to get my five years as a teacher under my belt. I really wanted to teach full time because one thing that I knew very clearly from doing enrichment work was that it’s just different. Classroom teachers do different types of work than a lot of other people who educate others do -- college professors, enrichment educators, people that do coaching, mentoring. 

There is something very different about full-time teaching, and so to that extent I think that the critical sensibility is a good one to have in the classroom, but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about whether someone is a good teacher, and I don’t know if it’s in the top five, in terms of the key traits you need to have to be a good classroom teacher. A critical mind might be part of it, but honestly if the kids don’t really care about your critical insights I don’t know how effective a teacher you’re going to be. I certainly found that when I tried to use my own criticism directly it was pretty hit or miss. It’s as likely as any other text to engage students. 

Teaching is really about the relationship you build with the students you are working with. I do find that a lot of folks that I know who are critics do make good teachers. I actually know some music critics who are high school teachers, that’s their day job. But I’m not sure there’s anything inherently better. It’s better to “be a music critic” about music than not to be, but there are probably other things that  are more important for teaching.

SEC: 

I guess what I was wondering was if the critic sensibility of looking closely at something and assessing its value and worth lent itself to the way we think about classes and systems and what’s valuable and ways to approach student learning? I wondered if being able to think critically about what we do could come from that critic sensibility.

DCM: 

One thing that I’ve noticed with music critics -- the people who are really good music critics tend to be really good other things, too. They tend to be good thinkers in a lot of fields, and they’ve chosen music but they could have just as easily chosen politics or film. 

And I also find that a lot of folks that are thinkers and writers in other spheres often show their worst instincts when they’re writing about music. So that’s always fascinated me about music as a medium, that it is so predicated on our viscerality, our feelings about it, how we feel about it, and we try so hard to put that into this kind of critical thinking language, but a lot of times we just use the critical thinking language to say the really biased or weird thing that true critical thinking wouldn’t have us saying. I read a lot of critics, who are very smart, who when put in an uncomfortable space will just use their critical faculties to say something that I don’t think is a very “critical thinking” thing. 

Good teachers are more likely to uncover the good music critic within themselves than the music critic who does that [uses critical thinking language for non-critical-thinking insights] is likely to access their inner teacher. 

I think classrooms do this kind of naturally. You have to be openly curious and humbled and not allow any of your preconceived ideas about what’s going to be the right thing to guide you too often, because the students will just knock you down. Students are really good at sussing out inauthenticity. So when you’re using those critical devices to prop up something that needs questioning, the people who are going to do that first are your students. 

One thing I found teaching is I would say something that I’d never thought twice about and my students would say, “why do you say that?” Maybe there’s a song they’re listening to I don’t like and I say “oh, I don’t like this song,” and there’s a student who really loves the song and they’re like, “I really love this song! It’s my favorite song!” And I have to think about the song differently now because I’m in a situation where I’ve been kind of put off-guard and I need to actually use my real self-reflective critical thinking. 

So I think there’s this great synergy between criticism and teaching but I actually think it kind of comes from the teaching side more than necessarily from the criticism side. Being a good teacher helps you be a better critic in a way that I’m not sure that being better critic helps you be a better teacher. 

SEC: 

One of the things you mentioned there was the idea that it comes from a feeling, bad music criticism or bad criticism just comes from that feeling rather than an analysis. And I wonder if we see that sort of thing in education because I don’t know what your experience with teachers are but there is a certain kind of teacher who has been around for a long time or even a short time and has a feeling of what things work, and doesn’t want to change their practice.

DCM: 

I think that the thing that interests me about feeling in music is the way that feelings can destabilize us. And I think what you’re describing are teachers who are doing almost the opposite, teachers who feel highly stabilized in their classrooms. That’s what I’m always skeptical of. It’s the teacher that feels like nothing could possibly happen to them to change anything about what they think or what they do. 

It’s not that I’m the most open-minded and amazing person, it’s just that I have a lot of experiences where I think I know something and the teaching experience really knocks me down a peg. It can be humiliating, in fact! When you realize that what you just expressed that you thought was teaching critical thinking, isn’t. 

For instance, when I’m talking to young, predominantly black, and predominantly low-income students who are 16 to 19 years old about the news, I could get up on my high horse -- I read the Washington Post every day and I do this and that and yada yada yada, and talk about the credibility of sources. And then they start telling me about things that are actually happening in their very own backyards and neighborhoods that I know nothing about. And who am I to say that the way that they found that information is better or worse than my way? I don’t mean that obviously means I’m not better or worse, I might be better at something, but I need to think about it more carefully, because the assumption I went in with that I had the knowledge and the students had the brains to absorb my knowledge, it didn’t work out that way. 

It’s not even that it can’t work out that way. I do have knowledge sometimes and they can absorb the knowledge. But the teacher who isn’t open to being humbled unexpectedly is not going to be able to improve their practice in the way that the teacher that is can. That isn’t to say you need to go cut yourself down at every opportunity and completely take out all your confidence, it’s just that it’s complicated and again, students are going to be able to push you in ways that other types of relationships don’t. 

So that’s what I’m looking for in teachers, and I think music does this to people. When you really hate a song and you just explode with anger about it, I mean, the kind of feeling that that can instill in you, I can’t think of a lot of other media that can really do that. But I can definitely tell you some experiences that people have had in classrooms, where the kid did that one thing and you just exploded, you didn’t even know that was your trigger. Like, “oh my gosh, that kid that wouldn’t sit down, that really bothered me for some reason, I have to analyze that!” I think music does that. I think there is something about the combination of feeling and analysis that is so tied together in music, I think there’s an echo of that in how we learn about ourselves in the classroom. 

