#can you imagine that... kicking a Christian child that YOU raised out of your church dance group for being gay

[paper-bag-boy]

at 12/13 years old, i was introduced to the term "masterbation" for the first time in my life (I'm aroace so maybe that's why i didnt care/know about it before then) and it was from the mega church i went to.

all they taught us about it was that it was a sinful urge and that people spoke to our pastor from all over the world to "cure" them of it and one dude even wrote in a testimony to say he'd been praying to be "free" from that sin and was now "cured" from masterbation for x number of years.

i remember 12/13 year old me turning to my youth leader and asking what masterbation was cause the pastor wouldn't actually tell is what it was, just that it was bad. i dont remember what her expression was but she didn't exactly answer my question and i kept been confused for a few years before finding out on my own and thinking i was going to hell for sinning by accident.

kids who werent raised christian being like "lol baptising children is whack if they tried to do that to me i would start doing things to make it look like i was possessed" no you would not. you would bask in the pride and approval coming from the adults around you and you would quietly wait your turn because you were told from birth that sinning sends you to hell and baptism is The Promise that youre dedicating your life to jesus that youve had hyped up for years and watched other people be fawned over as they cry happy tears about it and you do NOT want to fuck up your One Big True Promise To Love Jesus Forever So You Don't Get Tortured For Eternity when you are literally 8 years old. im begging yall to remember its a thousand times easier to see the church's bullshit for what it is when you're not actively in the church. eight year old you is not thinking about trying to fight back against an oppressive religious group indoctrinating children because You Are The Children Being Indoctrinated. stop acting like you would've magically known better if it were you.

[privilege-rpg]

SARAH FABRAY

☆ FULL NAME: Sarah Elizabeth Fabray ☆ GENDER: Ciswoman ☆ PRONOUNS: She/Her ☆ AGE: 34 (April 10th, 1990) ☆ TYPE: Full sibling; solo ☆ HOMETOWN: Los Angeles, California ☆ JOB: Owner of and Guru at Peaceful Harmony ☆ SCHOOL: PSU Alumni ☆ SEXUALITY: Fluid ☆ FACECLAIM: Anna Camp

ABOUT SARAH

homophobia tw, religion cw

When Russel and Judy Fabray had their first child they placed all of their expectations for their future on them. They were told that they would be having a boy and that’s what Russel always wanted. A strong Christian first born son to pass all his knowledge to and raise as the strong family patriarch he should be. You can imagine his disappointment when the baby turned out to be a girl. Sarah Elizabeth Fabray was born without her father’s approval so she then grew up seeking it. 

While she was loved by her mother and raised to be the good Christian girl she should become. Sarah pushed hard to gain her father’s admiration. She learnt the Bible and memorised key passages. She would be the first to volunteer at church and get involved. Outside of church her father channeled some of his desire for a son onto her. She learnt to be strong and to walk over people before they could walk over you. To be a titan of business who could provide for the family. 

Sarah grew to be the perfect example to her siblings and a strong confident Christian woman. Yet no man was ever good enough to fit with Sarah’s and her parents expectations of the perfect Christian husband. As she grew Russel and Judy would match her with boys from other well respected families but it never felt right. There was never any spark or as Sarah would put it they were just wet flannels with no backbone. So while she waited for Mr Right, Sarah channeled her energy into her work. If she wasn’t going to have success in the love department and start her dream family she would have all the success in every other aspect of her life. She went to PSU studied hard and was top of her class to became a corporate lawyer in New York.

Sarah flew through the ranks at the firm with her tact skill and no nonsense approach. She had a very strict schedule that kept everything perfect and moving nicely. She had a personal trainer and kept strong kickboxing. She met a lovely man and was engaged to be married and she was on course to become partner in the firm. But when her father’s scandal came out it was devastating. The man she thought was the perfect Christian man. Who showed her faith and taught her all the qualities and things she should want in her life was a liar!

While Sarah tried to hold it all together the scandal cracked her foundation in such a significant way what everything began to fall apart. Sarah didn’t look at her faith in the same way again. It didn’t have all the answers and how could her father teach and pretend to be the Christian man he was and lie. The further Sarah looked into herself for answers the more unresolved trauma she unearthed. The main one being that she definitely wasn’t straight. But women marry men and create families as god intended. Suddenly Sarah didn’t fit what she always believed was the narrative for everyone. This paradine shift meant she became an outsider in her mind. How could God leave her high and dry like this with no answers. She couldn’t talk to anyone of the faith for fear of prosecution. This internal struggle resulted in the breakdown of her engagement. Her fiancée calling her a Jezebel and harlot for wanting women. That the devil had gotten to her. But he haven’t. She had just discovered this side of herself that she had pushed away.

Then she lost out on the role of partner at the firm. Turns out when your father who is well known in the business world has a huge nationwide scandal they don’t want your name attached to theirs. In fact they fired her and kept her away from the high paying important clients. It was a true kick in the teeth. Sarah had given everything to that firm. She worked constantly. Never taking time off, always on call and getting the best for her clients. She spent time money and all her energy to get to the top and all they did was take her success for their own and push her aside.

Then the final straw was when she lost her parents approval. Sarahs head was scrambled. Her father was an adulterous, she was queer, her engagement was over, she was still queer, and now she had lost her job. So she headed home. To whatever sanctuary she had left in her mother. But as she laid on her mother’s bed crying about her losses and seeking comfort she came out and her conservative mother after losing her husband couldn’t have a queer daughter with no prospects. She threw Sarah out.

There she was distraught wandering the streets of LA in the middle of the night. Her perfect hair matted, her perfect makeup smudged with mascara running down her face. One of her jimmy choo heals snapped. No where to go, nothing to do, no one to love.

Sarah took to a bar to drown her sorrows. She had reached such a dark place that she thought why not end it all. She was a disgrace to her family and to God. It was as she was drinkunly wandering to find the nearest bridge that this person stopped her and spoke with her. The first person with no judgement. That is how she met Guru Daksha Kumari. Daksha took Sarah in that night. Gave her a safe place to crash and the next morning Sarah awoke to Daksha doing yoga stretches and chanting mantras while this enchanting smell of incense filled the air. Sarah although a novice joined Daksha that day and a whole new world was opened up to her.

Chakras, energy, healing, vibrations, crystals, meditation, Sarah found a whole new world in holistic medicine. She went on a journey of heating around the world and learnt from shamans and healers. She healed herself and gained a whole new outlook on life. Accepting God in a different way and embracing a many faceted spirituality. She discovered spiritual gifts and could see people’s auras.

Sarah left the corporate world. She left New York. She left her material things and she left the religion she knew and found a new life. Now she lives by energy and auras. She works with a higher power and all this discovery allowed her to accept her queer self and the love she can give to anyone. Upon returning to LA Sarah started Peaceful Harmony retreat and specialises in chakra healing, meditation, and yoga. Helping people unlock their true spiritual potential.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Russell and Judy Fabray, agent and actress, the perfect couple. Heads of a “perfect” Christian family. Even if behind closed doors they were far from perfect, with Russell’s temper often getting the better of him. In 2007, however, that perfect image was shattered, when the first, of many, of Russell’s affairs became public knowledge. Judy divorced him as soon as she could, but his lawyers and personal PR did their best to bury it all, he still needed to uphold his image as a “Man of God” even if it was far from the truth.

[sahidchettair]

DENOUNCE part I

The story of how Sahid became the town’s least loved individual. 

Sahid’s interest in Hinduism had started on a random day, thinking about their father, about what little they could still remember of him. Dark eyes, dark hair, a radiant smile, and the stories. The stories were what still haunted them, even though they could only remember small imaginative images, little extracts of a complete saga. When they closed their eyes they could envision a lady with blue skin, or a man with blue skin and swords. They could see a man with the head of an Elephant, and a man with two women looking like they had just descended from the sky. It was vague, all of it was vague, and in that moment they wanted to be able to remember everything. 

It wasn’t hard to find information on Hinduism, the first time Sahid had pretended it was an assignment for school. Their step-father checked the browser history and found the many websites that Sahid had opened over the course of the week, and raised an eyebrow. The second time they had focussed their attention on books in the library, even if those were few and far between. The third time Sahid had promised to fix someone’s car in exchange for using their computer for research. The more content they consumed, the clearer it became to them. 

They found believing in Brahman was easy, it was a concept that spoke to them on a level that nothing else had spoken to them before. They knew they had been keeping up with their Dharma in a terrible way. They were not a good son, not a good student, only a good singer on occasion. However, they did believe that Moksha was something that they could obtain if they changed their behaviour. Rituals were not a part of it, but they gave them a sense of contentment, a sense of belonging.

Puja was something they tried to do on a daily basis, it helped them focus, feel closer to their father and at the same time believe that a better life was possible for them. God understood, they knew that. But it had to be done when their parents weren’t home, it had to be done when they were certain they had the place to themselves. They left later for school, the afternoon and early evening lessons and after school daycare gave them more time at home. 

They had hidden a few things in their room that they would get out every time it was time for Puja. Their step-father had gotten rid of all the things that had once belonged to their father, so they needed to create something new. 

They closed the door to their room and sat down in front of their bed-side table, where everything was carefully arranged. They closed their eyes, hummed lowly, repeated a few words in Hindi that they could remember, mashed them with an English translation they had found somewhere. It was a mess, but they didn’t think the words mattered much, it was their soul that spoke after all.

They had settled into a trance, not hearing the door open downstairs, not hearing the footsteps on the stairs, only hearing the presence of another human being when their door was opened. 

Sahid turned quickly, only to see their mother watch them in horror. She understood of course, she only needed a single glance to make the connection. It had been her religion too once. Horror made way for rage. “How dare you!” she snapped, her Hindi accent had never left her voice, but it was clearer when she was angry. 

“Mum,” Sahid replied quickly, pushing themselves from the floor and heading for the door. But she pulled it close before they could reach it. They banged on the door, and heard the key being turned. Their heart sank. 

“Mum, let me out, please, I can explain!” They pounded on the wood. But they heard nothing on the other side. She had moved away from their door, but they didn’t know where in the house she was now. 

Panic grabbed them. They wanted to make for the window. Jump out of it, run for freedom. But that would not solve the problem. They hurried to hide their things again, and could feel their heart thumping in their chest with every single step. Their hands were shaking and their eyes felt wet. 

This was not how it was supposed to go. All their life they had tried to gain their freedom. Some part of them had enjoyed starting a ruckus and never getting caught, another part had known that one day it would all come falling down, and their step-father would turn on them, but it would be something they could still mend. It would be something dumb and while they would shun them, they would also be able to see if Sahid did better. They lived with that idea. 

This wasn’t that. 

Starting fights, stealing, cheating, and pranking people was not the same as this. This would have different consequences. 

They were sitting on their bed, body shaking as they anticipated the consequences, when they heard the door open downstairs. 

“Where is he!?” 

Their stepfather bounded up the stairs, and as the sound of the key spoke through the lock, Sahid stood. They thought they were strong enough to face their stepfather, but one look at his rage, and they felt all their resolve falter. 

“I can explain,” they started, but the man had edged closer and with one push Sahid lost their balance and fell to the floor. 

“What are you thinking?!” he said, bending to grab Sahid by their shirt, pushing them further into the floor.

They saw their mother watching from the opening in the door, her face passive. They couldn’t remember the last time they had ever seen her express any kind of emotion outside of Church, except for that rage earlier, that was the only time. 

“We’re going to the pastor, and you’re going to denounce your heathen faith!” He picked them up from the ground, and dragged them out of the room. “Get into the car,” he said, his voice dangerous. 

“I can explain, in Hindu-” 

The fist connected with their stomach and Sahid went down. They started coughing and put both arms around their belly. 

“Don’t you dare. Your mother warned me, she warned me that you might try to convert back to your father’s faith. I told her that we raised a good Christian boy, now look at you, I should’ve listened to her. Now, GET INTO THE CAR!”

Sahid didn’t try again, they stood wobbly, and made their way down the stairs towards the car, still clutching their stomach. It was parked in the drive, the front door still open. They sat down in the back, feeling terrified and weak. 

About ten minutes later their mother and step-father came out, they didn’t look at them, just sat down in the car. Their stepfather drove them to the Church, pulled Sahid out as if they were some criminal and not the child he had raised for the past sixteen years. 

“You’re going to renounce your faith in front of the pastor, you understand?” their stepfather told them, the edge had not left his voice, it was even more dangerous right now, as if every moment he needed to spend in Sahid’s company was a personal offence. 

Sahid did not denounce their faith. They could believe in Hinduism and Christianity at the same time, they could believe in God and believe in Brahman, but they could not pretend that they didn’t, they were sick of pretending. 

Their stepfather dragged them into the church, and had to drag them out again, one firm hand on the hem of their shirt. Their mother walked behind them as if she was about to attend a funeral. They had been pushed back into the car, and watched as their mother and stepfather discussed the matter. They didn't fight, of course they didn’t, the two parents agreed upon it without needing many words. They got back into the car and drove home.

Sahid listened nauseated to the car engine as it was shut down. Their house suddenly didn’t look so welcoming anymore. 

Their stepfather got out of the car first, and opened the door for Sahid, he looked in, his eyes filled with fire. “I want you gone before I get back from work. I don’t care what you do, everything you leave behind in that room goes to the trash. Don’t you dare try to speak to me or your mother again. I will not have a filthy Hindu as a son.” 

“That’s unfair,” Sahid said, their voice was tight, they looked at the man who they had never actually seen as a father and despite everything they didn’t want to leave the house. They had nowhere else to go. 

There was a moment of pause before Phil reached out and grabbed Sahid’s shirt again, the fabric ripped, but he still got them on their feet and dragged them into the house, up the stairs, and into their room. “Where is the stuff?!”

Sahid shook their head, they knew what that meant. “No!” they said, tears in their eyes. 

“Stop crying, you freak!” their stepfather screamed, pushing Sahid to the wall. He studied their face, and of course it wasn’t long before their eyes gave enough away. He moved in a direct line to the box that was hidden under the bed.

“No!” Sahid yelled again, following the larger man and trying to push him out of the way to get to the box. 

Phil fell into the side table, it broke under his weight. “You-!” He got up quickly enough, kicked Sahid in the shin before they could reach for the box. His hands grabbed for the box and threw it on the bed. Meanwhile Sahid had already regained their balance and wrestled their stepfather away from the box again. “Leave that!” 

Sahid grabbed the box and jumped over the bed, hoping to put some distance between the two of them. They could never count on their stepfather playing fair however. Soon as they bolted for the door, Phil threw a piece of the table at them. It hit them against the side of their head, and they lost their balance, crashing against the wall. 

Their stepfather grabbed for the box, ripping it from their hands and throwing the contents on the bed. He grabbed the small postcard of Shiva first, holding it in front of Sahid. “Are these your fake gods?!” he roared, then ripped it in half. 

Rage washed over them, they tackled their stepfather right into the wall, who grunted at the impact and almost went limp. Sahid grabbed the two pieces of the postcard from him, and then quickly threw the contents back into the box. 

“Phil!” Their mother was standing in the doorway, looking at Sahid as if they were no longer hers. “What have you done to him!?”

“He attacked me,” Sahid said, moving out of the way so their mom could go to Phil. “He-”

“Get out!” their mother shouted. “Get out now! I don’t wish to see you ever again!” 

They reached for their school bag and held the box against their chest before they ran out of the house, jumping into their car and driving off with no destination in mind.

[shadowknight465]

The heretic inside us all

I should, I shouldn't, I should, I shouldn't...

He whispered to himself while plucking the flower's petals. Maybe those things are lying to him, and because he has such a bad reputation, he doesn't know if he should talk to the Priest about them. Maybe if he does it would be another excuse for the Priest to tell more lies about him. Then again that Priest was creeping at one of his secret students. Making her feel uncomfortable. Or if he goes to detail on what those things look like he'll probably give him the answer, and maybe some holy charms to ward them off. Whatever the case is he has to do it at midnight to not draw any attention. But first he has to tell Dream, so he wouldn't be worried. He went back to his house feeling lucky that it's a Sunday. When he got home he instantly made himself some lunch and went to the well for a drink. He may not be a religious person, but Sunday is his favorite day. Where he can be alone for once, he knows the Bible well, but the real reason why he stopped becoming a Christian devoted man was because God never answered his prayers, and he saw how people use their religion as an excuse for being horrible people, and he doesn't want to be just like them. Still he can't change their perspective of things, and it will kept that way. He was probably asleep when Dream came back, because when he woke up the first thing he saw was the face of a green caterpillar. He slowly got up, and asked Dream what time it was. To which his brother pouted saying Nightmare can never be scared. Nightmare sighs with annoyance, and asks Dream what time it is again. Dream blinked, "Oh! Umm.. I didn't check the sundial, or in this case the moon-dial?" As Dream collects his thoughts, Nightmare walks to the sundial room. Midnight. Perfect. Nightmare grabbed his cloak, took off his crown, put the mysterious book under his shirt, and told Dream that he'll be back in five minutes.

He hope that even the Priest can help him about his supernatural encounters.  Who knows maybe the Priest will help him.  He went outside, and silently walked to the church building, later knocking on the door. "Come in my child are you trying to get closer the Lord, or are you committed a sin for me to give you forgiveness-Oh it's you." The priest said as he open the door. Nightmare doesn't need to look at him in the eye to know that the priest hate him with every ounce of his being. "I didn't came for either of those things, I just want to tell you that I've been supernatural encounters with ghostly creatures." Nightmare explained. He's wished that he told his brother earlier, but Dream will probably think he's insane. "What kind of ghostly encounters you demon?" The Priest ask with a bitter taste in his beak.  "Ghosts that are telling me that I'm their king or emperor-whatever the case is of their realm." Nightmare explained.

"Which is?" The Priest asked suspiciously.

"The Necro empire-" The Priest put his left-wing on Nightmare's head. "If this creature lied, then may God strike him dead." The Priest commanded to God. Nothing happened. "I guess you were telling the truth after all, and I never thought I will say this to a disgusting demon like you, but I'm afraid that even I can't help you."

"H-how come?" Nightmare started to get worried. "Because I know what the creatures are, but we banned all knowledge of them for this good village safety."

"And why is that? What they will do?" Nightmare pleaded for answers.

"They causes pain to those who has hurt you, and cause greater pain to the  people who had hurt you unintentionally. There's got to be a reason why they're doing this unless..."  The Priest turned to Nightmare. "You haven't sold your soul to the devil have you?"

Nightmare was shocked with disgust. "No, I haven't."

"Are you sure? Because the only way they can come back is if you sold your soul to these devils." The Priest explains. "I swear your holiness I didn't sell anything to the devils." Nightmare pleaded. "LIES!" The Priest voice boomed the building. "AND I BET THAT THE TRUE REASON THAT GOD DIDN'T STRUCK YOU DEAD JUST THAT EVEN HE HAS FORGOTTEN YOUR WRETCHED SOUL!" Nightmare dropped to his knees for he cannot stand the loud noises, one of the biggest reasons he hates going to church. "ARE YOU CRYING BECAUSE ITS TRUE?!" The Priest yelled at him. Nightmare, while trying his best to calm himself down pleaded. "N-No pictures I-I can't stand the booming sounds..."

"EXCUSES!" The Priest yelled. "N-No it's true." Nightmare tries to defend himself with words.

"GUARDS! GUARDS! TAKE THIS HEINOUS BEAST AND PUT HIM INTO THE CELL!" Nightmare heard The holy man yelled. He can feel the guards strong grip as his eyes were closed the entire time.

What has he put himself into?

~~~~~

Morning has arrived as Nightmare open his eyes blinded by the sun's harsh light, and felt a hard cold surface on his lower legs. He quickly regain his focus, and saw he was in the middle of a courtroom. People gathered all around him. Some were smiling, probably to see the torture. He seen one-too many courts to know what's going to happen to him. As he scanned around the room he felt a negative aura and headed straight towards it, seeing Dream crying.

Maybe it was a bad idea at all...

He thought to himself. "Nightmare." A deep voice echoed the room. Nightmare turned to the voice and in the minute he saw the court robes, he knew what this means. And knew there was no chance of him winning.

"So, Nightmare you were always the questionable person in this entire village, and for that we leave you alone," The judge begins his speech.

Lies...

Nightmare thought as he gave the jury a death glare.

"But now our holy man said that you sold your soul to beings that should not be named."

"I'm was telling the truth..." He mutters to himself. 

"What was that you say?"  The judge ask. Nightmare look up.

"Well?" The judge ask getting a little more impatient.

Nightmare sigh figures if he's going to be on trail he might as well try to prove himself to be innocent. "I said I was telling the truth." Nightmare repeated himself. "And why should we believe you." The Priest asked glaring at him, Nightmare didn't need to see the smile to know that the priest was enjoying this. "Should I get someone to defend me while all of you are against me?" Nightmare asked reminding everyone of the rules when it comes to trials. "In trials like this the defendant doesn't need to be defended." The judge explains to him. It wasn't a huge surprise for Nightmare. Which he couldn't care less. He does care that his brother has to be in the court room however and who knows if they've lie to Dream that he can't be defending Nightmare. "Anymore questions you want to ask before we get started Nightmare?" The judge asked to him. Nightmare shook his head. "Then let the trial begin." The judge announce.

"Nightmare you have been accused of selling your soul to they who shall not be named, is that true?" He said. Nightmare kept his head down, not because he was angry he's just uncomfortable of talking to strangers in the eye. "About the accused? Yes. But about the story? No." Nightmare replies. "So why do you have this book our holy man found underneath your shirt?" The judge asked. Nightmare had forgotten about it. "I was going to ask him about the strange book. Because it keeps saying things about the dead and the Moon King, including the value of lives." Nightmare told to court. "And where did you found it?" The judge asked. Nightmare kept quiet knowing they'll destroy one of his safe place if he told them. "ANSWER ME!" The judge voice echo the room. "It appeared out of nowhere." Nightmare partly told the truth. Then, one of the gaurds came up to Nightmare; towering over him as Nightmare was tied down. And with brute strength the guard throw punches and kicks at him. Then as if command, rips Nightmare's shirt partly to expose some already broken ribs, later grabbed one of them and ripped it out of Nightmare's chest. Nightmare screamed in agony, and losing black blood all over the floor. "Black blood..., so you are evil." Nightmare heard the judge over his pain. "I was just born with it, so it doesn't mean anything." Nightmare tries to reason while still in pain. The Judge and the guard both nodded while looking at each other. He had seen this before, and knows it isn't good. The Guard went to the back to come back later with a war hammer, and raise it over his head. Nightmare had to close his eyes to try to imagine he's in a different situation. And he would have succeeded if the hammer wasn't so fast when it hit the right side of his skull. Now half blinded he try to find Dream in the crowd, but couldn't see him. All he could see on his right side is black with a hot yet cold substance over the side of his skull. He tries to reason with himself to where his brother could be, till he heard two bronze doors slammed. "Do I need to go on with your crimes?" The judge asked. Nightmare was in so much pain that he couldn't hear what the judge, or anyone is saying. "Your silence has answered at all." The judge calmly said. "You were accused of kidnapping children, and teach them about witchcraft. Is that true?" Nightmare heard as his pain ease for a bit. "I would never kidnap a child, and I wasn't teaching them about witchcraft I was teaching them about how to read and write; something that you wouldn't dare do." Nightmare answered with disgust. He may known a bit of magic himself, but those are white magic he has been using, not black magic. "We have a church Nightmare," The judge reply. "and that is all what the children need to know." He continued. "Well maybe some kids wanted to know how to read the Bible on their own, and how write their names." Nightmare respond. "But you did kept a little boy, and didn't bring him back till the next day." The judge remind. "I was worried about his mom would do to him after his dad died. And I saw how she treated him after the funeral such as, blaming him over her husband's death when it was clearly not his fault. And later told him that he should replace his father." Nightmare explains. "Am I not allowed to worry about my neighbors' safety? Do I need to tell everyone that our strongest man try to commit rape to a little girl?" Nightmare reasoned with the court. "He would never do it, but you would." Nightmare heard someone, but he ignored it. "I also have met a few children who had heartbreaking stories such as, one little girl who was forced to touch our priest in areas that made her feel uncomfortable, as she could do nothing about it."

"That still doesn't give you the excuse on practicing witchcraft..." The judge reminded. "The so-called witchcraft I practiced wasn't meant to harm people it was meant to heal. And are we forgetting that we also have Wiccans in our village?" He said. "I'm going to ask you another question then," The judge reply. "Is all of this true about what you are saying?"

Nightmare look at floor from the tiredness, and the pain he was in. "Yes. All that I have said is the truth." Nightmare responded. "One last question Nightmare." The judge asked. This was at the point he knows it's hopeless, and does not care about the visions he started seeing about the Village being burned to the ground. Because all he cares now; is if anyone will listen to him. Or at least tries too.

"Are you afraid of God and his heavenly angels?"

Nightmare with all his strength look at the judge with his good eye-socket, and said in the most calm firm voice. "No. I'm not afraid of any supernatural being of extraordinary powers, because I know the real monsters are all of you."

A moment of silence had filled of room.

"You're an absolute liar, Nightmare." The judge reply with a sick, twisted voice. "And now you shall be sentence to death in front of our very eyes by one of God's angels." As a window flies open leading in a creature that is known as a throne. As it hovers in front Nightmare with its blinding light. Nightmare could see a naked man made out of light. Still not scare for his own life for once. He said to the angel. "I'm not afraid of you, or your God." To his, and everyone else's surprise. The throne breaks the Nightmare chains, and cleans up his spilled blood, later giving him back the mysterious book. Nightmare stood up with all the strength he got, and walk out of the church to be hugged by Dream who is sobbing because he didn't do anything to help him. "Brother?..." Nightmare asked in a weak voice.  Now seeing flashes of his memories. "Yes, Moon?" Dream asked crying over his shoulder. "I need to go back to the in-hill.." Nightmare said as he collapsed. Hearing an echoey distance of his brother calling out his name.

~~~~~~~~~

It was dark again with the same old spirit orbs hovering around him. "Let me guess: It's my time to go." Nightmare smile as he look down. He honestly never thought that he'll have to die like that. It's not like he could control fate anyways. "Actually, this isn't your time yet." A orb reply. "So why are all of you around me? Is it something I had to deal with every time I shut my eyes?" Nightmare asked. "No. We came to tell you about the weapon waiting for you in the ruins."

"Ruins?" Nightmare questioned.

"Yes, the ruins. Of the Celestial half-demons."

Nightmare remember the urban legend that's been spread around for 200 years. About the beginnings in the fall that ruins. About how 12 celestial succubi has seduce 12 powerful heroes, and gave up the daughters to their victims as soon as they were born.  And how the heroes had to give them up so an old man who claims to know celestial beings which includes raising them. The old man then raise, and turn them into 12 types of heroes. Hoping that one of them will become his wife. Unfortunately the old man turns into an abuser as the girls grew up, and start falling in love with each other. Well except for one who thinks she's a boy and is the lunar witch. As if his abuse wasn't enough, she was almost forced into a relationship by the sun paladin, who is in love with her. By making everyone else abuse her to the point they killed her only friend an black owl griffin. All so she can become the witch lover. It unfortunately cause her to lash out on everyone, and ran away to be killed by the old man. And just when you think it's over it turns out the old man killed, and trap the others into their own weapons. Now possessed the weapon they used to wield; they now have no choice, but to wait for a new master. So would that mean Nightmare is gonna have the witch as his weapon?

"I'm not using someone as a weapon." Nightmare said.

"Not like that Nightmare. We mean the warlock, even as a spirit possessing his own weapon can create your weapon." They reasoned with him. Nightmare is sort of satisfied they didn't misgender the warlock like everyone else who had heard about the legend. Nightmare sigh and thought about it. If he agrees, then he'll have to go to the ruins to maybe meet a few of the trapped ghosts, and might died before getting the chance to get it. But if he doesn't they'll probably summon the warlock, and turn him into his slave.

Nightmare took a deep breath. "I'll go to the ruins."