SEC:

This was obviously a very big week because on Pitchfork this week they reviewed all the Taylor Swift albums. 

DCM: 

All the Taylor Swift albums! I know! Where were they when I was actually writing for them in 2006? They didn’t ask me to write up the self-titled album. I had it before anybody did. My friend actually burned me the self-titled Taylor Swift album and mailed it to me. In the mail. I was there, man! I was there! 

SEC: 

What did you think of her first album?

DCM:

I loved her first album. At the time I had taken a critical turn. I was really interested in teen pop music, so I was writing about it at an old website called Stylus Magazine, a really cool online space. And it’s funny because I think people can look back -- I’ve worked in elementary media literacy and all this stuff and it seems like maybe it’s all of a piece, of me being really curious about youth culture. I’m actually not that curious about youth culture. I just really liked the teen pop music at the time personally! So I got into it and I was writing about it and that got me into youth culture only because of the ways in which people were writing about young people. 

I thought it was just bizarre -- High School Musical had just come out. Taylor Swift had not quite broken yet. She was still trying to be a country star at that time. And people were just writing about it -- you saw this when One Direction got really big, too, these recycled teenybopper losing their minds takes. And so it forced me into understanding youth culture, and that got me connected with the Media Education Lab at Temple. I was a grad student there at the time. I thought I should actually try to understand what’s happening in youth culture, because I mostly just liked, like, listening to Ashlee Simpson for myself.

When Taylor Swift came out, I saw this as a really ingenious way to try to find a space outside of Disney which at the time was starting to build its music brand through Hannah Montana and High School Musical, and she was doing this thing where she was trying to capture the country audience with the same moves that they were doing in the teen pop music. And it was interesting to watch her really struggle in country music. She had a couple hits on country radio but there was always this talk about her inauthenticity and how she’s not really country and whatever else. And then when Fearless came out it seems like it was just this explosion, that young people just flocked to her and created almost a whole separate genre of Taylor Swift. She is her own genre now. I think she has been since 2008. She stopped being a country star about a year after she started. 

But what’s interesting to me about the Pitchfork thing is how uncontroversial that is now. Of course you’d cover Taylor Swift! She’s the biggest American pop music star probably in the world. I think she’s maybe bigger than Beyonce by a nose? They’re probably the top two, right? 

SEC: 

Probably! 

DCM: 

Why wouldn’t you be interested in writing about that? At the time you just couldn’t do it. 

SEC: 

It was part of the rockist sensibility that was still in the ether then. Poptimism was still kind of coming out. For me, I remember when I was in school I was teaching Grade 8 and we were doing a music video lesson, and a student wanted to watch “Teardrops on my Guitar.” And I remember being snooty about that then, and I think I probably looked down on that student and I almost  guarantee that student noticed that. So for me, that’s a lesson to check yourself. It’s so easy for us to look at student culture and say, that’s not my culture, that’s not good. And we saw that even in Pitchfork, which was the leading credible source of music.

DCM: 

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, because you have those experiences, and you have such a personal relationship with students whether you want to or not. I consider myself a progressive educator and I’m all about relationships, but there are some really healthy boundaries that teachers need to have from their students. And part of that can have to do with their popular culture. You also don’t have to be the hip teacher that insists on being really into all the music your kids are into. It’s more about your authenticity to yourself in your relationship to the students. 

But at the same time, if you don’t like Taylor Swift, there are a lot of ways to engage with the student who loves Taylor Swift honestly without making the student almost a representative of a social problem. You still have to teach that kid math! You still have to have engagements with that student who loves Taylor Swift. And that is such an important part of that person’s identity. But as the teacher, that’s the field that you have the least control over. You really have almost zero say in how that student is going to take their own popular culture and make meaning out of it. 

And so in a way it was actually kind of healthy for a place like Pitchfork to stay away from Taylor Swift, because the only thing that would have happened is that they would have gotten somebody who doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift to write some sneering thing about it. Or do the thing where it’s like, “well, begrudgingly I’ll admit there are a couple of songs here.” But something interesting was obviously happening with Taylor Swift from a social perspective. I happen to think it was pretty god as music, too -- your mileage may vary with that. 

SEC: 

If you were going to give yourself a Pitchfork rating as a teacher, what would you give yourself?

DCM: 

Well you have to understand about Pitchfork ratings, because there’s a science to it, right? It’s a little code between music nerds. Anything under a 7 and above a 5.8 means “I listened to it, it was fine, you shouldn’t really even bother to read this review, because I’m not really sure how I’m feeling about this one right now.”  Anything between a 7 and a 7.5 means this is a solid album that I don’t quite have the traction on, or I really like it but they won’t really let me rate it higher. I don’t think they do that any more. They made me change some of my ratings sometimes. 

SEC: 

Did you give a number? I thought it was the case that writers didn’t give the number.

[Ed note: Pitchfork editorial gives scores now, but when I wrote for Pitchfork in 2004-2006 writers gave the initial score and it was discussed editorially if necessary.]

DCM:

Yeah, I gave the numbers. Writers gave the numbers then and there was sometimes an editorial decision about it. I infamously tried to give the Arcade Fire’s first album a 10 and they wouldn’t let me. We negotiated it down to a 9.7, which I think is kind of funny. It’s too bad, because it turns out it’s really more of a 9.4, but that’s OK. I mean, I was really obsessed with it at the time. It settled into a 9.4. 