"That's what we like to hear." The orbs said as a blinding light flashes.

~~~~~~~~~

Nightmare woke up again. This time he's in a bathtub with Dream right by his side. From the tear stains on Dream's face; he could tell his brother had been crying a lot.

I shouldn't have let him see me like this.

Nightmare thought as he sigh. Causing Dream to wake up. "You're finally awake." He said this time crying with tears of happiness. "How long have I been asleep?" Nightmare asked. Noticing how dirty the room looked. "Four whole days. I had to have that fire ring thing to help me to not let you die." Dream responded expressing his joy and frustration. "Dream?..." Nightmare said calmly. "YES?!" Dream excitedly replied. "That fire ring thing is called a throne, one of God's highest angels." Nightmare replies with a laugh. "BROTHER YOU NEARLY DIED! YOU SHOULDN'T LAUGH!" Dream yelled in a worry tone. "Sorry, I just can't believe that you forgot one of the legends I told you as a bedtime story ." Nightmare calms down.

"Also, Dream?" Nightmare asked. "Yes?" Dream looked up.

"STILL ALIVE!" Nightmare cheered proudly. "STILL ALIVE!" Dream followed. Nightmare then notice the book Dream has in his hands. "So you found it, huh?" Nightmare reminded Dream. Dream nodded. "I can only make out a few of the words, but I wanna ask you you something." Dream replies. "What is it?" Nightmare asked. "That stick with a crescent moon on it, and the guy in the nun outfit holding it. I saw pictures of how he reaps souls like the Grim Reaper, but there's also some pictures where he heals souls. Like this picture with a disturbing fire creature in it." Dream pointed at the image where it shows the so-called Moon king comforting the fire creature in like it a crying child. "Do you think the creature might evil?" Dream asked. His eyes turned to Nightmare. Nightmare vision turns into a flash. This time seeing the flaming creature crying with Nightmare's hand is touching his cheek bone. "I-I just wanted to g-give you justice.." He said with a voice that sounds similar to Dream, but is overlapping with someone else's. And the smell of his breath is like burnt alcohol. Yet, somehow Nightmare felt that he knew why smelt like that. Just as the flash appeared it disappeared revealing a striking similarity between the creature's face, and Dream's face. "Brother, did you have another vision where you are comforting someone?" Dream asked waking Nightmare up from his thoughts. Nightmare nodded while catching his brother staring at his still-healing ribs. "I'm sorry that you had to witness to trial." Nightmare apologize, trying to figure out if Dream was part of the jury, or if he just snuck in without being detected. "It's not your fault, Nightmare. I heard rumors about you being taken as a prisoner, and I just came to see if it's true. And when I saw you getting beat up, and you nearly losing your right eye socket, I ran away because I was too scared." Dream confesses. "Actually it was my fault if I haven't come to the priest; None would happen." Nightmare reminded Dream. "Also I think you should enough tears for a few days. You should go to get some sleep." Nightmare suggested. Dream nodded as he walked back to his own bedroom. Nightmare took a look at the place where one of his ribs that got ripped off was on a table right next to him with a note reading. "Put it back on him as soon as he wakes up." Nightmare guesses it was probably meant for Dream. So he put it back to its original place and wait for the water to heal it.

I survive yet again..

Nightmare thought as he relaxes in the bath. Nightmare looks around to find his journal which had a few scratch and bite marks on it indicating Dream might've tried to read it. Nightmare then chuckled as he opens it with a charm spell, finds a quill and begans writing.

June 26 , 1517

It had been a while since I wrote the last entry, and it was because I try talking to the priest about my visions plus the supernatural encounters, but I ended up getting trialed, and was tortured there. Royal guards beat me up, and they trying to destroy my skull with a Warhammer. And unfortunately my brother, Dream had to see it. They all try to sentence me to death by an throne's hand, but the throne has shown mercy on me. Maybe it's because even God is disgusted by most of the village actions. When I fell unconscious after the trial. The strange beings told me to go to the celestial half-demons ruins where I can get my weapon from the moon warlock. Now thinking about it me in the warlock almost have the same origin story ,but I don't want to end up like him. Or be a vengeful spirit of any kind. Sometimes I believe that we're all heretics, one way or another. Including our holiest men, The Priest and The Judge.

He then put the quill down, and took another shut eye. Without having to worried about death again.

[eldritchsurveys]

209.

Are you a mean drunk? >> Not unless I also happen to have sensory overload or something else that overrides my ability to be sanguine.

Do you listen to a lot of mainstream music? >> Sure, I suppose. To be honest, I’m not sure what qualifies as “mainstream” anymore; I feel like it used to be a lot easier to make that divide.

Do you think you're pretty? >> That’s not the word I’d use, personally.

Have you ever been in a long distance relationship? >> Yes.

Do you go clubbing? >> No.

Are you a hopeless romantic? >> Not unless it’s on behalf of fictional characters.

When do you have to wake up tomorrow? >> Whenever I damn well please.

Do you think Ludacris is ugly? >> No.

Do you fit any stereotype? >> Yeah, probably. Shoving people into stereotypes is kind of an art form amongst us as people, so I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to do it to me.

Do you associate songs with memories? >> Yeah, the things I remember best usually have songs attached to them to help the memory persist.

What's the weather like where you live? >> Right now? Snowy. :|

What's your opinion of Lady Gaga? >> I like her music.

Do you appreciate raunchy humor? >> Sometimes.

Do you ever listen to Lily Allen? >> No.

Have you ever been racist? >> I’m sure I have.

Have you ever added someone you don't know on Facebook? >> No.

Do you make playlists? >> I have a couple on Spotify but I rarely do anything with them. Except for the Shower playlist, because obviously I use that when I shower.

What's your worst feature? >> *shrug*

Have you ever kept a diary? >> I’ve kept quite a few.

Do you actually use your calendar? >> I don’t have a [paper] calendar.

Do you have dirty pictures in your phone? >> No.

Have you ever looked up porn on the internet? >> Yes.

Are you an angry person? >> Yeah, I’m pretty angry about some things. Mostly it manifests as depression, because I’m not really aggressive by nature.

Are you close with your family? >> ---

What kind of music do you listen to when you're sad? >> Usually just stuff I like. I don’t necessarily gravitate towards sad-sounding music.

Do you like hippie jewlery? >> Uh.

Have you ever used the word "groovy"? >> Probably.

What are your grades like? >> ---

Have you ever watched the original british skins? >> No.

Do you like oreos? >> No. I do like crushed-up Oreo (the cookie part) in like McFlurries and shit. I like the texture.

Have you ever had a sex dream about someone you barely know? >> Most of my sex dreams have been about either celebrities or some NPC my brain made up for the purpose of the dream.

Were you a cute baby? >> I don’t know, probably.

Do you ever listen to angry girl music? >> Uh...

Would you ever shoot someone right in the face? >> Probably not.

Have you ever sold drugs? >> No. I mean, let’s be real, even if I had I probably wouldn’t tell the internet.

What color are your headphones? >> Black.

What are you like first thing in the morning? >> It depends on how I woke up.

Do you get crazy sex hair? >> No.

Do you download your music illegaly? >> Not anymore, I just use Spotify now. It’s easier.

Have you ever crashed a wedding? >> No.

Were you a blink 182 fan back in the day? >> No, I just liked a couple of songs.

Were you ugly in middle school? >> To me, I was.

Have you ever been to Boulder Colorado? >> No.

Do you rage against conformity? >> Not necessarily.

Have you ever yelled at a self check out machine? >> No. Sparrow does that sometimes, but they don’t really frustrate me.

Have you ever been shot? >> No.

Is everything going to be okay? >> I mean, yeah. Eventually we’ll be dead, which automatically means we’ll not have anything else to worry about, so.

Are you stoned right now? >> No.

Do you listen to Sublime? >> I listen to two Sublime songs.

Has someone ever understood you more than your understood yourself? >> I don’t think so.

Are you on good terms with your parents? >> ---

Have you ever written a letter to Santa just for kicks? >> No.

What's your opinion on border control? >> I avoid forming yes/no opinions about complicated issues that I know I don’t understand the full extent of.

Do some people have way too much time on their hands? >> I don’t know, maybe. Depends on how they feel about it.

Do you ever drink 5 hour energy shots? >> I drank this ONCE and it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever tasted. ...It did work, though, I’ll say that much. But it really ain’t worth it for me.

Does country music ever make you cry? >> I don’t listen to enough of it to have had that experience.

Have you ever had a moment so wonderful it felt like magic? >> Yeah.

Have you ever snorted pixie sticks? >> Yeah, lmao.

Are you okay on your own? >> I am, generally.

Does your face twitch when you're about to cry? >> I don’t think so.

If heaven and hell are real, which one are you going to? >> Well, I don’t know. Because some doctrine says that if you’ve ever at all said the words “I accept Christ as lord and saviour”, then you’re perma-covered like some divinely good health insurance, and all your sins past present and future are forgiven and so on. And I did say those words as a child, because I was raised Christian... so even though I don’t consider myself Christian now, I wonder if there’s like a “no-takebacksies” kind of thing going on and St Peter would have to let me in the pearly gates regardless because of what I said when I was like eight. Or maybe another sect is right, and I’m going to Hell because [I’m a heathen/I’m queer/I don’t go to church/I say “goddamn” and “fuck” a lot]. Seems to me like it’s a crapshoot regardless.

Have you ever had a premonition? >> I don’t know, maybe.

Did you ever try cutting yourself? >> Yeah. Succeeded, too.

Do empty streets creep you out? >> Sometimes.

Have you ever seen your dad cry? >> No.

What's the last concert you went to? >> Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Have you ever gotten sick of taking about yourself? >> No. Hence why I’m still taking these 10+ years later.

Could you ever be a therapist? >> No.

Have you ever made yourself throw up? >> Yeah.

Do you know someone who looks like one of the beach boys? >> I don’t know, I’m not sure what the Beach Boys even look like.

Are your nails currently painted pink or purple? >> No.

Do you adore mini sticky notes? >> Uh, no. I mean, they’re convenient and all, but I’m not in love with them or anything.

Do you have bad short term memory? >> Not spectacularly.

What's a song that will always give you the chills? >> I don’t know.

Have you had any major tragedies in your life? >> No.

What do you think of open casket funerals? >> I think they’re creepy as all hell-- not the “looking at a dead body” part, that makes sense to me, it’s just the painting-up of the dead body so they look... like they’re sleeping??? How does that help? I thought the point of viewing the body was to come to terms with the fact that said person is in fact dead and aid the grieving process. What purpose does the makeup serve? (I’m not terribly fond of the funeral industry in general, if that’s any indication.)

Are you bad at spelling? >> No.

Have you ever had a pet rat? >> No.

What do you binge on? >> Uh... nothing? I guess?

Do you want a cigarette right now? >> Nope.

Can you shake your ass? >> A bit.

Do you know someone named Dick? >> No.

Do you have a childish sense of humor? >> I don’t think so? I mean, maybe. I would laugh at silly things kids laugh at, but I don’t think that makes my humour childish, per se.

Do you like free samples? >> I mean, sure.

Are you a coupon fiend? >> No.

Who would you love to be with right now? >> Hm.

Could you go a year without sex? >> Yes, and longer besides.

Are you wearing any rings? >> No.

Are you homophobic? >> No, but I’ve done things that would be considered homophobic because I didn’t know any better at the time.

Do spiders make you jump around and squeal like a little girl? >> No.

Are you a sexist pig? >> No, but see the homophobia answer.

Have you screamed at anyone in the past week? >> No.

Do you have road rage? >> No.

Have you ever made yourself look like a fool for love? >> I don’t know, probably.

Did you ever see the harry potter movies on opening night? >> No.

Could you ever eat a worm? >> If I had a compelling enough reason to, sure.

Do you have low self esteem? >> Sometimes.

When you hang out with someone a lot do you start to pick up their habits? >> Some of them, yeah. It’s part of the whole masking thing-- mirroring is a masking cheat code.

Have you ever called your mom a bitch? >> ---

Do you have a cute laugh? >> I don’t know???

Do you write on your arms/hands? >> I used to, but I don’t have much reason to anymore.

Do you believe that you can get ink poisoning from that? >> No.

Do you think you're gonna sleep okay tonight? >> All one can do is hope.

[infiniteglitterfall]

are aces lgbt?

The exclusionist argument always seems to boil down to, “I don’t hear aces describing any experiences I relate to, so they’re not lgbt.” 

I think we’re going about this backwards. 

If that’s the way people want to define it, we should be listing things that are obviously examples of “lgbt” oppression,” like • being kicked out,  • getting raped by someone who wants to change your sexual orientation, not just because you said no or because misogyny, • harassed at church, work, or school, • being threatened with or sent to conversion therapy, etc., 

and then seeing if aces also experience them. 

Sorry, I put kind of a lot of examples of these in the first section. It was really hard to restrain myself because there were just SO MANY. I tried not to do 5 examples for every single one at least.... 

Step 1: what kind of oppression do lgbt+ people experience?  

• 30% more harassment, 221% more sexual assault, 100% more intimate partner violence, and 277% more stalking than straight people.

conversion therapy and rejection at church

1. “I was sent [to conversion therapy by my church] to be barraged [with] self doubt and shame until I became afraid to even look at the same gender.... The distinction is often made that [conversion therapy would] be 'against your will’ but that isn’t nearly as cut and dry as it sounds. When you are publicly shamed by your congregation (if 'accused’ in a religious setting) you may very well agree to conversion therapy as your only option. Especially if your a minor like I was. ”

2. “When a preacher found out [about my sexual orientation] he recommended conversion therapy – even before i had come out as pan or trans.... guess who was told by members of their church to go to hell when they came out...? Me!” 

3. “So, I’m a Christian. Was raised by and still live with a super conservative Christian family. Babysit for a super conservative Christian small group. Live in a super conservative Christian neighbourhood. Went to a super conservative Christian summer camp literally every summer of my life. 

“Basically I’ve met a lot of conservative Christians.... [What they tell me is people like me] are ‘unnatural’. That it’s a shame they’ll never be able to fulfill their ‘God given duty’ AKA get married and create lots of little conservative Christians. That they’re sick and should be treated so they can experience true happiness some day AKA marriage and creating lots of little conservative Christians.”

4. “I'm a victim of corrective assault, been threatened with conversion therapy, been forced to medicate to ‘fix’ my sexuality and been threatened by pastors of my church. I'm just so upset.”

5. “[My mom] believes its a mental issue and wants me to start corrective therapy Monday. Why can't she just accept me as me, why do I need ‘fixed’"

corrective rape

1. “[When we talk about corrective rape], we’re talking about the so-called friend, the ex boyfriend, who I got along with just fine after we stopped trying to date, right up until he cornered me outside of Prom. We’re talking about the guy who’d been told by someone else I considered a friend all about [me questioning my sexual orientation]. Who kept oh-so-considerately telling me that he was doing this for my sake, that after I understood how good it felt, I’d be normal.” 

2. “my ex-boyfriend... decided to trick me into drinking, manipulate me emotionally, and force me into sexual situations after I came out to him because he thought he could fix me and didn’t stop even after multiple failed attempts.”

3. “[my rope partner] decided to trick me into drinking, manipulate me emotionally, and force me into sexual situations after I came out to him because he thought he could convince me I wasn’t.”

4. “When I came out [to my mum], she starting to force me to date girls so I would have sex with them (to 'fix' me) and even took me to the doctors and my endocrinologist to get my hormones checked since she was convinced there was something really wrong with me.”

5. “He started by pressuring me assuming it was a mental health issue, he already knew I had many, he assumed if I had adequate access to counselling I would be “fixed” He blamed it on everything from my childhood to my self esteem.

“And then he decided it was because I’d never had sex. He raped me at least 6 times, I dissociated a lot of the relationship but I know there were 6 places where it happened, I don’t know how many times it happened in any given place though. He told me that I should be happy because it proved I was wanted, that eventually I’ll like it, and that he needed to make me “whole” He said that he knew that there was a straight girl underneath everything who just needed to know that it was ‘okay to be sexual.’”

getting kicked out

1. “my mom threatens to throw me out if I so much as bring it up“

2. “When I was house hopping, basically homeless as a young adult, my roommates would kick me out for not having sex with them. [Being out of the closet] got me homeless and back with my abusive mother.”

3. “I'm an 17 year old... and a junior in high school. I came out... to my family the other day and it went so horribly wrong. My own parents accused me of being some odd freak that's not human and just... kicked me out. I only have my clothes, computer and such electronics, 100 dollars and my cat. I'm living in a friend's basement. I wanted to go to college and earn a masters degree... but I have nothing. I'm so lost. I don't know what to do.”

4. “I know for a fact if my mom finds out I'll be homeless on the streets myself.”

5. “I [was] forced to have intercourse to try keeping my abuser from making me homeless... constantly [using my sexual orientation to]... threaten to kick me out 24/7.”

general familial rejection

1. “i've heard 'i was threatened with being kicked out of my house' so, so many times. also 'i was abused/hit when i came out'. most ppl just went back into the closet and lied.” 

2. “My ex boyfriend sexually assaulted me [when I came out]. People have mocked me constantly for it. My parents put me in therapy for it.“

3. “I’ve tried to come out to my parents so many times and my dad doesn’t believe me, and my mom thinks it means there’s something wrong with me!”

4. “I just recently went to a family reunion and... I confided in a cousin about [my sexual orientation] and of course he told everyone, then they all legit got angry at me [for it]. Asking me how it happened, telling me it wasn't real, it got to the point where they screamed at me then my aunt started setting me up with guys in her neighborhood.”

5. “Mi padre dice que... es una moda y que son "subnormales" les que lo son.  Me quiero ir de casa. [broken heart emoji]” (translation: “My father says that [my sexual orientation is] a fad and that people like that are ‘subnormal.’ I want to leave the house. [broken heart emoji]”)

harassment at work or school

1. “i overheard my boss discussing ways to get me to leave. somehow, and i don’t know how, he saw some of my tweets talking about [my sexual orientation]. he’s of the option that [it] is some disease, that it goes hand in hand with being devoid of emotions somehow, and that because of that i can’t possibly be a good teacher because i am incapable of empathy for the children and i am mentally ill.

“sure. he can’t fire me for that. but he sure can make my work environment so stressful, uncomfortable, and downright hostile. and he can do that so much it will make me quit. i didn’t want to let him win, but like. i was legitimately suicidal because of the environment at work and i felt like i had to quit.”

2. “I'm actually one of those... who have been denied a job simply because of my [sexuality]! last year the college I go to was looking for a counselor for the younger classes, something I've wanted to do! a week after I applied, I got an email saying that while I was qualified they saw my... posts [about sexual orientation] on my FB and didnt want to hire me because they were afraid I wouldn't be able to positively connect to others!”

3. “I'd like to chime in on the whole workplace thing. In my experience, yes, [even if you’re not out], they can tell. They'll notice that you don't have [or at least don’t talk about] a significant other. They'll notice when you don't join in certain conversations, especially ones talking about relationships and ‘hot’ people. They'll notice. And, if my experiences are any indication, they'll talk about you behind your back.”

4. “I spent half of my freshman year math class tensed up in terror, trying to ignore the boy with his hand up my shirt because he'd threatened to out me to my parents if I told a soul - and my parents would have put me in therapy....”

abuse within the mental health system

1. “i have severe depression and about a year ago i had checked myself into a mental hospital because i knew i couldn’t keep myself safe. the hospital felt like a safe space to me and at one point during conversation i came out.... one of the patients, a male much older than me, began to tell me how... he would [sexually] touch me. he was very graphic about how and where he would touch me. everyone in the room cheered and laughed. i was terrified.... two days later i attempted suicide. i was immediately sent to another mental hospital. this time involuntarily.“ 

2. “How do I quantify my experience with that therapist? Do I drop names? I’m certain he’s still billing himself as a gender specialist.... And I mean, I was extra-complicated, is it really his fault I got messed up, that CBT backfired so hard?

“Yes, actually. Yes, it’s his fault.

“Sometimes now I even call that experience abusive. Certainly gaslighting.

“There was so much ‘you overattach to labels and overthink everything’ as a Solution? But most of all, the “this again?” was the worst. The ‘we’ve covered this, you’re not X, that’s your disordered thinking again.’

“And any time I mentioned that, it was all awkward and unanticipated and sorry-you-feel-that-way(-it’s-your-brain-again)(-couldn’t-have-known).

"Then last summer I realized I was autistic, and he laughed at the mere idea, and I isolated until I ended up in the psych hospital.”

3. “When I was 19, I was in therapy trying to deal with depression and anxiety (and honestly a lot of child abuse I didn’t realize was abuse at the time).  My therapist... made a lot of homophobic statements, didn’t believe bisexuality was a thing either... INSISTED that I ‘just didn’t want to get better’.... He gave a male client my contact information, pushed me to go on a date for multiple sessions, and pressured me to have sex when I said I didn’t want to.

“I was raped.”

4. “I love not being able to talk to my psychologist about my issues [around sexuality] because if we do she'll suggest conversion therapy for me again. Feels good, feels organic” 

Step 2. compare the above to studies that include aces, and to the personal stories of aces

wait, we don’t have to. 

all of the above examples are actually by and about aces. 

and no, the study results linked at the top are not from the “group x” one about who people imagine they’d discriminate against. it’s a totally separate university study that asked about what people had actually experienced.

[americanbackyard]

Our Rise, Our Fall

One of the most focal things we have been shown in trumpland is his followers, his fans. There is a difference between supporters and fans in that a supporter can be shown reasons why not to support someone or something and there is a possibility that they might change their mind. A fan is much harder to convince that the object of their affection is not worthy of their time or emotions. Trump is one of a million to hold some kind of shine to people and become an icon in the culture of America. Or at least part of America. Not the good part...

A unique thing has happened in the case of trump's popularity in that we can now clearly see that many Americans do not pay attention to anything beyond tabloid type information, regardless of the nearly unlimited amount of real information available at no cost to them. We can now plainly see that there are many stubborn and selfish people out there who refuse to look into things for themselves and choose to join mobs of others who act and react the same way. These are the rabid fans. In the case of donald trump and what they believe him to be, they show us that their lives are not their own, even if they claim to want to be left alone by government and those who are not like them, ie; white christian republicans. The amount of hypocrisy is astounding with these people and there is no way to convince them of the ridiculousness of their ways. Yet they function in society somehow. Amazing how the human psyche works. This is the survival instinct that we see in homeless people who appear to have lost their minds yet still build a shelter of discarded objects and scrounge for food. Rabid fans build a shelter of twisted ideals and scrounge for justification of what really boils down to bigotry and stupidity.

For decades trump has been in the B-level news as if he were the only person with money, surrounded by women and golden objects and living in a towering palace and blah blah blah. Anyone who took a few minutes here and there over the years and actually read anything at all about the man could have seen that this is not the case. What we are able to see now about his history, regardless of seeing his taxes shows that he is a dime-a-dozen developer with no peers and no friends, a multiple bankruptcy failure, a man with dreams but only of himself, which he is unable to make come true due to his own lack of intellect or determination, a con man and a grifter, plus a racist. There is nothing at all to like about this man and nothing to worship as some do.

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions...” - 2 Timothy 4:3 (1)

Even those who call themselves Christians who are fans of trump obviously have not read or begun to comprehend the scripture on which their supposed faith is from. Besides the religious aspect of The Bible there are many practicle warnings to heed and advice to be taken. Rabid trump fans do not take advice nor do they heed warnings. If they did, they would not be rabid trump fans. As we have seen for decades this is nothing new though, as televangelists and now trump's “spiritual advisor”, herself a complete fraud, screw over their flocks every second of every sermon... Why are people so gullible? Why are they so desperate? Could it be the same thing that causes people to worship deities that promise a better “life” after death? Try living in the now for God's sake, so to speak.

For some reason, people are able to overlook things like racism, perversion, fraud, lies, and other acts of diminished ethics if what they see is a shiny extension of the worst part of themselves that makes them feel better about being shitty, for lack of better words. I'd imagine they were raised to be that way as they likely did not learn that as an adult, at work, or in college or church, although looking at the messages of some churches, like the Westboro Baptist Church, or various colleges like Liberty University, it is possible but people were attracted to those places for some reason in the first place, and look at some of the fine people they churn out. Also there are many people in history that are beloved but had things about them that would make a normal person cringe. Historical figures today that are relished, and I don't just mean with confederate statues, which is a fine example of praising the wrong people, but popular politicians, athletes, entertainers or religious figures that were racist, child molesters, rapists, or a variety of other things that if your neighbor were one, you would want to kick their ass halfway to New Zealand.

What it comes down to is that people need to look at the reality of other people around them and understand what is real and what it not and how their own lives and the lives of those around them are more important than the lives of who they are fans of, and how they all connect. It's called “getting fucking real”, something that many forget. “Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel universe—one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light-years beyond our reach. Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problems—failed marriages, hardscrabble upbringings, bad career decisions—and we can relate. The paparazzi catch them in wet hair and a stained T-shirt, and we're thrilled. They're ordinary folks, just like us. And yet… Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by comparison. ” (2) Again, get a fucking life... But they are unable. Why? And how can we help them to help themselves and not affect us all and the whole planet really by not making stupid decisions based on falsehoods and unreality and believing in people like donald trump, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Paula White, Pat Robertson, Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, etc. We cannot. BUT we outnumber them. SO why are we not coming out in droves to defeat the insanity which enables them to continue in their relentlessness path of destruction and jeopardizes all of humanity on a daily basis? Sounds intense but let's face it, the more folks let politics and religion rule their world the more the corporations and pontiffs will take advantage of them. History tells of this over and over and over again. It's nothing new folks...

We are beyond the two party system at this point. It is now a puppet show in front of us while we have become a mob of idiots versus a huge living room of couch potatoes. We let in the interlopers and the freaks and some of us gladly accept them based on their excuses or shiny false badges of honor while others of us say “whatever” and go about dong nothing to stop the inflow of assholes into the system that we trust to run things while we are running the rat race. There are herds of people who are fired up over things that they are told affect them when they absolutely do not, yet they fall for it hook line and stinker singly based upon the emotions and simplicities of their personalities that their new heroes have honed in on to get what they want from them. “...why do people repose blind faith in leaders or ideologies? How is it that otherwise sane and sensible people become moronically incapable of grasping reality? The culprit: our brain. Still evolving and still primitive, it readily sacrifices rational evidence-based conclusions in favor of primal ones. And so conformism trumps individual judgement.” (3) So is it because we are still primitive? Racists have their own ideas about who is primitive but let's face it, the worst degrees of thought in this country are coming from the rightwing white pseudo christians, who pretty much measure up, or down actually, in evolutionary thought when it comes to primal instincts.

Then there are those who won't vote, or get up and stand up.

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight! (4)

On the other hand many are prone to apathy and burnout, due in large part to the overexposure of the right's flock of sheep and the constant pressing of their presence by the wolves that lead them into their dens. “We use voting as a tool to transmit to others who we are,” explains Eyal Winter. An economist, he works at the University of Leicester in England and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. (5) So while the crazies identify with each other and go out and do what they can to make themselves known, others are simply distressed or depressed by it enough to give up and not take the same initiative to go make a difference and fight the powers that suck.

Let's face it though, which party is the one using the Electoral College to silence over three million voters and give trump the win? Which party is guilty of voter suppression in over a dozen cities, that we known of? Which party is guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, poll violations, and supports racism while arguing to abolish immigrants, even legal ones, and who holds children in cages, separates them from their parents forever, allows them to be raped, become sick, or die, and then traffics them out? It's all happening., and we let it.

When will it become unacceptable? When it becomes inconvenient? The easy way out of a major confrontation is to get out there and vote and let your voice be heard. The numbers will speak and cannot be overturned. Not yet at least. Unless we let it. We can easily see the wrongdoing of the right wingers in the discrimination of those who the right hates the most. The GOP is not christian by any means, nor or they civil servants, nor are they compassionate, ethical, scrupulous, professional, or on anyone's side besides their own. They are not the lesser of two evils, they are the evil. The lesser may be the only thing we have to curb them but we can work on that and turn it around. It all starts now, or it never starts, and the end is already here. Will those in the position to make positive change refuse to do so? Forget those who are fooled by it, this is about you, the ones who can make  the difference.

Perhaps both sides choose the path of least resistance. But who controls the controlling factors introducing us to our supposed paths?  That choice is ours alone. Common sense might dictate which side we take but in the end we should all be on the same side. And politics and religion are constantly used to keep us from doing that, so that they benefit and not us, even though we put them in charge, willingly, when we vote for them to “represent” us.

In the end what is it going to be? Are we all on our own? Is it survival of the fittest? Or of the most privileged? Will the meek inherit the Earth, or will the corporate enterprises destroy it? And will we let them? This is why it is imperative at this point to get things straight and not allow the absurd to flourish and to take command of the things that matter rather than allow the power mad to run amok. It's happening all over the world and has been for a very long time. Is it just human destiny then to drive itself into the ground? Perhaps. But if we are to get to the next level of a civil society then we have a lot of work to do.  We ourselves and our fellow humans need to make things work, and not just rely on some suit wearing zombies with a political label. A progressive party is not just a partisan party but one for all, to do what? PROGRESS. There is an entire side that does not get this yet but might learn from example. OUR example. And again, if they won't learn, it does'nt matter if we make our numbers count. They will survive and even thrive, even if they may never accept who helped them do it. That's okay though because that is what a civil society does. It sees a problem, diagnoses it, and urges those around them to try to figure out a solution together without doing further damage or taking the easy way out.

Maybe we are dealing with cognitive dissonance. Or maybe some people are just fucking stupid. I like  to think that nurture plays just as important a role as nature though, and that perhaps one can keep learning throughout life to see the big picture and utilize common sense, or at least common decency. Of course, that can only be taught. Or can it? Altruistic behavior is believed by some to be hereditary in many species, so hope is not be abandoned. As easily as hope may be offered up in the form of security and salvation in sensible terms, it can be sold too as something entirely different than what it actually is defined as, something redefined and repackaged by untruths and lust for power. Thus, the rabid trump fans. The ultra right wingers. The fanatical conservatives. The crazy republicans. Not all people on the right are evil, many just conveniently go along with their dimensions which they find themselves lazily confined in. We need to agree on a middle ground of decency and intelligence, of fairness and unity, and only voting and voicing will present that to those who cannot or will not see it. They won't change their minds and we can't change it for them, so we have to change ours and let them see what we can do together.

For once in my life I've got something to say I wanna say it now for now is today A love has been given so why not enjoy So let's all grab and let's all enjoy!

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

Just take a look around you What do you see? Kids with feelings Like you and me Understand him, he'll understand you For you are him, and he is you

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

I don't want to be rejected I don't want to be denied Then its not my misfortune That I've opened up your eyes

Freedom is given Speak how you feel I have no freedom How do you feel?

They can lie to my face But not to my heart If we all stand together It will just be the start

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided

If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided If the kids are united Then we'll never be divided (6)

(1) The Bible

(2) Psychology Today, Carlin Flora, July 1, 2004

(3) DAWN, Peter Hoodbhoy, August 8, 2015

(4) Bob Marley, Get Up Stand Up, 1973

(5) Science News For Students, Bethany Brookshire, November 7, 2016

(6) Sham 69, If The Kids Are United, 1978

[forceyourway]

Tree of Life Shadow Work Challenge

Day Ten: “What aspects of my religious background might I benefit from taking into consideration?”

(Using Loki’s tarot deck, “The Raven’s Prophecy Tarot”) So I had every day pre-drawn, so I don’t repeat cards or anything, but I seem to have accidentally deleted the picture of all the cards. I guess I’ll be drawing day-by-day now. Expect repeats and sudden multiple-card spreads.

Seven of Cups - This is about wishful thinking and temptation; multiple paths lie ahead, but some of them are only imagined. This doesn’t refer to Christianity, but to where I am right now. “My religious background” can easily be replaced with “fate,” for clarity. I have been thinking a lot lately about this Shadow Work, and in some ways, it has done less for me than I would have thought. I’m pretty sure I know where I’m going right now, but what if I’m wrong? If I’m wrong, my whole world comes crashing down. I won’t be able to see myself in the future. It’s scary. I need to start thinking of a “Plan B,” just in case/ The Seven of Cups is also a warning that I not choose instant gratification before what I need.

Religion - Belief, Ideals, Morality

Reflect on your religious background. How devoted to religious and/or spiritual practices were you/was your family? What sort of ideals were upheld? What was considered right and wrong? What was the underlying theme that accompanied the concept of religion for you– how did it make you feel? Did you find it comforting, assuring, manipulative, foolhardy? How did your religious background make you feel as a person? How have these factors impacted how you experience religion now?

I was raised Catholic. We didn’t practice much, but every now and then there would be church, and I’ve gone to Sunday school and a religious summer camp sort of thing, and been enrolled in Catholic schools twice. Also, my great-uncle was a priest. So religion was a thing, even if it wasn’t a thing. My parents were not very religious, but religious enough that anyone non-Catholic (or even non-Christian) was to be viewed with extreme suspicion, and they were big on sin. My dad in particular would reference the Ten Commandments a lot, especially “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” which I took as bullshit. My parents are abusive, and I wanted nothing to do with any god who would make me okay with that. The other points I questioned I will make bullet-points for, because otherwise this will get very long and jump all over the place:

Baptism - I didn’t like the concept of baptism, because it is very often done when one is a baby, so they can hardly consent to the procedure. I didn’t like that I had been baptized in a faith I wanted nothing to do with. Recently, I was invited to attend my friend’s (baby’s?) Christening, and I did, for my friend, and for the child. I was really surprised by how many “vows” were being made, and without the consent of the child. I don’t even like the idea of pushing religious books/media/etc. on children, because I think it’s done with the intention of conversion. But now, being Kemetic, and loving being Kemetic, I would love to have a Kemetic child. I can see their room, with plush jackals and Weegyptians and dolls made to look like the gods, and I love it. “Baby’s First Shrine.” And I’m writing Baby Pagan books! I’m starting to understand the appeal of things like Baptism and having religiously-themed children’s stuff; it’s going to be hard to keep myself from pushing my faith onto my children. I’ll continue to practice my faith around them, but refrain as much as possible from trying to coerce conversion. KO has a thing called Rootnaming, where your child can receive a name within the faith, a sort of pre-Shemsu name. It seems common to do Rootnaming after the birth of a child, and I really want to, but I’m gonna try to hold out until they’re old enough to say “I wanna get Rootnamed.”

Confession - I was always very uncomfortable with confession, because I didn’t want to acknowledge my sins, nevermind announce them to someone else. I was always meek and mumbling and “Well, you know, stuff” in Confession. I suppose I also found it a bit strange that Confession was supposed to sort of absolve your sins, because some sins are very big and very impactful, and I don’t see how saying 5 “Hail Mary”s can negate that. I kind of like the idea of Confession, because I can see value in admitting one’s faults. Acknowledgement leads to change, and change leads to growth. But I don’t think it should ever be mandatory. That sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Original Sin - I never liked the concept of Original Sin; I thought it was unfair that everyone should start out in life with the chips stacked against them, because someone else did something bad. I also found the idea of condemning unbaptized babies to Hell - or even Purgatory - extremely disturbing, because you don’t get more innocent than that.

The concept of Hell - I was confused about Hell, because I was always told that when people did bad things, that’s where they’d go. But Hell was supposed to be eternal torment, and if God really does love everyone, how could Hell exist? I was terrified of going to Hell, and my mother was always pushing that idea on me. I had - and have - nightmares about it still. And if people were punished for doing bad things, when bad things happened to me, I must have deserved it. It took a long time to shake off that feeling of guilt, because my life is unusually chaotic, and peppered with constant disaster. Meeting my gods really helped me kick this way of thinking, because I can see themselves in me. I can understand why I’m constantly sucked into conflict, and from that, I will grow.

"Let he without sin cast the first stone” - My dad would bring this out if he was ever accused of doing something wrong, or if he was defending someone else when they did something wrong. It seems to me just a convenient way of blame-shifting, for the purpose of deescalating conflict, and so he doesn’t need to look at himself. Seems like a fancy way to say “No, you!”

[englishchinesetranslations]