Nah, I’m just kidding, 9.7 is the perfect score for that album, I think. 

What was I talking about? Oh yeah -- Pitchfork ratings are very specific, so as a teacher, I actually don’t think--I only taught for four years in a classroom so I am ineligible for anything above a 7.6. That’s the cap of the album that was great and some people are going to love that album, but no one is going to talk about it in the critical conversation at the end of the year. So you’re going to see a lot of individual writers’ favorite albums that they don’t feel comfortable giving a bunch of Pitchfork hype to get between a 7.3 and a 7.7. After that, once you get into the 8’s, you’re getting into the critical conversation. 

So I would give myself over four years...a 7.4. 

SEC: 

One thing that jogged my memory and made me think you were someone I should talk to is that you were posting on Twitter a list of observations you were making as you were coming to the end of your year, and the end of your job. 

DCM: 

I had this manic spell in the first week after I left where I just had all these disconnected thoughts. So I started a big Twitter thread, and now I’m writing some of that stuff up. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything with it. It’s nice to just write, I’ve written like 30 pages of observations. 

I didn’t write anything while I was teaching for a couple of reasons. One, I felt really overwhelmed with the job of it -- I don’t know how many of your listeners are teachers and how many aren’t, but I feel like the lack of understanding that people have about the kind of job that teaching actually is from a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour type of day-long standpoint is one of the fundamental things that keeps people from  truly understanding education problems in general. I don’t know if it’s true in Canada versus America but certainly in the U.S. -- anything that’s bad in Canada is probably just worse here.

So I started writing these observations because there were so many scattered thoughts, and I didn’t feel comfortable reflecting on it formally anywhere, because it was happening to me in the moment. I felt some protection of my students and not wanting to use them as examples of things, use pseudonyms or whatever. But now I’m kind of processing it and I really am reflecting a lot on it. 

A lot of what I learned makes me think of Annette Lareau, who wrote a great book called Unequal Childhoods, which tracks different social classes of folks raising kids in Philadelphia -- middle class, working class, and poor, more or less. I think she didn’t really hit that many super affluent families and she honestly didn’t seem to engage with that many really poor families. There were a couple. And her big sociological insight was around this idea of middle class versus working class parenting philosophies. 

The middle class parents, maybe unconsciously, maybe consciously, go through what she calls concerted cultivation, which is the idea that your children are investments and you cultivate them to become a certain type of person. A lot of this is based on the kinds of scheduling that you do and the activities you do and the way you teach kids to question authority, in ways that promote power. So middle class kids learn to ask the doctor questions, whereas working class kids don’t ask doctors questions because doctors are experts and you don’t ask experts questions--because that’s why you’re seeing them. Working class families tended toward something she called the “theory of natural growth,” something like that [ed note: her phrase is the “accomplishment of natural growth”], the idea being: let the kids be kids, set pretty firm distinctions between the adult world and the child world. So there are these authoritarian elements of the working class philosophy, but generally kids have a lot of space to themselves. They just kind of do what they need to do as kids. There are often many more siblings and other folks from the family that are of comparable age. 

And then she tried to deal with poor families. And really most of the book that I remember when she’s writing about children growing up in poverty is thinly-veiled horror at the daily existence of their lives. Having to take a bus for an hour to try to get food stamps so that you can go get some bread, but it’s not enough. She’s just detailing the horrors of American poverty. 

And I think I understood this all better in working in the environment I was working in for so long, and getting to know the students, and getting to know the distinctions between students. That’s another thing that I think happens, especially when people write about, quote, “urban education” -- by which they’re usually talking about high populations of students who are black or people of color -- you just homogenize the group benevolently. It’s like a benevolently homogenous group, so you’re all for the kids but you can’t see the distinctions between the kid who’s got the working class parents and the kid who’s really suffering from acute poverty and needs other kinds of assistance. So working so closely with so many with those kids helped me understand how poverty and working class families in our country are so intimately connected, and they’re part of what you could argue is the same socioeconomic bracket. What poverty is in America, to me, is just what happens when the bottom drops out of the working class and there’s nothing to protect anybody. 

So what I had to do in working with my students was to really develop an understanding of who they were as -- I sound like John Lennon in the ‘60s, but -- who are they as working class people? And that was a lot of my own learning as a teacher. I had things I could teach -- everybody needs to know how to Google and how to make movies and how to write. But what I had to learn was what this whole social arrangement was, and how students’ lives before they ever came into my classroom affected both their attitudes toward learning and where they were going with it. That was most of what I learned. 

So when I started reflecting it was like, “God, I don’t have a whole lot of cool pithy quotes about education because, like Annette Lareau, I’m just kind of struck by the horror of poverty, and I don’t have a lot to say about it!” How do you help this kid to learn...? “...But this kid is homeless! Oh my god, how could you let a child be homeless?” Those were the kinds of things I was dealing with. 

It’s the kind of work I want to do -- but it’s a lot to process. How to write about it is very complicated. 

SEC: 

Let’s talk a little bit about how you found out who your students were. That relationship aspect is really important and I think a lot teachers believe in that, but I also think they are uncomfortable about how to go about that or what they might uncover when they go about it. 

DCM: 

I always told my students “I keep it 85.” They keep it a hundred, I keep it 85. I’d say, I’m your teacher, so there’s 15 percent of things I’m not going to tell you anything about but of the 85% of things I will talk about, I will be 100% honest about 85% of things. And that was important for me to be able to share with my students within boundaries that I set for myself but know that every time I talked to them I was coming from a place of honesty for myself. Because it allowed them to be honest with me, and so our dialogue kind of worked when they had trust in me. 