Feminist icon Kate Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Her 1970 book Sexual Politics, called “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” by the New York Times, had a seismic effect on feminist thought and launched Millett as what the Times called “a defining architect of second-wave feminism.” In a cover story that same year, TIME magazine crowned her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” Fellow feminist Andrea Dworkin said that Millett woke up a sleeping world. Kate’s sister Mallory, a CFO for several corporations, resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. In a riveting article from a few years back bluntly titled, “Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives,” Mallory revealed what she saw of the subversive undercurrent of her sister’s passionate radicalism. Asked for her thoughts on Kate’s legacy, Mallory shared her very personal responses, which follow. Mark Tapson: Your sister was an icon of female empowerment, but what do you think the reality of feminism has been for generations of women since Kate helped launch the second wave of the movement? Mallory Millett: How bizarre it is to have to argue the obvious; to have to prove over and over again what is self-evident so let me be as offensive as I possibly can: Men are men and women are women. They are essentially different and designed for a natural division of labor. Period. I get a kick out of the feminists’ love affair with the word “empowerment.” They have clever formulas for ensnaring hapless souls into their deceits. One of their slicker moves is to create a vocabulary designed to get around long-held beliefs, mores, taboos or fears. “Pro-choice” is their Newspeak euphemism for the casual murder of an human being; “Dreamers” means illegal immigrants; “Progressives” denotes a group dragging us back to the cave; “Sanctuary City” means a place where no actual US citizen is safe. This “empowerment” thing makes me especially crazy. We need only go back to Eden in Genesis where God commanded Adam not to eat a certain apple. Eve demanded he eat it. Adam obeyed Eve against the will of God Himself. That’s not power? It only proves that man will do anything to please woman even if it means going against the wishes of his Almighty Creator. The point of the story is not that woman is evil but that woman is all-powerful and definitely runs the show. Woman sets the boundaries. Man is lost if he is surrounded by bad women. Mae West’s famous double entendre is so appropriate: “When women go wrong men go right after them.” The Genesis admonition to women is to be careful of your influence over others because you already, innately, wield great power… actually, if we believe The Bible, all the power. Having had that power, feminists were so greedy for more that they destroyed our society in order to prove they were exactly like men. In doing so they have destroyed the American family and our children which has resulted in the demolition of society. We are now in a world where Satanism is on the rise, where judges are removing the Ten Commandments from city squares, where abortion is a mere trifle. We allowed [the late atheist activist] Madalyn Murray O’Hair to remove prayer from the classroom and Kate Millett to remove mommy from the home. Deadly combo! My thesis is this: when men ran the world and women ran society we had a chance to conduct our lives in some semblance of balance, but women have abdicated their running of society and thus, it has collapsed dramatically. Women forced their way into the running-the-world deal and now we have a world gone mad. And the beautiful society which we Western women built is in tatters. Moms decided they were the same as men so they deserted the home and babies to grab their briefcases and rush out to run the world. When women ran society power emanated from the home. Men labored to keep their families sheltered, warm, clad and fed while women mostly stayed in the home to run the children and the community. Mother oversaw the household and carefully watched the children’s behavior. Most of the neighborhood women knew each other and had informal meetings in their living rooms and kitchens, called “coffee klatches.” It was here that the community developed ground rules on how to manage children and husbands. Any mother was free to chastise anyone else’s child should they misbehave. It was pretty unheard of for someone to say, “How dare you correct my child!” They would agree amongst themselves what was desired behavior. Good manners were required and trained. Neighbors backed each other up. It was expected. The essential rules that Moms formed in their infants and homes radiated outwardly into streets, schools, offices, boardrooms, departments, factories and agencies to form the framework of Western ethics. The communities, churches and schools all echoed the same values because most people went to Church or Temple and so, the foundation of our mores being Judeo/Christian, Mom’s rules were designed by the Ten Commandments. Many towns didn’t lock their doors, even at night. So, after fifty years of the almighty “consciousness-raising” experiment to empower women, and during the recent Harvey Weinstein [sexual assaults] scandal, what we are hearing from the little girlish voices of the victims is, “I froze, I was paralyzed. I gave in because I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified!” Hey, that’s some weird kind of empowerment. When I was a girl we did what our moms instructed: we yelled “NO,” slapped his face, and left the room or called a cop. MT: Many people aren’t aware of feminism’s roots in cultural Marxism, but you were present at early meetings of the revolutionaries who would go on to form NOW, the National Organization for Women. Can you tell us what you witnessed behind the scenes about their true aims? MM: In 1969 I attended consciousness-raising sessions in New York City with my sister, Kate, where a group of 10-15 women sat around a long oval table and plotted the New Feminist Movement and the founding of NOW. Their template was Mao’s China and the group confessionals conducted in each village in order to “cleanse the people’s thinking.” The burning objective of Kate’s “consciousness-raising” was “the destruction of the American family,” as she deemed it “a patriarchal institution devoted to the oppression and enslavement of women and children.” They went on to form NOW and, with that organization, achieve their stated goal of taking down the Patriarchy through a massive coordinated promotion of promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality. Their proposed method was to infiltrate every institution in the nation: the universities, the media, primary and secondary schools, PTAs, Teachers Unions, city and state governments, the library system, the executive branches of government as well as the judiciaries and legislatures. One of their most desired results was the smashing of every taboo in Western culture. Imagine that! Think of that alone! The normalizing of every taboo: polygamy, bestiality, Satanism, pornography, promiscuity, witchcraft, pedophilia – all activities which rot the human soul and city. Nothing burns down a society with such dispatch and totality as the unleashing of taboos. My sister Kate decided her contribution would be to establish Women’s Studies courses at every U.S. college and university, which she efficiently executed. On examination, these courses emerge as nothing more than Marxism 101. Kate taught that the family is literally a slave unit with the man as the bourgeoisie and the women and children the proletariat. Two of her own books were required reading. In these classes young girls are conditioned into murderers who will dispense with their own precious unborn child as readily as a dirty Kleenex without a twinge because “it’s my body.” I can’t hear of the 70 million Americans killed before birth without a catch in my heart over Kate’s role in this. She taught girls to “be an outlaw; be a damned outlaw, cuz all the laws were made by evil white men. Be a slut and be proud of it!” Now we have girls parading about with the word “SLUT” emblazoned across their tee-shirts. Orgies? “Absolutely! Try everything. There are no rules.” So the woman whose job it is to construct the basic rules threw them all to the wind. Then she ran away from home and from any babies she didn’t kill in order to run the world. We’ve had women running the SEC, the Secret Service, the IRS, the DNC, yada yada yada. They run so many things now and a great many are under investigation with one female head of department after another either lying or refusing to answer legitimate questions being asked by the people (i.e., congressional committees). Aren’t public officials required to answer to the people? “Be an outlaw, be a damned outlaw!” So, they infiltrated every system and department in education, media, entertainment, government, justice, Wall Street, you name it and they’re there. For decades since they started their stealth invasion the father in every sitcom has been debased and, most of all, clueless. I am dumbfounded at the efficiency with which these women recruited others and wheedled their way into everything in fifty short years. Oh, yes, woman is one hell of a powerful force. Now, we have a nightmare army of militant feminists: Lois Lerner, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Huma Abedin, Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey, Samantha Power, Elizabeth Warren, Cheryl Mills, Maxine Waters, Donna Brazile, plus the main outlaw, Hillary Clinton, lying and obfuscating us into chaos. That’s what outlaws create: chaos! Today, 60% of babies who escape abortion are born outside of marriage. On top of that they are miserably reared, thrown into child-care shortly after birth, with not only a lousy education but a miseducation in classrooms infiltrated by Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Howard Zinn, Naom Chomsky, Marx, and Saul Alinsky rather than readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, American History, and Civics. Our children now score poorly compared with other countries, whereas before the feminist “experiment” we led in almost all categories. In 1964 we had 90% literacy and 5% illegitimate births. We now score shockingly low on literacy (38% of American men read at the lowest levels; only 11% of men and 12% of women are proficient readers) and of course, those out-of-wedlock births at 60%. I would say that raising several ill-prepared fatherless generations of slackers, meth and opioid users, porn dogs, disheveled rockers, and illiterates speaks poorly of any degree of empowerment in parenting. Most parenting is done by absent single women since two-thirds of mothers are raising their youngsters outside of marriage. So, we have the filthy clothes, ten o’clock shadows on guys, shocking grammar, plethora of tattoos, sullen misfits in torn filthy clothing listening to violent hate-filled so-called music; entitled attitudes and non-existent manners say it all. Empowerment? Why, the facts scream that feminists are two generations of the worst-ever educators of America’s children. In what manner does this speak of empowerment? Woman, by your fruits are you known! And those fruits didn’t come out of your briefcases. MT: In obituaries upon Kate’s passing, the news media wrote largely glowingly of her influence, but what do you think the good and bad of her feminist legacy has been? MM: As I scan the wreckage of our beautiful America, knowing that my own sister was in great part responsible, I feel as if my heart has been kicked down the stairs. So, on pondering this question about the good and the bad of militant feminism, it reminds me of the joke in which the reporter asks, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” MT: Can you tell us a bit about Kate’s mental instability, and if you think it had anything to do with her radicalism? Or vice versa – do you think her radicalism affected her mental state? MM: Kate was mentally ill for as long as I remember. She was five when I was born and our elder sister Sally says that once I arrived, Kate was hanging over my bassinet plotting my murder. We shared a bedroom from my birth. From my earliest memory I recall trembling from the vibrations of her insanity. She was the most disturbed, megalomaniacal, evil and dishonest person I have ever known. She tried to kill me so many times that it’s now an enormous blur of traumatizing horrors. She was a sadist, a torturer, a deeply-engrained bully who took immense pleasure in hurting others. Incorrigible and ruthless, she was expelled multiple times from every school she attended. I spent my childhood with heart hammering as I tiptoed through the house so as not to be noticed by the dreadful Kate. Our mother was helpless, paralyzed with terror in the face of Kate. It’s a grinding hardship to bring oneself to write such harsh things about one’s own blood. It took some bucking up for me to start telling the truth. I must say here that, always and forever, I had a reservoir of love for my sister Kate, but reality trumps all and her brand of nihilistic darkness was an implacable obstacle. I spent decades laboring to reason her into the light. One day my counselor guessed it: “So, do you understand that you’re trying to make your sister sane?” “I know,” I said, thinking of her stiff smile, which was never real. Her smile was that chilling kind in which the mouth is rigidly arranged into a smile shape showing all the teeth, but it’s obviously a joyless mask. “If only she could be happy. If only she could cease being so agitated and miserable.” “You cannot make that happen,” said my advisor. “We cannot talk another into sanity. That’s entirely up to her.” “But what can I do?” I pleaded. “Sometimes, you just have to leave the room.” I understood in a flash that, so loyally attached to her was I, it had never occurred to me I could actually, simply, leave the room. Kate announced her atheism very early on and the vacuum created sucked in even more corruption, lying, stealing, fury and domination of others. If God and the afterlife are abandoned then you’re going to be cranky, morose, generally angry, and it’s simple to toss out the Ten Commandments. I would venture that her mental instability created her affinity for the atheism of Marxism. To quote Dennis Prager: “My belief in God and the afterlife keeps me sane. The thought that just this life is all there is would mean that life is random and pointless. It means I will never again see those I love. This would drive me mad. I don’t see how it wouldn’t drive anyone mad who cares about suffering and who loves anyone. So, is there an afterlife? If there is a God, of course there’s an afterlife.” Most everyone on the left is atheistic, depressed, dark and miserable, and they want us all to be miserable. Winston Churchill said, “Socialism results in the equal sharing of misery.” They detest happiness. Nothing makes them more miserable than another’s happiness. There is no more comedy! Since they swooped in and took over Hollywood and Broadway, everywhere you search for comic relief is dark, dark, dark. Surf through 200 TV channels and it is grim, grim, grim and then there’s a dismemberment. Our “entertainment” has become death, terror, horror and filth. Americans were funny people – funniest in the world after the Brits. First, they lost humor and then we followed. Tina Fey? Major funny-killer. Lena Dunham? A disgrace! Saturday Night Live? David Letterman? Kill me, just shoot me. I love the term “Feminazi,” as these humorless women are, indeed, fascists, killers of faith and society. So many people think the rise of women and the evisceration of our culture are somehow coincidental. But it’s been calculated and deliberate. It’s the only way America can be “fundamentally transformed” into the Marxist test-tube to dazzle the world. It’s the result of HATE: hating God, hating life, hating society, hating men, hating babies, hating history, hating our fathers, hating our families, hating our white male Founders, hating happiness, hating heterosexuality, hating Western civ. Is this not madness? I was with them at that table as they founded the Women’s Movement and NOW. The entire stated point of their activities was to destroy the American family and with that, Western Civilization. Is this not crazy? They were tooth-grittingly determined. They were driven by destruction and deeply violent impulses toward men and the patriarchy. Their goal? To establish a matriarchy in order to end all war because that’s what men do, wage war. They believed that if women ran everything there would be no more war. In their madness they have conspired to destroy masculinity, drugging our little boys while trying to remake them into little girls and thus, emboldening our enemies who now see us as easy pickings. No nation is easier to overwhelm than one which has feminized the men and put females at the head of the tribe. Matriarchies never survive – never have, never will! So, they plotted for Hillary Clinton to go to the White House simply because she was female. She is a proven liar, a persecutor of her husband’s sexual victims, a woman whose campaign for President was remarkably incompetent. Yet, they were certain (still are) that she was up to running America and to be the Leader of The Free World! She couldn’t even run her own campaign. But that didn’t matter to Kate and her pals. She was a woman and that was enough. Is this not sexism? Is this not madness? Kate’s life story is a saga of our family desperately trying to have her involuntarily received into a mental institution where they may have helped her. She vividly chronicles most of it in two of her books, Flying and The Looney-Bin Trip. Over and over our elder sister Sally, our mother and I, and various nephews and nieces endeavored to have her hospitalized. This was especially true after an incident when I was trapped alone with Kate in an apartment in Sacramento for a week and she did not allow me to sleep for five days as she raged and ranted, eyes rolling in her head, frothing at the mouth and holding chats with “little green men.” Not knowing a single person in Sacramento, I had nowhere to turn. Too terrified to go to sleep, I wasn’t sure she even knew who I was but I could imagine a butcher knife thrust into my back as I slept. Big sister Sally came from Nebraska to rescue me. After that there was an enormous effort by the family wherein we all took Kate to court for legal commitment in Minnesota. She hired a male feminist hotshot New York lawyer and managed to swim back out into the world to hurt, menace, and harm ever more people. When Sally called last September to say Kate dropped dead in a Paris hotel room that morning, I was flooded with such indescribable relief that she could no longer spread her filth, lies and misery, nor could she go on threatening the lives and safety of others. Once, she wrote an entire book describing her deep passion for her lover, Sita. Sita’s response was to kill herself. My biggest anxiety about Kate has always been that one day she would take out a family of five on the Saw Mill River Parkway as – laced with liquor, wine, lithium, marijuana, and God knows what else – she hurtled, ranting and raging, up that difficult road. For many years I have braced for that call in the night. She had enablers everywhere. She was worshiped on all seven continents. We did a massive intervention with twelve of us: family and friends, a psychiatrist, two ambulances standing by, several cops, and she managed to elude us all by hopping on a plane for Ireland. Her “instability,” as you put it, was apparent enough to both airline and cops in Shannon that she was committed by the police straight from the plane to an Irish psychiatric ward whereupon her ubiquitous groupies – this time Irish – managed her escape through a second-story window in the middle of the night. Without a doubt, over time, once she became enmeshed in the larger group of leftist activists around the world, her madness, buoyed by their lunacy, became even greater and more impossible to penetrate. Their groupthink is so dense, so full of lies, the vocabulary is so deceptive and intricately designed to brainwash, that just to witness it and their interactions from a distance is beyond alarming. After we buried our mother I never spoke with Kate again, as I’d finally come to accept that there is no honest communication with this mental illness that is today’s liberalism. Finally, I left the room. The original article can be found at: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269251/my-sister-kate-destructive-feminist-legacy-kate-mark-tapson

[gracewithducks]

Old Wells and New (John 7:37-39 & Genesis 26)

Much like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day invites us to consider our roots: where it is we’ve come from. For some, remembering or spending time with our parents brings joy – but for others, these days are cruel, bringing grief, renewing trauma, bringing back the ache of unfulfilled dreams, and reminding us of all the ways our families have let us down.

 And if that’s where you are today, I see you. I hear you. I am grateful for my own dad, and I miss him something fierce, but this is not going to be a sermon about how wonderful dads are or how much our earthly dads teach us about God.

 No, instead, we’re going to talk a bit about one of the first families of the bible – about Isaac, who is the son of Abraham, the actual son of Abraham, who is often called the father of not just our faith but the father of three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all trace our family roots back to this one man.

 Early in the story of scripture, God calls this man named Abraham, and his wife Sarah, to set out into the world – leave behind everything they’ve ever known, and to go into the great unknown, following the promise of a family, and a home, and a future. God promises Abraham, “I will bless you, and through you, all the families on the earth will be blessed.” And so Abraham and Sarah set out in faith. To be sure, they made their fair share of mistakes along the way. As they passed through the lands of strong kings, for example, Abraham lied about his wife, Sarah, telling the kings – more than once – that she was not his wife but his sister… And Sarah herself, when she grew impatient for God’s promised son, tried to fulfill God’s promises in her own time and in a different way. The road of faith is for Abraham and Sarah a rocky and trying one, and though they never take possession of that land God had promised would one day be theirs, they did eventually hold and raise the son through whom God would carry that promise into the future.

 That son’s name was Isaac. And you might think it would be amazing, growing up with the father of three great faiths as your dad, growing up the child of promise, whose birth was foretold to both of your parents by heavenly messengers. But Isaac’s family was far from perfect. His older brother Ishmael was kicked out of the house, because one day his mom saw Ishmael playing with Isaac, and it made her mad. And then of course there was the day when Isaac’s dad Abraham took him on a nice father-son hike up a mountain and then tied him up and tried to sacrifice him on an altar. Only God’s direct intervention saved Isaac’s life, and after that day, we never see his parents in the same place again.

 Families are messy. Families are complicated. But Isaac survives.

 And after Isaac has grown, and married, and had sons of his own, and those sons have quarreled and grown and quarreled some more, there is a famine. So Isaac and his wife Rebekah leave their home, taking their household and their flocks, in search of a new place where they might flourish. They end up in Philistine land, and while Isaac is contemplating heading all the way to Egypt, he has a vision: God says to Isaac, “Stay here, in this land, for a while, and I will be with you, and I will bless you. For to you and to your descendants, I will give all these lands, and I will fulfill the promises I made to your father Abraham. Your descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and through your family, all the families on earth will be blessed.”

 This is a huge and pivotal moments for Isaac: an affirmation that, in spite of all the mistakes and missteps along the way, the promises God made to his father will carry through into the next generation. So Isaac follows in his father’s footsteps, for better and for worse: he has already set out from his home in search of a better future; now he has received a reaffirmation of God’s promises… and he also follows in his father’s footsteps by lying to the king and pretending his wife Rebekah is his sister. Fortunately, when the ruse is discovered, the Philistine king proves to be a man of honor, and he places his protection of Isaac and his household, and invites them to stay and live alongside the Philistines in peace.

 But as Isaac’s flocks and crops flourished, he became more wealthy, more powerful, in that land – until the Philistines felt threatened by these neighbors, and they filled up Isaac’s wells, stopping them up with earth, in order to drive Isaac and his household away.

 Think about that: the people were so threatened by Isaac’s prosperity that they struck at his water supply. No matter how rich or powerful we become, we all still need water – so it was an effective attack, if a short-sighted one. If Isaac had been asked to leave peacefully, those wells might have given water to his contentious neighbors; instead, they would have rather stopped them up all together than let Isaac continue to draw from them.

 And maybe I’ve been spending too much time and energy in the larger church debates, but it sure seems like we’ve done an awful lot of trying to stop up one another’s wells these days. There’s a reason why scripture, and even Jesus, compare our faith, our relationship with God, to our relationship with water: without water, we die. When we’re thirsty, we do anything we can, go to any lengths we can, in search of something to quench our thirst – and that is how our souls yearn for God; the Psalmist describes it this way: “As the deer pants for water, so my soul longs for you.” And Jesus says, “I am the living water… come, all who are thirsty, and drink.”

 Water is what refreshes us, what strengthens us, what gives us life. And to push the metaphor a bit, we don’t all tap into the same reservoirs; we don’t all drink water from the same wells or same pipes… we don’t all quench our thirst from exactly the same fountains in all the same ways. But can you imagine one neighbor going and filling in their neighbor’s well, or turning off their water, ripping out their pipes – just because we don’t agree, or because I think that my water is purer or tastes better than yours? It’s ridiculous; it’s absurd. I may never drink from your well, but you do, every day, and your well is giving you life; who on earth am I to take that away?

 When we talk about faith, we often talk about essentials: the essential is, we all need God; we all need grace; we all need the presence of the Holy Spirit. We all need to drink from that living water. But that water flows in many forms; the Spirit moves in many ways – and I don’t want to begrudge or worse to stop up the well of faith that is allowing one of my neighbors, one of God’s beloved ones, one of my siblings in Christ, to make it through the day. We can talk. We can disagree. But I certainly hope that we can be the kind of people who dig more wells, not who dam up the rivers and poison the wells sustaining those around us.

 But back to Isaac. Isaac has gotten too big for his neighbors, so they cave in his wells, and the king says, “Isaac, you’d better just go away.”

 So Isaac goes. And he camps and settles in the Valley of Gerar, where he finds wells dug in his father’s time. And he opens up those wells, and he finds there is still water in them, and there is something beautiful and poetic about Isaac’s household finding life in the wells dug by his father’s people a generation before. This is why it matters that we pass on what we believe: so that one day future generations might drink from the same wells of God’s goodness and grace, so that they might find hope in the faith that sustains us today.

 There is strength in the faith that’s been handed down to us. Our ancestors may not have been perfect; our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors didn’t get everything right. But that doesn’t mean they got everything wrong. There are still lessons to be learned, and strength to be drawn, from their mistakes, from their successes, from their experiences of living into the story of grace.

 When things are hard, we go back to the old wells: we go back to our roots, to the gifts left to us by the people who helped to bring us here – and maybe that’s our parents, but maybe that’s a friend, a teacher, a coach, an aunt or uncle, a neighbor, a colleague, a pastor – someone who, for all their flaws, still led us to living water and helped us take a drink.

 When things are hard, we dig out our ancestor’s wells. But that’s not all we do. Isaac doesn’t just open up the old wells – he digs new ones. And when people fight when him about those wells, he goes and digs some more. We don’t just look to the old, but we look for new sources of grace, new ways to tap into the presence of God for which our souls thirst; learning from the past, we believe God’s Spirit is still moving, under the surface, unseen, and we create something new, as we live into a new future.

 Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come.” May our thirsty souls be restored – and may we be the kind of people who keep digging new wells of grace.

  O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you (Augustine, adapted).  We give you thanks today for all those who helped us on this journey, for all those who prepared our way – and we pray for those who will one day follow where we lead. Help us to be faithful; help us to be generous; help us to be gracious. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

[nancydhooper]

High school could have been hell for my transgender son. Don't make it hell for the next kid.

I had hoped that my son would wait until after high school to come out as transgender. But I realized I'd prefer a thriving son over a dead daughter.

This piece was originally published on USA Today.

When I gave birth to my first baby, the doctor said, “It’s a girl!” Before I even knew my child, those words helped me imagine the future.

But the future was different from what I expected.

By the time my child was in high school, he went by a boy's name, ran on the boys’ cross-country team, received hormone therapy, underwent chest surgery and used the boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

It was clear early on that Aidan was different. From about the age of 2, Aidan didn’t want long ponytails but short hair. He wanted to wear shorts and track pants — going shopping meant the boys’ section. He was super athletic. Aidan looked like a boy.

I thought I was raising a tomboy. I wondered whether someday my daughter would come out as a lesbian. Then, in junior high, Aidan told me, “Mom, I was born in the wrong body. I’m transgender.”

I was floored. When your child comes to you and says, The most basic things you think you know about me are false — it takes your breath away.

I Googled my mind into oblivion. I read about families that kicked children out of the house and disowned them. I read about schools that refused to use a child’s chosen name and preferred pronouns. I learned that transgender kids have a sky-high suicide rate. I was terrified. I realized that my choice might be a dead daughter or a thriving son.

Living your truth is hard — but right

I had hoped Aidan would wait until after high school to come out publicly as transgender, but after 10th grade, he told me he was going to do it on Facebook. I couldn’t stop him, and so I posted my own letter alongside his video — and people were supportive. Afterward, Aidan seemed lighter and happier.

Even so, it was not an easy path. Our family used to go to church together, and we’d jam to Christian music in the car — until one church associate told Aidan he was damned to hell. Aidan was devastated, and eventually quit the youth group. These days, he questions the existence of God. I still go to that church and feel so sad and angry that representatives of an institution I value denied my child’s sense of himself — I didn’t want that to happen in other places.

So I felt grateful for the support from Boyertown Area High School in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. By 10th grade, when Aidan started there, he had been consistently dressing in boys’ clothes for years. He told the guidance counselor he had gotten strange looks using the girls’ bathroom and needed an alternative. She offered the nurse’s bathroom.

That summer, Aidan started taking testosterone. When he returned to school in the fall, we filed for a name change so he would officially be “Aidan.” Then he had chest surgery. In Aidan’s senior year, he joined the boys’ cross-country team and, with the school’s permission, began using the boys’ restroom and locker rooms.

Finally, he felt fully validated for who he is. Aidan was coming into his own as a happy-go-lucky, popular and confident trans kid. Everyone who met him seemed to like him — he was even elected to the Homecoming Court. My fear began to fade.

There's more on the line than just bathrooms

But during Aidan’s senior year, a handful of other students sued the school, claiming that their privacy was violated because transgender students were using the same bathrooms and locker rooms. Adolescence can be an awkward time for anyone, but the high school has private changing areas and bathrooms so no student has to change in front of others.

I’m grateful that two courts have recognized the right of transgender students like Aidan to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. But now the other students have asked the Supreme Court to review the case. We are working with the American Civil Liberties Union to discourage the Supreme Court from taking up the case. 

It might seem like this is just about a bathroom — but in fact it’s a powerful institution saying to a child, you have no right to be who you say you are. Schools form the center of kids’ social lives, and they are where kids develop a sense of themselves. Had the school excluded Aidan from the same facilities as other boys, it would have negated, instead of affirmed, his new and shining confidence and ease in the world.

He knows transgender kids who have had more experiences like that: They have been rejected by family, friends, institutions. Several have attempted suicide.

I consider myself a very lucky mom. God blessed me with two wonderful kids. My greatest hope is that the world recognizes my son, and other transgender people like him, and allows them to find their paths. 

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbt-rights/lgbt-youth/high-school-could-have-been-hell-my-transgender-son-dont-make-it-hell via http://www.rssmix.com/

[thiscatsbell]

"The Girl with the gaslight"

I'm 15 when I see Viv for the first time.

I'm at wrestling practice, warming up for a long day of drilling in two pairs of sweats so that I can make weight tomorrow. In my mind I'm imagining myself as something else: a cartoon rabbit. Most days at practice I imagine I'm something else. Somewhere else. Anywhere and anybody but a corn-fed teenage boy trying to make weight for a saturday meet. Most days I can lift off from my body during practice and enter into a dreamworld so vivid that it feels real.

"I am a bunny rabbit," I think to myself. I try to imagine the ears, the feeling of my tail against the mat each time my wrestling partner takes me down.

"That's bullshit," Viv says, tugging at my waistband.

She's a lithe girl: 14, maybe 17 at the most. Dresses in black skater-punk wear. Jet-black, flatironed hair. Wallet on a chain. I'm sweating and desperate to get back to my bunny rabbit fantasy but she follows me, hangdog and bored, both hands locked into my waistband.

"Why do you bother?" she asks.

My teammate works through a new takedown. Stand up. Let the guy hurl me to the floor. Stand up again.

"You don't want to be here anyway."

She paces around the circle as I get tossed over and over again.

"You don't even like this sport."

She's right. I only got into wrestling because the bullies did it. I got better than them. The bullying stopped. Survival has a weird way of motivating you when you're 15 and feel like an alien in your own body. Familiar, too. Befriend your bullies and you won't be bullied. Get stronger than your bullies, and never be bullied again.

But Viv? Viv is something new. She slithers around the mat, stalking me. "It's not like you can escape this anyway. This is who you are: going through the motions because it makes people like you as a person. That's all this is to you, innit? A ticket to punch for a few moments of admiration?"

A break. The coaches are talking. I close my eyes. Breathe. I wish I were a bunny rabbit.

I feel Viv lean on my shoulder, her breath hot on my neck. Her lips touch my ear.

"You don't really want that. You just want to be gone.

"You should just end it."

I write my first suicide note that week. As a kid with an active imagination I kept a piece of computer paper folded up in my pocket at all times. I'd jot down notes there, and when the paper filled up it'd join a heap of other papers on my desk, mostly to be forgotten. But that day, Viv followed me home from practice. Whispering. Always whispering.

"You hate yourself."

"I hate myself."

"You wish everything would stop."

"I wish everything would stop."

"You don't matter anyway," she added with a thin smile. "You never mattered because you can't get anything right. Not like it's going to get better anyway. This is what life is for you."

"This is life for me."

"Good boy," Viv says, patting me on the head. I feel empty but calm. Clairvoyant, even, in the knowledge that this didn't matter.

I discover two things that week.

One: my stepmom snoops around my room. The note sat on top of the pile. She tells my father, and they sit me down for a talk. I don't tell them much. Anything I say can and will be used against me in some later argument. This is the nature of things. They get a friend of the family to give me samples for Zoloft. We don't talk about it again.

Two: Viv is right. I can't even write down my own thoughts without fucking it up.

I learned how to fight Viv by screwing up the house rules.

Chores, for me, means three things: laundry, cleaning the room, and dishes. Unless someone forgot to take out the dog. Then that's my chore as well. Unless I missed a spot on the glass. Then it's like I didn't do the dishes at all. I cannot do these chores right.

A child is not allowed to be loud when a parent has a migraine. An itemized list of any perceived slight performed by me during this time will be presented to Dad to deal with later.

A child is not to be too quiet. The family will remember every time the kid chooses to spend time by themselves. This information can and will be used against them at any time, during any argument, no matter the context.

Everything I say is wrong. Even when it is right, or sourced, or just a benign opinion, it is wrong. The family will find ways to get me to say wrong things so that they can be dragged out in the open and mocked properly. Failure to comply will trigger the not-too-quiet rule above.

To be not wrong requires fighting. Not with debate or discussion. Raised voices, at first; and fists if all else fails. I choose to learn to be okay with being wrong.

Write everything down. If it isn't written down I don't remember it right. When I want something the family doesn't, and people start raising their voices, I'm wrong. At first it takes time to convince me that I'm wrong. But in time I learn not to trust what's in my head.

I try to follow my notes to the letter. "No spots on the glasses." "Laundry folded and put away." "Dog must be taken out at least once a night." "Do towels if there are less than 4 in the closet."

Family ridicules me for writing it down. "You can't remember to do your chores? How dumb do you have to be?" But even if something in the notes turns out to be wrong I know that I wrote them down. I know they existed. Sometimes the notes I wrote are wrong even if I remember writing them down, and I remember every word. I just didn't hear things right. That's all.

Anger is not right. Anger makes the family angrier, and when the family is angrier my memory is even less right than it usually is. Better to be an empty vessel. Don't ask for things; ask what the family would prefer I do. I don't trust my memory and my wants. My memory is almost always wrong when challenged.

I can only be right if I am successful in a way that invites praise from people in town. Every tournament won in wrestling is a night where I get to be right. Sometimes, if the parents are feeling generous, an A will earn me a few hours of being right.

By the time Viv comes around I already know how to argue. She speaks. I listen. Even if I don't think she's right, she's probably right. My mind just gets things turned around; that's all.

I am sixteen and printing off a binder of theology research. There is no school project behind this. My wrestling teammates found out I didn't believe in god when we went to a summer training camp. They kept me up for 2 nights trying to convert me, stopping only after I got the teacher involved.

Standing my ground felt right. I remember that clearly. Laughing as they started taking shifts telling me about the good news. Trying to sleep as they kept mumbling on about why I should accept Jesus into my heart. I felt... clear, really, in a way I hadn't before. No matter what my friends tried to say it was at least consistent. I could rely on their candor. Peg talking points against their passion.

When the town got word the house had a new rule: "You have to think about being Christian." At school: kids in school handing me tracts and bibles. Teachers hinting about what they know. Parents and volunteers mentioning churches.

And here I am, scouring the internet to build a bibliography of articles for and against being a Christian. It was either this or talk it out with the parents. At least when it's written down I can feel like I got it right, even when I'm later conviced it's wrong.

Viv sits on the washing machine behind the family computer, arms crossed, her lips pouty. Bored. She swings her legs to kick the back of my chair and knocks her heels against the machine. Thunk-thunk, thud-thud, thunk-thunk, groan."

"Don't you get it? There are rules to being liked. You just can't seem to learn them."

I click through yet another Baptist website. Print. Skim. Highlight sentences. In the margin: "Obedience is how we show love to God." I'm good at obedience.

Why am I not good at being right?

I leaned back from the printed pages so that my head can rest in her lap. "Am I just this stupid, Viv? Everyone else seems to get along fine. I'm the only one fucking this up."

"Possibly. Nothing else has worked so far, right? And you're right. Sis seems to have found an equilibrium. The stepbrothers just do as they please. But you?"

She chuckled and cupped my chin in both her hands.

"You're too stupid to even do belief right."

"I know."

"Have you even won an argument before?"

I thought about it. "If it's about things, sure. I'm good at things. People, though."

"Exactly." She looked up to the lights. Tilted her head. I closed my eyes and relaxed into her lap, the softness of her hands, the warmth of her body.

"You're never going to be worthy of their love."

"House rule?"

She stroked my cheek. "House rule."

One more rule: my computer is my citadel. It is a piece of junk cobbled together with duct tape and spare parts. I am not followed there. Files are encrypted, password protected. I learn to code and work on little computer projects to give me an excuse to avoid family time.

Inside the computer there are other voices just like Viv. They're all bunny rabbits and cats and foxes, and all of them say that they're real too. I talk to them, sometimes, about how I don't understand why I'm so wrong all the time.

Later, when I'm not living at home, I'll even meet some of the people behind foxes and bunnies and cats and such. Some will even become my family. Viv hates them for that, but she tolerates it for the attention. The validation. It's nice to be the sad one sometimes.

But here and now, I worry them. I'm not sure how to process that emotion. Worry? Why worry? It's not like I'm going to embarrass them. Most don't even know my real name.

Viv scoffs when I talk about the other voices.

"If they knew you they wouldn't feel so sorry. The truth would come out. You know how this goes. Poor, sad little Cinderella story online crumbles when given context. They'd find out how many house rules you broke, how you missed spots on the dishes, how you forget to finish your laundry. Then they'd think better of it.

"You're just bad at being a person. That's how it's always been."

Once I was on the zoloft folks thought I had my head back on straight. That's not true. Viv taught me better.

The pills were never about making me feel better. They were about the perception of feeling better. Nobody really gave a shit if I was sad or happy so long as I could put on the act. Viv loved this. I loved it too: there's something just decadent about walking through life with a smile on your face with "I should kill myself" as a mantra.

Knowing you are useless dead weight liberates you from any entitlement to feelings or needs. Favorite food? "Whatever you want to order." What do you want to do? "I don't have any preference." What do you think? "Not really important."