The way they trusted me was to know that I was not putting on an act for them. I was who I was. And that meant some warts and all stuff -- we would talk a lot about how I’m a white male teacher and that’s a thing. We’d talk about school shootings and they’d say, “why do white guys do that stuff?” And we had to have conversations about that. I didn’t always have the answers, but we could have the dialogue because everything was kind of fair game in terms of what they could bring to me and how I would respond--as me. Even if that response was “I can’t say that, I can’t speak to that, I don’t know.” So that’s one of the ways I built trust. 

What’s funny is that I think a lot of the teachers at my school thought that because I had an interest in popular music, that was something that gave me some capital with my students. It appears that way from the outside because I would know all of the music that they listened to, including the music they made.  A lot of my kids made music, so I would always want to know who they were. But I don’t think that my fellow teachers understood that I didn’t actually like most of the music my students listened to and I wouldn’t have sought it out if they hadn’t been listening to it. But because they were listening to it, and because it was such a huge part of the classroom -- it was coming out of headphones and speakers and laptops all the time -- I wanted to know what this stuff was, because I was curious about it. 

Some of it I ended up really liking. But I think that’s irrelevant, whether I liked it or not. The point was I was curious about it and I took it really seriously, the music they liked. Understanding what it was and why they liked it was really important for me. That was an element of the trust, but it’s connected to the first thing I was talking about, which is the honesty piece. I honestly was interested. I think for teachers that honestly aren’t interested in their kids’ music, don’t force it. It’s not going to work. Whether it is better to take an interest in your students music or popular culture or whatever or not, I don’t know. I read something the other day, some educator Twitter who talked about how they pretended to be interested in sports every year. They were so glad the basketball season was over so they didn’t have to pretend to be interested anymore for their students. And I was like, that’s terrible! If you’re not interested in basketball, just say that! I mean, be honest. And if you feel you should be interested in basketball because your students are interested in it, then come to it from a place of honest exploration of it and -- you know, if you still feel like it doesn’t matter, just be real with people about that. 

It goes a longer way being honest with students about yourself and your shortcomings and everything, along with your strengths. That’s the other piece -- when I knew stuff, I told my kids, look, I’m sorry but I know a lot about this so I know you’re telling me this way you found this thing on the internet, and I’m telling you I know more about finding this thing on the internet than you do. I feel very comfortable saying that, this is the better way. But I limited the number of domains in which I would claim that kind of expertise. I tried to limit it to being on-topic in the classroom. I wouldn’t try to know everything about everything. When I don’t know stuff or don’t like stuff or don’t feel a certain way and feel comfortable enough to say it, I’m honest with them. In that way, you build a certain level of trust. 

The other thing is -- and I hate to say it -- I was also the permissive uncle in terms of classroom discipline at my school. I’m the guy who you go to and he gives you the ice cream and mom and dad get upset: “We don’t give him ice cream and now he’s gonna ask us for ice cream every day for two weeks!” I was also that. But I don’t think that that was as big of a factor as my sense of wanting to know my students, within limits, and wanting them to feel that they can know me as well as I want to know them, that it’s two-way. Whatever I want to get from them, they should be able to get from me. And that’s why I was the permissive uncle. I don’t actually care that this kid did this in my class, so why would I go through the work of writing it up and making it a thing, when I don’t actually care about this? Now, from an organizational standpoint that’s not a great approach to take. I get that. Things break down when there’s not consistency among classrooms. 

I guess it’s just to say, I wanted to know who these people in my room were, and that’s how I saw them. One thing I started writing when I got off of Twitter was that I think we have it backwards, especially for the age group I worked with, which was 16-21. Most of them were disconnected from formal school, although not entirely (it’s very complicated, especially in Philly). I feel like we tend to call kids “kids” in situations where we should think about them as adults, and we tend to call them adults in situations where we should be thinking about them as kids. To give you an example, we say that because this young woman has a baby even though she’s only 17, well, that makes her an adult. But because you are throwing pencils in my classroom, you’re a kid. Right? 

And I would kind of flip that in my mind -- I didn’t realize I was doing this until I was reflecting on it. I’d say, look, if you’re 16 and you have a baby, this is a kid that just had a baby. Let’s think about the impact of the baby on this young person’s life. But if you threw a pencil at me in my room -- why did this adult in my room just throw a pencil at me? I’m not saying you should think about things this way or it’s better this way, I just realized that that is the approach that I took philosophically to who my students were. I was working with adults and they were adults in all the times when I most wanted to call them kids, and they were kids in the times that I think, maybe not me, but society wants them to be adults. Incarceration, teen pregnancy, all these big scary social problems, you have to think about what kind of things a person is going through-- and what is a person going through when they’re going through it at sixteen? 

I think my students would judge me higher than a 7.4 as a teacher. But I also think that there were certain jobs I had as a teacher that I wasn’t as good at as other people are, and I’m pretty open about that. Organization of time. Having the plan set. Having the boundaries set. Making the space safe for learning. Making learning happen even when it’s hard. Those are the things that, because I was so interested in how people are feeling, “are we there today,” sometimes I could lower my standards, I could let the discipline slip and it affects other people’s learning. There are some teacherly things that I think I have a lot of work to do in my own professional development. 

One way I started thinking about it early on was, in my first year, I was reading the John Lennon biography. (It’s weird I’ve mentioned John Lennon twice so far. I do love the Beatles.) And they’re describing Hamburg, their first big tour in Germany, how they got there with their songs and they realized after the first night that they’d played all their songs and they didn’t know anything else. 

So they were in this crucible -- but not of creativity. They didn’t go to Hamburg and write their best stuff. They wrote their best stuff after Hamburg, after they’d gone through this crucible of performance. Performance, performance, performance. Play it again. When you run out of something, pick an old showtune that someone half-remembered. Steal songs from other people. Play the thing you just heard the other band play and see if you can do your own take on it. Not because it’s creative but because you have so much time to fill and you don’t have enough material. That’s how I felt after my first year teaching. There was so much time and I’d gone through everything, I felt I’d left it all on the floor in my first year and I had nothing left. I was already resorting to Googling lessons and trying to figure out what the hell I’m gonna do tomorrow. 

And so I realized in my disposition, I’m thinking about the difference between being a composer or a songwriter versus being a performer. And how those things are often connected but they’re not the same. So maybe I’m a Carole King--a really good songwriter but it’s often better if other people sing my stuff. Even though there’s a couple things only I can sing. Other stuff, other people should probably do. 

My relationship between curriculum and teaching is like that. I’m like a singer-songwriter more than I am a performer. That was a good realization to have, because it means there are some things I’m just never going to be the best at, and if I’m teaching full time again I need to work with those limitations. But that hadn’t hit home before. I could have abstractly said something like that before I was a full-time teacher, but you gotta feel it. You gotta understand what it feels like to run out of material and be empty and have nowhere to go. Every teacher goes through that. It usually happens in the first year if not the first month.

SEC:

That idea of teacher as performer--there’s a lot to unpack in that. When you’re a performer, what is the thing you’re trying to be? I don’t know that a lot of teachers think about who they’re trying to be. There’s a lot of thought about what they are trying to do. Not who they’re trying to be. Who you are informs a lot of what you do. 

DCM:

Yeah -- it’s an imperfect metaphor. I mean, I think teaching as performance is only one, maybe even small element of teaching. There are a lot of non-performative teachers who are just really good at the nuts and bolts of getting people in a room to do something. That is a good teacher, too. It was more about the difference between imagining lessons and putting them into reality. Maybe because I’m a music guy that’s where my head went with it. But it is interesting to wonder, if teachers were performers, are there rock stars versus second-chair violins? Different ways to perform? I dunno, I don’t want to go too far with the metaphor, it’s tenuous enough as it is. 

SEC:

I wanted to go back to one of the things you talked about in your observations. You were working at an alternative high school and a lot of the students who you were working with had so many gaps, or there were things in their background that had made them not love learning or not feel confident in learning. I’m curious about how in the high school situation, it’s hard to catch up with that background. I mean, maybe this is a Philly question. Where I am, we were the poverty capital of Canada for a long time, we may still be. There may be some overlap here. So what do you do in those cases? Because you talk about scaling up form elementary and how that might not work. 

DCM:

It’s hard, because the tendency is to scale up from young. So where did you lose it with math? I have to be careful about my language here, because I don’t want to play into deficit thinking. I also don’t want to do the thing where I say there’s no such thing as a deficit, because if you talk to a student about their math abilities, they’ll be like, “I have a deficit! Please help me!” 

If you find the point where the student disconnected -- to give an example I like to think about from my work, because it controls for a lot of other stuff -- take a student who is more or less engaged in the project of school and has not decided that school in and of itself is a bankrupt institution, but who also has real challenges with math. If there is some kind of specific learning disorder, it hasn’t been diagnosed, and it’s probably too late to be diagnosed, and it’s specific to math. What do you do?

I think the way that people tend to go about it, that I’ve seen, is to figure out what should have happened in fourth grade and figure out a way to do that fourth grade piece in high school. And I think that’s a problem, because I don’t think that it works very well, and it especially doesn’t work for kids who are not motivated. If it could work for anybody, it would be the student who is already motivated but happens to have this missing piece from fourth grade. 

In this student’s case, it was literally that they had a bad math teacher in fourth grade and they struggled and failed math and they were kept back. So the kid gets to high school about a year or two late because of this math issue that he’s had that’s been unsupported, and now he’s at our school. And the question is, how do we work with the student who has a math issue? For me, the answer is one on one instructional time. And I hate to say that, because what it means is that the classroom itself is not the space to deal with this. 

And that’s a very uncomfortable realization that I started to have as I was working through this with my students -- that I can differentiate, differentiate, differentiate, but when the gaps are so large...I don’t know. I feel like this student needs an hour of an expert’s time that is a reading specialist or a math specialist. Then there needs to be something else happening in the classroom environment. 

I think a lot of the issues are a little like that. From the reading perspective it’s even more complicated, because these practices of literacy are so intertwined with content knowledge, background knowledge, cultural context, how you were taught phonics from a very early age, basic decoding that may have happened in weird ways. 

What you can do at the high school level is you just set the bar really high for everybody, but you don’t assume that anybody actually knows how to read. You set the bar for everything else really high, and you don’t do the basal reader with the sixteen year old. If they’re interested in mass incarceration, you read about mass incarceration. But they may not be able to read what you’re using --so you use the exact same resource and you use every trick in the book to get them reading as much as they can -- chunking it out, working on smaller passages, connecting it together. I don’t know what all the best practices here are. I’m probably going to go back to school at some point to learn some of this stuff, in terms of literacy coaching. 