Life's a lot easier when you take the damn pills and let Viv do the talking.

I am 17 and driving out of town. Viv is in the passenger seat. I work a lot of hours at a diner downdown; more time I spend there, less time I spend at home. The windows are down and I'm singing along with the radio. For a moment, I'm happy.

"Next car," Viv says. She's in the passenger seat sulking. Today she's wearing a rubber dress and drenched in chain-link necklaces. As cars zing past she nods at each one and leans in. "There. There. There. Next one—there."

Her hands are on the wheel, pushing me left. I countersteer. Left. Right. Left. Right.

She's right, I guess. Next car. It has to be the next car.

"Why?"

"Why ask?" Viv says with a smile. "You'll just get it wrong anyway."

I am 20 and laying on the grass in a small-town Indiana Park. On my left, my girlfriend. ON my right, Viv. I'm staring at blades of grass and trying to find the words.

For the past month I've spent the weekends in another town so that I can dress up in girl's clothing. I got ma'amed for the first time this past weekend and it left me feeling strange. It felt... right, somehow, even though I knew that had to be wrong. When I tried to talk about it my words twisted in my mouth, made my heart seize up in my chest.

We're laying in the park. I feel trapped. When this happened in the past I deferred to somebody else. Can't trust my own brain, after all. Better that someone else makes the call. But here, laying on the grassy ground and rubbing my temples, I couldn't ask.

Viv leans into my ear. "Keep it zipped."

My girlfriend rubs my back. "You seem to have a lot of fun dressing up."

"Yeah," I say.

"She's not your friend."

"Is it more than that?"

"I don't know."

Playground swings creak. Kids laugh. I star deeper into the blades of grass. Maybe I can hide here. Just stall her out, you know? It's only a matter of time before someone proves my brain wrong anyway. Why say anything if it's not going to mean anything?

"Do you want to be a girl?"

"Keep your mouth shut," Viv says. Her arm locks into mine and tugs, hard. "She's not going to help you. Nobody is going to help you. You're just a freak. You know this. Second it gets out, everyone will turn on you. Just keep your mouth--"

"I think so," I say. A weight lifts from my chest. For a brief moment the world seems brighter. Manageable. I breathe - really, truly breathe; a breath that goes all the way down to my toes - and let it out in a long sigh. Muscles unknot. Of course I think so. I've always thought so. Even if my brain is wrong it knows what it wants to be.

Viv screams. Then she reaches under one arm, grips my jaw, and works me like a puppet.

"But maybe I'm okay with being in the middle. I mean, I'd make a terrible girl, right? What do you think? It's just a stupid idea."

Then Viv holds my lips shut until, exasperated, the girlfriend gets up and leaves. "Close call," Viv says, wagging her finger in my face.

It seems silly now but Viv helped me make sense of everything. When my brain says one thing and the people around me say another I get confused. And when I can't win arguments I look to her to make both ends meet. Here's what comes out:

Alex is a broken person who is incapable of doing anything right. She is either too emotional or too rational, depending on the day, and too sensitive when people tease her. Sometimes she even cries when someone points out missed spots on dishes - I mean, how fragile do you have to be to do that? Any time she stands up for herself it's for the dumbest reasons. Some mean joke sets her off, or she's writing a story where her family isn't 100% supportive of what she does, or she makes a choice that the family despises and still expects respect and dignity. Given time and ridicule she'll roll over, though, and everything will turn out all right.

In short: things would be better for everyone if she just kept her damn mouth shut.

I am 22 and everything is wrong. My girlfriend is driving us to a home she just purchased. I'm still a guy even though it's been two years since I admitted the truth. I didn't want to buy the place. My brain screamed that it didn't want the place. But I didn't say no. I protested, sure, but that was just my brain being wrong. When she pushed back I just let it happen.

Viv is in the backseat of the car. She's kicking at my seat: first with little nudges, and then with giant kicks from steel-toed boots. She's rocking a lacy white dress that'd grown musty and dingy from being left in storage for too long.

"This is what you deserve," she says. Kick. Kick kick. "You hear me?"

I don't have the strength to reply. I want to say something. Anything. I want to open the car door and tumble out onto the road. Maybe I'll die. Maybe I'll just be really injured. Picture it: door opens, I dive. The skin on my shoulder melts as it rubs pavement at seventy miles an hour. I'm smiling. Laughing, even! The pain gives way to a dull pleasure. Closure. No more house! No more relationship! No more feeling like an alien in my own body!

You can't fire me, world! I quit!

The kicking stops. "That's more like it," Viv says. I look into the rear view mirror. Our eyes meet. There's a wicked grin on her face. Her hands grip my seat and begin to shake it. She laughs. Cackles.

"Come on, Alex! Shit's not gonna get better any time soon! It's now or never! Once you get to that house it's over!"

My fingers slide into the door handle. The energy of madness courses through my veins. After years of sleep I'm finally awake! The blood in my veins! Stale air in my lungs! It all begins here, right here, on the side of I-70. Pop the seatbelt! Lean out! Throw open the door!

"She's just going to tie you down, Alex. Ten years from now you're going to be a husk in middle-of-nowhere Indiana with a stupid-long commute, yelled at whenever she feels sad, taken for granted, ignored when you dare speak up about how you feel.

"Stop being a pussy about this and open the damn door. It's the only way out."

But I hesitate. Viv groans. She grabs for the seatbelt and starts wrapping it around my neck. Once. Twice.

"I'll do it myself."

The belt tightens. It takes my girlfriend a few seconds to realize what I'm doing. She swerves toward the shoulder. Unbuckled the belt. Screams at me until I realize my brain was wrong.

The world snaps back to reality and I'm looking at myself in the side mirror, fresh friction burns on my neck, trying to piece together what just happened. I tell her about the door. About wanting to die.

"We can talk after you paint the house," she says, and puts the car back on the highway. As she gets up to speed I hear the car door locks engage.

When I look to the back seat Viv is just laughing. Why wouldn't she? I can't even kill myself right.

Viv started using pain at a bowling alley in Virginia. I must have been 12 or 13. The family is still mostly whole. I can't get anything right: the extended family in Virginia thinks I'm awkward, the family isn't sure if they can poke fun or take me seriously. In a few months Viv will help me write my first of many suicide notes.

It's not the family's fault, to a point. I just can't figure out how to make them happy. Everyone else seems to get it but the second I open my mouth it's shut down. My feelings get corrected. My conversation doesn't connect - it's met with jeers and jokes. But Viv, Viv listens.

The alley is blacklit. A rock band plays in the center of the alley. I'm... tired. I definitely remember being tired. Anxious, too, but the me at the alley doesn't know how to word that yet. That's present-me, realizing how panicky and anxious I was as a kid. Second-guessing every little thing I did had a knock-on effect for my stress levels.

Somewhere between awake and asleep Viv sidles up onto the bench facing me. She's older here - college kid, probably - wearing a bowling shirt and platform boots and studded leather bracelets. When it's my turn to bowl she slaps me on the face, hard, and points to the lane.

"Seriously, you're worthless as shit. Did you really just get in front of everyone and tell the duck food joke? The family warned you how bad it'd be. You did it anyway."

Stand up. Bowl. Sit down. Drift. Viv starts yelling, arms flailing, eyes stern.

"They're just trying to protect you. They know you better than anybody. Why can't you just get it? That's all they ever want from you. Stop being awkward and get with the program, dope."

It's my turn again. Bowl. Catch some flak for telling terrible jokes. I'm tired. Low. I want to talk about it with somebody but every time I bring this up I'm too sensitive. Boys don't cry, and all that shit. Better that I suffer and silence and figure out how to handle my shit than risk being called out on the carpet as the sensitive boy again.

I cock my arm back and slap myself in the face, hard. The haze lifts for a moment.

"Feels good, doesn't it?"

I smile. Another slap. Yes. Good is the word for this. I deserve this pain. I'm the one who can't get shit handled. I'm the sensitive boy who can't get anything. If nobody else is going to beat this out of me it's on me to fix. So I go to town - slap, slap, slap, laugh, slap slap. Viv joins in too, praising me for the harder shots, laughing with me through the pain.

"That's more like it. This is what you deserve, Alex. Pain and misery, pain and misery. Doesn't it feel good?"

When we leave the alley my face is red and welted. I chalk Viv up to a dream from being too tired, too stressed.

Nobody notices when Viv steps in. I'd hit myself, Wrestle on a busted back until I couldn't walk, belittle myself when I made the tiniest mistake. If someone so much as whispered a note of criticism or anger my way I'd take it to heart, rolling over immediately and giving them whatever they wanted. But nobody gave a shit. It was heroic, or perfectionist, or just Alex being Alex.

It's only when I try killing myself that people listen. When I talk about suicide I'm paraded around all the friends of the family. Look at all the good parenting we do, everybody! Our darling son is sad and we're taking care of him! See all these pills we're giving him! See how we reach out to everyone and tell them how sad he is? Aren't we just grand?

And in a week we're back at square one: I hate my guts, and only Viv takes the time to notice. Sure, she may hate my guts. She certainly didn't help. But Viv listens. Viv makes me feel like I can control something even if my brain is always wrong.

I am not in control and Viv keeps me from feeling sad about it.

Want to know my secret? I always want to kill myself. There is no secret sauce, no triggering event. Every single day of my life Viv comes to visit and suggests I kill myself. It's goddamn clockwork.

I am 32 and in the bathroom of my cushy tech job. My wife and I just shared breakfast and coffee in the spacious kitchen of our new condo. But Viv show up in the stall with me, all of five years old, and pokes at my belly.

"You're never going to be a pretty girl. You should kill yourself."

"You should have talked to this business user sooner. You should kill yourself."

It's not about telling Viv to take a hike. She'll never listen. Surviving her is about learning to not listen.

Two days after I tried to kill myself with a seatbelt I'm painting the house I hate. The girlfriend is... somewhere else. I can't remember where. I'm unemployed and one month away from starting transition; things got a bit hazy in the transfer. But I remember painting this living room in a sea foam green color that I just despise, focusing on breathing. Breathing is hard.

A week ago I went out as a girl for the first time in a long time. It felt... it felt real in a way that life hadn't felt in a long time. I felt like Cinderella at the ball; lost in the ecstasy of a body that matched what was going on in my mind. I danced with strangers. Laughed. Admired my image in the mirror.

And here I am, back in guy clothes, back in my straight relationship in a house I didn't want with a woman I knew was bad for me.

Around this time of my life I'm having a panic attack per day. The girlfriend is demanding I find a new job. Mortgage isn't going to pay itself. I can feel the walls closing in around me. This is my future. This house, this relationship, this body -- they are my prison bars, my bare bed, my metal toilet with lukewarm tap water.

(Viv gets a kick out of this, by the way. She's walking around the living room I'm painting and painting a mental image. "You'll have your first kid here. And - oh! - you'll probably spend a lot of time on this couch soothing her when she has a breakdown!" Just walking through the house, pointing out every ding and every dent in a house you didn't want in the first place.)

When the girlfriend comes home I'm in a full-on panic attack. She starts up about the job, I think. Talks about mortgage payments. I excuse myself to the basement. She doesn't follow.

I tried to kill myself two days ago. She does not follow.

My heart is on fire. The basement is cold and dead. I laid my head on unfinished concrete and try to breathe. It catches in my throat. I want to run. Scream. Drive away, something.

Viv sits at my side. She puts a hand on my chest. The other hand plays with a box cutter. "Your prison," she says, flipping the cutter around the first kunckle of her middle finger. "Just like I promised. Just like you deserve."

I want to run. Blood runs hot in my veins. I stand up. Pace. Do pushups until the sweat runs freely down my chin. If I'm exhausted I can't run. If I can't run I can go back to understanding that what's in my head is wrong, and what the girlfriend is saying is right. Of course I need to find a job. Of course I need to relax. Of course she's looking out for my own good.

Viv hands me the box cutter.

"You're never going to get the chance to be a girl," she says. Her fingers encircle mine and she runs the cutter over my arm, tracing the pulsing veins with a gentle caress. "You think she's just going to be okay with all this? Hardly. You didn't speak up in time, Alex. Just like always. And now your future wife just up and bought a freaking house! You can't leave now. She needs your help.

"She'll always need your help."

"Yeah."

"You know I'm right."

"I guess."

"But you know," she says, pushing the knife harder against my skin. "You could go out with one hell of a bang. That'd show her! Close the books, kid. Once and for all show her you're the fucking boss of your own life. One good cut and it'll be over."

"Yeah." I relax. She's right: it's just a little knick. There was a drain in the concrete below my wrist; if I amed it right the blood would drain right in. No mess. No muss. No fuss.

My family would throw a great funeral. Maybe they'd say nice things about me. Friends walking past the casket, sobbing. The girlfriend, stuck with the house, struggling. Yeah. That'd fucking show her. My brain may be wrong but my body has power. Weight, even, once the life was gone.

Besides, I didn't want this male body.

I pushed a bit harder. Scratches started to show on the skin. Pearls of blood poked up where the knife had started to pierce skin.

This male body.

"I have to try," I said. I think I cried. Fuck, the whole thing's a haze now. I floated above my own body. Fingers wrapped around the blade. Viv stroking my hair, cooing sweet nothings in my ear. I'm wearing a sweat-stained shirt from the all-male college I attended. I'm pale and a little jaundiced from drinking myself to sleep for the past week. I'm thirty seconds and one flick of the wrist away from watching my blood drain into a hole in the middle of fuck-all Indiana, alone, throwing up the biggest middle finger I can think of to a world where I could never, ever be right in the eyes of others.

And then I stop.

"I have to try," I say again. It's louder this time. "It's either try, or die right here, right now."

Viv does a double take. "I'm sorry. For a second there I think you said you wanted to live."

I pull myself to a sitting position and face her. This is... well, it's new, for sure. Usually Viv just has her way with me. Snippy comments in one ear, demands in the other. And usually I know better than to trust what's going on in my mind when it's not in line with what Viv says. But in that basement, sopping up bits of blood with the tail of my t-shirt? I felt defeated. Completely, totally defeated. Viv won; I was a horrific piece of shit, beyond redemption, a life form whose blood should have been in that drain a long time ago.

I don't know. Maybe knowing I was ready to lose everything made me ready to win something.

"I could try hormones," I said with a weak smile. "You know, see if I can chase that dragon I found when we went dancing."

"That dragon is fucking gone, man. You're the one who walked into the house with eyes open. You're the one who got your ass fired from that school."

"And if nothing comes of it, I come back down here and kill myself. Not like there's a time limit on this, right? I'll go try the hormones and if--"

"--when--"

"--if/when they fail I end it then. No harm, no foul."

Vis stood and crossed her arms. She started to yell. "There's going to be a ton of harm! Imagine when you go home and start telling people you're a girl. How's that going to work out for you, sweetcheeks? Trying to trust your brain like you know anything. Fuck. Just... take the cutter. Two minutes, tops, and then we're done."

I stand. Look her in the eyes. She's crying; big, wet tears that traced the contour of her scowl. To her credit she only stood in the doorway long enough to say she put up a fight; when I nudged her she stepped aside.

"I think you just need to settle in to the new place," the girlfriend says. It's been a week since the box cutter and the basement. My therapist just cleared me for hormones. In a week my life is going to run on the rocket fuel that is a body that matches what my mind expects.

"I mean, it's not a good idea. We just bought a house together! How are you going to get a job? Can't you just, well, think about it some more?"

"I've thought about it for years," I snap back. This isn't like me. When someone says my mind is wrong they are almost always right. But here I am, ramping up into the full-on shouting match I'll ever have, and my mind insists that it's right. I'm not a man. And it's time to either accept this fact or let the blood run down the drain.

"I have to try," I say by way of apology. She scowls. This is one of our last conversations.

Two weeks later I'm taking my first shot of estrogen. To the outside world this is a snap decision: a fit of pique in which I took on the next fun minority identity.

But I'll tell you this: Viv didn't talk to me for a whole month after the first shot. Even as my relationship fell apart, even as I watched my family implode, even as the remaining vestiges of a stable life caught fire and fucking burned to ash, Viv kept her distance.

I'm 24 and the bottom has fallen out of my life. I'm out. Trans, visibly and unmistakeably so. Genie's out of the bottle. Layoffs are starting to ripple through my workplace. In a month I'll have a layoff notice of my own and be one paycheck away from losing the apartment. It's late. Christmastime. My friends are all with their families. I'm eating box mac and cheese and chasing it with terrible vodka.

Viv sits on my computer desk, her legs dangling over the side. She's fifteen again: goth makeup, short pants, flannel. She's tapping her fingers on the lip of the desk and looking around the room, impatient. I'm writing - one of the novels I started around transition-time that crashed and burned with the stress of blowing up my personal life - and my only roommate is none too happy.

"I told you this was going to happen," she says. "The second you revealed to the world just what a freak you are, that you hid it from everyone instead of giving them a chance to prove you wrong? That's when this went to shit.

"You deserve all of this."

"I did talk to my friends before I talked to the family," I say. Not to Viv, per se. I'm talking to myself, my journal, the family holiday pictures Facebook wants me to remember. We are happy in the pictures. Smiles and arms around shoulders, bright faces, huge spreads with baked macaroni and cheese that I never bothered to learn to make.

Yesterday, with my dad and his family, I got handshakes and hesitant hugs.

"I lied to them," I say.

"You most certainly did."

"I tried so hard to keep it down. I lost. Now I'm a freak and a liar."

So many chances to be open and honest, wasted. Now I had a group that took my needs at face value. A group that believed in me. They didn't know the real me. They couldn't have. The family - they knew me better. Family saw me with the warts and everything. The happiest highs, the saddest lows. They knew how fucked up I was deep down.

Maybe they'd have sent me to a camp. Maybe they'd yell. It always made sense when they yelled.

Viv slides off the desk and skips across the empty living room. She dives into the bathroom. I hear rattling in the medicine cabinet. Then: two skips to the tiny kitchen, rustling in the drawer.

She returns to the desk with a dull knife and blood thinners. "Maybe you should try to kill yourself again. Make an effort this time - land in the hospital. They listen when you do that."

I wince. When I moved into this apartment I'd taken great pains to remove every blade from the home. (What can I say? Viv can't persuade if she doesn't have tools.) But here, eating mac and cheese and drinking bottom shelf vodka on Christmas day? Viv got desperate.

"Come on, baby. One more spin. I'll get the tub running. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two. Then it'll be over. I promise."

I'm 24 and hiding in my apartment. Outside, my ex is banging on the door. Screaming "I just want to talk." Viv reaches for the handle.

But I know what happens next. I let her in. The limited self-confidence I had built in the past month would fall apart. She'd take one look at the place, insist I come stay the night, and start whispering sweet nothings. With time I'd learn that my mind was wrong; she was right. The house wasn't so bad. Being a guy wasn't so bad. Not great, but I could survive if I stopped trying to make sense of what's in my head and just let other people tell me what to do.

I could have broken it to her better. I could have taken her with me to talk to the therapist. Could have brought her along for my first shot. Could have... could have talked more instead of burying everything deep.

I let her bang and bang. The phone rings. I ignore it. When she leaves I have a big, long cry.

Viv fetches the knife.