I do think that we tend to level kids in ways that are really counter-productive to their ability to see the point in education in a big picture sense. When you’re going into school and you’re sixteen years old and you’re reading the “adapted reading” that is really not very good--these adapted readings tend to be very poor quality. I had a person that I worked with who used a website that would replace words with easier words with an algorithm. I would read the results and think, this is garbage! You took a really cool article and you changed all the words in it! You can’t just do that! “I’m gonna take this song that I love but I’m going to change every other note in the melody and I’m sure it’ll be just as good.” That’s not gonna work. 

So I think you treat the group that you’re with as capable of taking whatever they can talk to you about. And then you think of literacy as a very specific set of practices, and that different pieces of it need to be emphasized in different ways. For my students, maybe everybody has to do some pretty high level vocabulary and then there are a lot of strategies for how do we chunk out this reading, which is really difficult for some kids, only a little difficult for other kids, and pretty much in the comfort zone for the others. You kind of have to sit down with the kids and go through it sentence by sentence, talk about it, re-read it--OK, so what is this saying? Why does it say it like this? And for the students who struggle with print literacy, it’s just going to take longer. I don’t know if there’s any way around that. 

I don’t know what it looks like in the long-term, because I also don’t know what the proper amount of time is. I also feel like students weirdly have too much time in school and not enough time with some fairly uncomfortable, hardcore learning. They spend a lot of time in this building but the times at which they’re really doing cognitively challenging work is not nearly as concentrated as it needs to be. 

I played piano as a kid, and practice is awful. I had to practice every day, and as soon as I stopped practicing every day I got worse. I could practice for one hour and then I was just done. If I could practice for an hour every day for a week, I got better, and when I didn’t do that I got worse. 

But I feel like the problem is that in school, you don’t have one hour, you have six hours, each of which is a one-hour block. But you can’t practice for six hours. You can’t do cognitively challenging work for six hours. So it seems like the better thing to do would be to really target the time when you are doing the most cognitively challenging stuff, do it for an hour, and then take a break and do cool stuff that’s not that. 

But I don’t know how you square that, because every teacher kind of feels like they’re in their own little island of content and they don’t realize that by the time you have the kids for fifth period they’ve been doing this all day. They’re not even doing cognitively challenging hour-long work. What ends up happening is that everybody kind of blands out. So you’re doing 20% cognitively challenging here, and 50% here, and maybe 0% there because you were asleep that period. It’s just not organized very well for what I think the challenge really is, which is that learning is really hard, the more you miss early on the harder it is to make up later, and the ways that you make it up later require more investment and more resources, not less. We want to do the opposite. We want to say, what’s the fastest way we can get this kid to learn all the crap they didn’t learn in the last twelve years? Well, I don’t think you can. Maybe the answer to that is that it’s not possible. I don’t know.

JEC:

We’re coming up on an hour now and I didn’t talk about any of the media stuff -- we’ll set up another call. I’ve enjoyed all of this time and want to put it all up. 

DCM

Sure! You basically got everything I’ve done except the media literacy work, which is fine because actually media literacy is a whole separate thing we could talk about. 

JEC:

That’s good. The work of Julie Coiro and Renee Hobbs, their work and your involvement in that, has been really interesting to me as I’ve been doing the same thing as you have in a lesser scale for the last few years. I really want to talk about that. So I’ll start wrapping it up and ask, what would be a resource you might recommend to someone?

DCM

The one book that I recommend to people is Inside Teaching by Mary Kennedy, whose big project as a scholar is understanding why reform tends not to work in schools. The reason it doesn’t work is that most reforms don’t fully grasp the day to day practices that teachers have to accomplish to do their job. And if you don't understand the very intimate details of on-the-ground work in schools, there is no reform that's going to change anything, because you don't actually understand what you’re doing. You have an idea, but you don’t know how to implement it at all.

Inside Teaching is a series of observations about how teachers manage in the classroom. They manage their time, they manage their resources, they manage their sanity, their tranquility. And that, to me, was one of the single biggest insights I ever had about teaching, and I reflected on it a ton when I was doing my full-time teaching, which is that teachers really value tranquility in the classroom, and soundness, this feeling of safety and quiet. And the reason is because they're teaching for so long that if you don’t have that, you burn out immediately. 

It’s one thing to be a cool engaging college professor and teach people three days a week and you have a little seminar room or whatever -- I’ve done that kind of teaching, it’s a blast. And I can be on all of the time! As you can probably tell already from this conversation I can be very on. But if you teach full time, you get there at like 8 a.m. and you leave at 5 p.m., you can’t be on for that whole time. You will physically blow a circuit. So her observation about what teachers do to manage that was so interesting. 

She has this really big picture critique of reform movements in education that are not ground-up from teachers. What I like about it is that she doesn’t have any clear ideas about what teachers should be doing, just that if you don’t have their buy-in, nothing that you do is actually going to matter very much. And the other insight there is that there are really good reasons why schools operate the way they do, even in the most dysfunctional school systems and spaces, and you should really put some effort into understanding exactly why things are the way they are. Because if you change one thing about it, you don’t realize you’ve also changed five other things that are connected to this one fix. There’s no way for ideas to fix organizational issues if you don’t really understand how the organization works. 

I return to that book a lot because it just it’s really a nice perspective on what teaching is, and why a lot of our best ideas about education don’t actually seem to work when you put it into effect. And the answer is it works for something, but not for teaching. This cool idea you had is a good idea for something, just not for this. It’s because there’s no way to sustain it. So that’s the book I would recommend. 

If you’re a science teacher, I just read a cool science book. I’m the type of person that thinks the last book they read is the best book ever written, and then promptly forgets it existed after I read the next book. 

The book I just read was Life Ascending by Nick Lane. It’s a science book and it goes through, from this microbiology perspective, everything from the origins of life through the development of most of the major processes of life, and it was a very cool, cosmic look at everything. I kept reading it thinking, “God, I wish I was helping teach a science class again, because I could talk about this stuff and kids would be interested in cells because they would know why it’s like this.”  I never knew! There’s so much stuff I actually never knew even though I, quote, “learned it in school.” I learn it again later and I’m like, “oh, I didn’t know this at all! I don’t know anything about this!” I could have told you what mitochondria were but now I actually understand mitochondria--it’s profound. I love that book because every chapter is like that for something science-related and I have a really hard time finding accessible math and science literature that makes accessible not only what happens, but why it matters and what the context is, so that was cool.

[kpopblog]

His Favorite Patient

Locked doors. Hushed voices. Passionate movements.

    This was your routine. Every visit whether it be schedule or for an “unexplained cough”. The two of you would become inseparable the moment he closed the door. You needed this just as much as he did, despite each of your drives. You were simply in it for a quick fix, a way to rid yourself of an ever growing craving for someone. While he originally denied the idea of someone as professional as himself being involved in such a scandal. However overtime as you had convinced him with sweet promises and propositions you began to become emotionally invested. Now it wasn’t just for the intense and passionate sex, though it was a wonderful perk. But now you were there yearning to know more about your physician and amazing lover. You couldn’t help but wonder with each tight grip, each moan quickly covered by a hand, or each graceful thrust if they were worth anything.

    Your mind was quickly brought back to reality by the sudden feeling on his teeth gnawing on the nape of your neck followed by small,gentle kisses to excuse his urge. Though, to you it only made the sensation worse. Now you were aware of every thrust and grunt he would make against your body much like he had been the entire time. Unlike your mind, clouded by insecurities and doubt, his was filled with nothing but thoughts of you. His eyes couldn’t help but notice every drop of sweat on your body as your intimate act was coming to an end.

    “A-Ah...fuck! You’re so fucking good.”

One…….two.…thre-

    “Yes! Right there, please Jin…...j-just one more time”

One….two….

    By the end of his last thrust you slammed your mouth onto his in hopes of muffling your moans. Soon after this stunt Jin thrusts faster, crazed by your sudden orgasm. Once they became slower and deeper you knew he was close and you began teasing him. You grab fistfuls of his hair as you nibble on the sensitive part of his left ear. All while your other hand skillfully travels up and down his body, grabbing and lightly brushing across all the right places. Jin couldn’t contain himself much longer as your mouth began to wander and he came while pulling out of you.

    “That was pretty close there,” you say as you softly chuckle.

    “Yeah….maybe a little too close,” Jin says as he presses his forehead to yours. The two of you lightly pant as you move closing the space between both of your lips, only breaking eye contact to deepen the kiss. Jin slowly backs away despite your shared desire for more only to disappoint you, “I hate to be the voice of reason my dear but, we need to clean up. I do have other patients and I don’t think you’d want them to see anymore than my handsome face.” Comments like these are ones that make you question what you are to him. And your head soon is clouded with the same questions from earlier in your “check-up”. He obviously has some emotional value attached to you…..

    You clean yourself up and gather your clothes as these thoughts continue. You want to ask him if it’s more than just meaningless sex or a quick fix. You need to know if he is willing to start a genuine relationship with you...or maybe he already is in a relationship. Jin notices the slight change in your mood and questions you to see if he had unknowingly hurt you or did something that made you uncomfortable. You assure him that he had done nothing wrong but that doesn’t stop him. He inspects every square inch of your body to see if he left a scar too deep or if there was a bruise too dark, he was your doctor after all and your well being is his top priority. While it was very comforting knowing that he inspected your body to make sure he caused you no physics harm it still hurt.

    “Hey Jin. What….what am I to you? And don’t say ‘My patient of course!’ or ‘The best lover in the world’. It’s really been bothering me for a while and I just would feel better if you could tell me...please.” You hadn’t expected to ask him like this but, while the sex was full of the rush of danger you also needed some kind of closer.

     “Oh….well um. I-I honestly can give you a straight answer right now…” was all he could say. While you appreciated his honesty it wasn’t the answer you wanted. You needed a definite answer whether it be that you were just a plaything or something more.

    You remain silent as you nod your head and digest his answer. He apologizes to you and tries to explain himself but you can’t hear it. You can’t hear anything to be exact. The thoughts in your head have eerily gone silent. “I hope your not mad at me...I just need some time to give you a proper answer,” is all you hear as you snap back to reality. You try to reply as casually as possible and say your goodbyes to Jin and leave the office with a prescription slip you never planned to fill for your “sudden fever”. You feel bad for wanting more but deep down you knew that relationships like yours were never meant to last. He was your physician and you his patient, and it should never be anything more. A patient is supposed to go to a 6-month exam and only see their doctor for unexplained or sudden illness not because they simply want to fuck. And it’s that same patient’s responsibility to not feel like there’s something more there than two people that happen to have a sex….After you drive away, you leave behind the feeling of completeness and open the door to a seemingly never ending hallway filled with want and loneliness.

      ~        ~        ~

    It was time for your next exam and you weren’t sure what to expect. “What would Jin say?” was the main question running through your mind. You didn’t how he would react without having seen you for six straight months. Would he be touch starved like you? Or would he pretend like what happened between the two of you was nothing? Maybe he would jump into your arms and proclaim to never let you go. Or he could just end everything right there…….You park your car and slowly walk up to the receptionist. She notes on how she hasn’t seen you in a long time and comments on how surprisingly your health has increased but, you didn’t care. The only thing that was on your mind was Jin and how he would react after seeing you for the first time in what seemed like an eternity to you. You jump a little in your seat when you hear Jin call your name to an exam room. Neither of you say anything until you reach the room and Jin mentions how surprised he is that you haven’t contracted any illnesses in the past few months.

    “You know that I’m not here for small talk...you either tell me what we are or…” you trail of your sentence afraid to say that the two of you will act as though nothing had happened between the two of you.

    “Listen.” he begins, “what you need to know is that this won’t work between us. What we were doing its...it wasn’t supposed to happen. A doctor isn’t supposed to break his oath and secretly have sex with his patient, especially not at his facility.” You look away and try to avoid eye contact yet Jin grabs your chin ever so slightly to get your focus back onto him. “You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, I should have never had sex with you but I did. And I never regretted any of it, mostly because of how amazing your body is but that’s a different story.” He winks his eye at you and you lightly chuckle at his attempt to brighten your spirit. He gently intertwines your hand with his as he delivers the rest of his well thought out proclamation. “But, it was never just the two of us getting together when we need a quick fix. That’s why I was so reluctant in the beginning. I didn’t know if you were going to fuck me and act like nothing ever happened or if you were doing it because you wanted money but you never wanted that. And while we did get out of hand more than a couple times, you would always make sure I was satisfied and learned about what I liked and disliked. And while it was not done in the typical way, you still showed you cared and that was enough for me. But when you asked me what you were to me, I felt so horrible. I barely knew anything about your personal life and yet I felt so close to you and, it was so confusing. I came here everyday hoping you would show up so we could fix it and go back to our normal routine but you didn’t. And in that time I came up with all of this. Now, it sounds like a jumbled mess of excuses and sugar coating but I promise you it’s not. This is my answer to what you mean to me and…..I pray to God that it’s what you’re looking for.”

    You sat in disbelief and shock. Jin had just told you everything you wanted to hear and more. Nothing could be better than this, he was pouring his heart out to you just like you had always wanted. You couldn’t believe that this was happening, it all seemed like you were still stuck in that touch starved haze and imaging this like before. The only difference now is that when you felt a tear fall down your cheek, there was someone there to catch it and when you reached out and held onto them like you’ve wanted to for the past eternity, this time they didn’t disappear. This time, he stayed right there and held you tight as you sobbed into his chest. This time, his hands gently patted your head and ran through your hair. And this time, the locked doors, hushed voices, and passionate movements all had a newfound meaning to the both of you.

*A/N: I really didn’t feel like doing anything so I decided to spend most of my night writing this and procrastinating. Hope y’all like what I wrote for my bias wrecker....maybe I’ll write something for my bias next >:)

[aluckycatpainteduniverse]

Never rate people’s success by their mutual status.

Mutual status is a very important thing. It plays a huge role and value in our lives. Someone is lonely, someone has a soul mate, someone has a good friend, someone like a child dreams of a prince on a snow-white horse in dreams. All of them are united by the fact that they are real or imaginary in some kind of mutual status. However, in the world a very big privilege is enjoyed by people who are in status together. Of course, if you have an ally, then you will be a strong community forming a strong unit. You will most often solve problems together, support each other and be the most important support for each other. Whether you are a brother and sister or a girlfriend with a boyfriend. But you, in turn, are independent of each other and are individual. What is very important that is only yours. So this is what I am leading to.

Some people, when they talk about one person, sometimes misinterpret everything and perceive it as otherwise not just as two separate people. They begin to evaluate one of these people by the criterion of their mutual status, which depends, in their opinion, on the partner chosen by this person and the person with whom he lives this life. This is very wrong and disrespectful for these young people.

A great many magazines or firms publish simply wonderful articles about any individual, woman or man. they talk about their achievements, advantages, their success, praise them for the whole, adore them, make a confession, etc. But for some reason the words like "Oh, --- name--, the one that meets with --- name--. Or " --- name --- which we know as sister --name --- “. I think it is insulting. What they are doing seems to want us to think that this person is becoming more popular only because of his partner, that he achieved everything just because he began to meet with him and so on. In fact, it would not be worth doing that and writing. As if it was caustic and engaging the reader, if he suddenly did not know this, in order to emphasize that this is the SAME WOMAN OF ASTRONAUT or THE SEXIEST MAN ON EARTH. Allegedly, she will be above her place.

Do you think if he was not married to her or she was not with him, they would not have achieved success and recognition? Not at all. Would have achieved. And how. Each of them is unique and educated in its own way.

And this person is by no means obliged to another for his popularity. He achieves, speaks inspirational speeches, reproves body positive due to the fact that he has such qualities, because he was born and brought up by his parents, and not because he is in a certain position with someone.

To give an example, some couples often appear separately at events. And this is not because they broke up or they became uncomfortable in front of someone or tired. Not. Just adequate people understand that your companion should move himself in this life. Make progress, put yourself in the right place. Just because he is he. And he should feel it himself. Indeed, in this world there is only one person who can make you achieve outstanding success. And this man is you.

So, if you, dear magazines and publicists, write about a person. Write about all the good things about him, rejoice for him, respect him without bringing his partner there. When you talk about the influence of a woman or her victorious speech, with whom she does not matter in a relationship. By this you will not do your article better, only more disgusting and embarrassing.

So do not evaluate a person by his social or mutual status. Just respect as an inward. Thank.