I'm 25 and on a chatroom with a man I consider to be like a second father. He's a novelist and an autoworker in the midwest who has mentored me since I was a teen. When times were tight in college he sent checks that he insisted I spend on nice things for myself. I'm laying on a mattress without a frame and typing to him on a netbook I picked up with my limited income as a helpdesk tech. I tell him how happy I am now, despite Viv's insistence on keeping the knife close by.

I have a new roommate. She moved across the country to help me move forward with my transition. In hindsight this is bonkers; in the moment it is sane.

But this man - a guy who has seen me grow up for years from the outside; a guy who has read everything I've written since I was fifteen, where all my deepest insecurities and fears were given form - he's trying to talk me out of taking my next shot.

To him, the girl-thing is just another persona to hide in. He's not alone. Everyone in my family who is willing to talk to me is bringing it up. "Maybe you're better off gay." "Maybe this is just a phase." "Maybe you aren't in a position to make this decision." "It's not like you." And yes, they're sort of right. I was a bit of an asshole when I came out. Doubly so when I invited strangers to help me make big decisions.

Viv loves these people. She plays them against each other in my head, reveling in the splendor of a world where my mind can never quite get right. She runs through every little mistake I made in disclosing my trans status as she works the dull knife in the space between my fingers, her hand covering mine, stabbing faster and faster.

But this guy cuts the shit and gets to the point.

"You seek domineers," he says at length. "The girlfriend, the wrestling. Things and people that tell you what to do."

This catches Viv off guard. I feel her chin resting on my shoulder as the messages come in.

"You've been denied validation. You seek fragile, inconsistent love that was withdrawn to manipulate you. And up until now your method of toughness, your method of dealing with these domineers, had been to accept the scars and pain."

"He can't know that," Viv says. "He's just a guy on the internet. Everything he hears goes through your filter. You manipulated him."

"Break this cycle, Alex. You can't keep accepting pain and scars forever."

"You fed him lies!" Viv bangs on my back. She's shouting now; impetulent screeching that echoes off the bare walls of my apartment. "All those stories, all those Cinderella-esque tall tales. Lies!"

"Male or female, above sll else, watch out for the domineers. You must break this cycle, or it will break you."

"Lies!" Viv paces around the apartment. Punches a wall. Grabs her head with both hands and squeezes hard. "You fed him all these fucking lies and he bought it.

"You weren't abused. You aren't special. You're just a stupid little shit who can't do anything right."

I still strugle with it - domineers, that is. Years of therapy and a handful of novels helped me find the confidence to recognize it and work to stop it. Hell, one of the first conversations my wife and I had as a married couple was how to hash out our differences without tripping over Viv's baggage. I vet every new friend and am quick to revoke access to my personal life from anyone who decides to be a dick. I don't do it to be mean or elitist; I do it to survive.

Because when a domineer comes along - when someone in my life plays a tune that Viv can vamp on - I can fall right back into that basement with Viv, knife in hand, not sure what is real and what is a lie.

I am 30 and finally on anxiety medication. For years I stuck with the family tradition for dealing with mental health issues: drink your problems away. Viv liked things better that way; once I was calmed down enough to think she could rehash every stupid mistake I made, break me down, bring out the knife.

I remember, once upon a time, my sister and I trying to get mom to go to bed. She was leaning up against the kitchen counter and counting out pills. "It's not a problem," she keeps saying to me. "I'm fine. I can stop whenever I want." Whether she was plastered because of some medication conflicting with alcohol or simply because she drank too much that night, I don't know. But I do remember how she kept counting her pills, pushing my sister and I away, insisting she was fine. There wasn't a problem.

I remember not wanting to start drinking because of what I had seen growing up.

I remember having my first drink at 17. We were at a party with some friends of the family. I had this can of sprite - a treat during the wrestling months where I had to cut weight. I walked away from it, returned, and noticed it tasted funny. "Did my sprite go bad?" I say, passing it around. My parents shake their head. Giggles around the room. My stepmom lets the cat out of the bag: "It's just whiskey. Lighten up! It's not going to kill you."

I remember having my first drink by choice at a TKE party. Some guy poured a margarita shot straight into my mouth. It's sweet. I remember feeling terrified, like I'd just taken a hit of acid and was waiting for the buzz to catch up with me. The room starts to spin. I step outside and call my mom. "I finally got drunk!" I said, laughing. I remember feeling proud, like my finally cutting loose and doing like the rest of the family was something to celebrate.

I remember - well, don't remember - blackout nights with cheap rum. I was teaching high school and having full-on panic attacks a couple nights a week. The rum kept me on an even enough keel to function but I definitely still got canned from that job at the earliest opportunity.

I remember saying I was going to cut back at least five times this year without much success. Sometimes, sure; I make it a month or so without too many slip-ups, but then I'll come home from work feeling terrible and grabbing a drink to take the edge off.

Fuck, maybe this is Viv's long con. If she can't get me to do the deed she'll kill me slowly instead.

Viv chuckles when I write that.

I am 25 and finally figuring Viv out.

It's been two years since I've spoken to my mom on the phone. I have a calendar reminder to call her every week, even if only to record a voicemail. THe family doesn't send invites to anything, anymore. I find out about births, marriages, and life changes through facebook friends of friends. Viv loves to point out all the big events I'm missing.

It's Christmas time. I fucking hate Christmas. Christmas was a thing I did with Mom. Now I'm calling her once a week in vain hopes of getting a response. I hate hearing about how the family is doing. I hate... I hate hearing the names, seeing the faces, hate that these people get to continue their lives without any repercussions while I'm tagging along with friends for the holidays like some goddamned boat anchor.

Christmas, man. Fucking hate every second of it.

After the phone call I'm reading email. I'd grown tired of these calls and decided to write down what I was feeling. The response leaves me in tears. It's not really for public consumption - lots of "I can't bear to look at your pictures or hear your voice" - but what Viv leans on comes at the end of the email: "How dare you issue ultimatums. I'm entitled to my feelings too. I feel like I lost a son."

Viv whistles and pats me on the shoulder. "Tough luck there, kid. She's hurt. I don't blame her; you didn't give her space to figure this out."

"It's been two years."

"But you have to give her all the time she needs."

"That's not true," I say. I'm not angry. Not desperate. Not bargaining. Just matter-of-factly disagreeing with the girl who is always poking me in the side.

"Says who?"

"Says my therapist."

The word makes her cringe.

"See here, though." She points to a line in the email. "'I just wish you weren't doing this transgender thing.' It's not like she's trying to gaslight you. And you did know this would happen, so--"

"That opinion doesn't invalidate my feelings. If the net result of what has transpired is that I've been abandoned by family, then I'm allowed to feel abandoned." I turn to her and smile. "That's how facts work."

"Facts. like how you sprung this trans thing on everyone? Like how you acted so goddamn happy about being trans those first few months? Like how you demanded that everyone be supportive of who you are, and cut out the people who dared ask critical questions?"

"Facts like those. And yes, I may have been a little rash here and there, but I didn't have the tools to separate what I felt from what others said I was feeling. I had to be firm."

"You could try not being trans, you know. That'd help you earn your way back into the family."

I stand from the computer, walk to the kitchen, and open a beer. Viv smiles at me. "You could be drinking with the family if you'd just get off your high horse. You know, at the Christmas party they're having. You saw pictures from last year. Looked fun."

"I'm okay."

"You know better. The family is great! Remember all the campfires you had in the backyard? The sing-offs in the kitchen? Euchre with your aunts? Board games with cousins? How there was a good joke or witty crack at just the right time?

"They loved you, Alex. And you turned your back on them."

She rapped my chest with two fingers to make her point. I brushed it away.

"No. That's not how it happened."

"You could have kept a lid on this. Stayed in the closet. Then you wouldn't be drinking beer here alone. You wouldn't have broken her heart."

I put the can down. "You could at least try to make sense. You were there. You held the blade to my wrist.. There wasn't another option."

"But they're good people."

"Who refuse to see that I'm happy and fufilled for the first time in my life. Who get angry when I make my opinion known. Who want very specific things as a condition of our continued relationship. Spare me, Viv."

"Your dad still loves you."

"Yes," I say with a shrug. "And he would have put me in a camp if he found out I was trans while under his roof. But he's trying. He knows the choice I made: death, or this.

"Want to guess what how mom would have wanted, given the choice?"

Viv doesn't have a response for that.

I can't blame mom for mourning her dead son. I see her as dead too; the memories I have of this person who I loved and respected belong to a person I can no longer be around. We may have talked every single day, may have shared tons of traditions, may have sang quodlibets over the holidays, may have shared songs at the piano, but that was then.

I am 31 when I marry the love of my life. I send an invitation. No RSVP. No attendance. I don't cry. I come up with a riddle: "What do you get when you put ten years between a parent and a child?"

"I don't know," Viv says.

"Strangers."

I am 27 when I discover r/raisedbynarcissists. It is also the first time I see people talking frankly about cutting contact with a parent. Their stories - short, raw, brutal stories - they may not match my own but by God do they ever rhyme. Reading knocked loose memories that I'd lost before - memories that found their way to this story.

I spend half a year asking myself if I grew up with a narcissist. Was it toxic narcissism? Was it abuse? Did my family's particular brand of domestic fucked-upiness lead to such a diagnosis? Certainly there are stories in my life that support it - most of which aren't mine to share.

I am turning 28 and going in and out of therapy. Turns out I was asking the wrong question. Does it matter if my home life was good or bad, or is it more important to ask questions about why Viv is in my life? Why did I need her for validation?

I'm 28 and fucking off to Chicago. No jobs for a trans woman in Indiana, for one, and for two I'm tired of being reminded of the life I had before. They can keep the city for all I care.

I'm 33 and writing this story while Viv watches over my shoulder. I've only thought about suicide 3 times this week, and I'm trying to write this sober. She's presentable today: wine-colored blouse, slacks, everyday flats. She pulls up a chair and watches the cursor pass from left to right, top to bottom. Sometimes she speaks up. Sometimes she protests. But for the most part she's resigned to see what comes next.

When we get here she leans toward me with a sad scowl on her face. "Listen," she starts. "I think we need to sit on this one."

"What?"

"You know. Sit on it. Save it in a folder and keep it to yourself."

"Okay, I'll bite." I spin around in my chair to face her. "I'm not a child; I"m 33 now. Fuck it. Let's have it out. Tell me why I should stuff this one."

"You know your memory isn't spot-on. Never was. And you threw away all the evidence; the journals, the scribblings, the old stories. No proof. Remember how you wanted to just forget everything? What if you did forget it?

"What you're seeing right now is worse than a memory; it's a Cinderella story, made up from whole cloth.

"Maybe you were just a shithead. You know you talk too much. Still do. It's every time you talk over people. Every time you change the subject because of some factoid you're reminded of. And you're sensitive about the stupid shit."

"That's fair."

"I'm just saying you shouldn't trust this feeling. The righteousness in your heart; the clarity of your hindsight; the sharpness of your anger. Hell, you already shifted things around to match dear old Frytag's triangle. What's to say you... well."

She laughs. "What if you gaslit yourself?"

And she's right. I don't have the evidence. I can't prove anything. Shit in my head's too broken to put back together. You have to understand that. Everything you read here could be another lie. I can never know for sure. But that's how Viv survives: the slightest bit of doubt and she's kicking on the back of my chair, gleeful and full of life.

"I want to break it off," I tell her.

"I'm sorry. That's not how this works. You don't just get to leave.

"It is now. I wrote you into existence. I gave you form so we could have this talk."

She laughs at me. "I'm not real."

"I danced around you for so long, Viv. Met all your cousins in stories. But man, every time I tried to write about you there was... there was one of your friends there you could hide behind. A real life story turned on its head in a novel. A little piece of my ex here, a picture of my mother there. Never enough to be identified directly. Plausible deniability. But never quite you.

"Now you're real. Now I can fight you."

She turns away from me, towards you, and puts an arm around your shoulder. It's heavy. Hot with anger. "You sure you want them watching?"

"Yes." I look to you with hard, watery eyes. "I want you to see this. I won't trust myself without a witness."

I'm really sorry about this, by the way. If I worked this out in my head I'd have talked myself out of my feelings later. It has to be this way. Me, pulling Viv onto the page, and you watching me having this conversation. Take notes. Even if it's wrong I know I wrote it down.

"I'm not the kid I used to be. I grew the fuck up, Viv. Broke it off with my old life. And yeah, I can't prove anything for sure. But I have people who can double-check what I'm seeing and what I'm feeling. Maybe it's gaslighting. Maybe it's a lack of conflict resolution skills.

"But it's real, Viv. And I should be entitled to my own emotions."

She shrinks away from you, from me. Backpedals out of my office. We follow her downstairs. In her hand, a picture of one of the few times I've gone home since coming to Chicago. Happy, smiling family faces look up at me from the photo.

"But you still love them."

"That's an odd word. Love. And yes, I still do. Even if they're bad for me they're my family. Even if they're dead to me they're still family. I still have good memories. Bad ones, too. But I can still love them for who they were and what they did in my life, warts and all, even if I know I can't go back.

"See, I love my chosen family, too. My wife, my close friends, the Chicagoans who reciprocate my love with compassion and respect. It's healthy, Viv. And now that I've tasted healthy love I have standards."

"Heh." She lets the photo fall to the ground. Don't pick it up after her. She's doing a bit.

"I guess you don't care about your family."

"My therapy bill would disagree," I reply, chuckling. "Try harder."

"Offer's still on the table," she says. She goes to the kitchen and pulls a knife. It's much, much sharper than the ones I had in my twenties. "Give me two minutes and I'll give you an out. Stick it to those mean biddies who gave you so much pain!"

"And what would happen to my wife? The mortgage? The friends I have here?" I take the knife and hand it to you. My eyes are misty and my hands shaking. Please. Hold onto the knife. Just for a while. Just for tonight.

"I want to live now, Viv. For the people who love me. For the good things I can do. For... fuck, Viv. For spite. My teens and twenties tried to kill me. And the forces that did that can take a long walk off the short bridge.

"See, becuase I'm onto you. You win when I feel worthless. I matter now. You can't convince me otherwise."

She shrugged. "You should still kill yourself."

I roll my eyes. "I'll take it under advisement."

Viv kicks at the ground. Don't indulge her. I'm serious. It's part of a bit. You indulge her and she'll start doing backflips. Please. I know it's awkward. But you've stuck around all this time. We can talk about it later. Promise.

"What happens now?"

"Simple." I walk to the front door and open it. "You walk out. Then I close the door and lock it. And when you want to come back I can read this story and remember - really remember."

She walks out. She's in the hall now, still wanting to get in the last word. Closing doors on people is still terrifying to me. I've only done it three times in my life. Once on my ex; once on my mother; and Viv here and now. I never get used to it.

Please, come here. Put your hand on the door handle. If you want to; I know I've alraedy asked a lot of you as a witness. Just like that. I just need to close it. Then we can go back to writing fun science fiction and fantasy.

Viv shoves her finger in my face."You know you got it wrong. Hell, you have to call in your backup to close the door. And when I come back you're going to welcome me back with open arms. You'll be writing one of your shitty books, or pretending you can throw a decent party, and when you go back over every little mistake you made I'll be right there, needling you, knife in hand."

"I know I'll get it wrong. But when I do you won't be there."

"Why not?"

"Because I know you now," I say. Push with me - yes! just like that! "And when you come around next time you'll have to knock first."

The door latches shut. I scramble for the deadbolt. Just... just give her a few minutes to clear out before you go, okay? Would be just like her to wait for you to leave before she slips back in.

[coloringpagekidsblog-blog]

Coloring Products For Kids

In a child's ages, parents do each possible attempt to create the child bloom in real method. Coloring pages is a commonly used practice by parents at home or teachers in school to impart understanding of the alphabets, animal, monuments, fruits, vegetables, amounts etc.. Kids love coloring activities and they can even learn a whole lot through fun activities & colour. Colors are fascinating and attract kids that's the reason the environment of preschool sessions or play schools includes colors to produce the toddlers or kids cherish and contented. Research shows that the kid in ancient age learns so the knowledge ought to be impeccable that needs to be imparted to children.

Which are the most popular coloring pages for kids?

Utilizing colors could be a superb way to inculcate the nature, trees, water bodies, along with other surroundings. By make use of nature you are able to introduce your own kids and colors, children learn through fun activities. It is also possible to organize a visit to the nearest zoo, to make your ones comprehend the creature. Earth coloring worksheets or pages or action books could be the alternative for preschool teachers and parents. Alphabets drawing worksheets drawing worksheets, Food drawing worksheets and many more are available online in printable coloring pages format.

Entertaining activity-how to draw action

Draw pictures of alphabets, animals, cartoons, numbers, leaves, etc. is one other way to impart understanding in a kid of various living or non living things in the world. It invokes the creativity within a child; make use of paper and vibrant colours to start such drawing activities with your children and make certain to occupy an outdoor location such as gardens, roofs, or patio etc..

Good Parenting at Coloring Book for Kids preschool point

A parenting that is good should think about the understanding about child's preschool period. Based on studies period of child's life span is very important to communicate consciousness. In every country, children often start school when they are just 3 years old and invest in their school's kindergarten or school section before they begin Year 1 - tier - in the age of five or six. When it comes to learning, parents can help with number awareness - as understanding the value and place of numbers, being able to recite from one to 10 is not the same. Talk to your kid about quantities, for example, five is larger than two. Focus on counting; board games and playing dominoes, like Snakes and Ladders, will instruct children how to count while making it fun.

While teaching them the Word of God at the exact same time, searching for a means to keep your child occupied? Christian coloring pages for children are a great tool you can use to do exactly that. As your children colour pictures of characters or Bible stories, it will help reinforce their knowledge of the Bible and of God.

The easiest way to get a good deal of pages for your children to color would be to print out them online. There are loads. Just look for "Christian coloring pages" or "Biblical coloring pages" on your favourite search engine, and you will come across a lot of results.

There are so many unique pictures available that you may have better success using particular terms like "Jesus healing the blind man coloring page" or "Tower of Babel coloring page," as illustrations. This is even a Sunday School lesson at church or a great idea if you're searching to compliment. In a picture that reflects the Bible story you're teaching them, you can let your children colour in these scenarios. After they are done coloring, their picture can be taped by them in their own bedroom, which will enable them remember that specific Bible story.

Alternatively, you could use coloring pages that you give to your child while he or she does something great, such as states thank you, gives a glow, or aids out before being requested. Does it benefit them by giving them an activity they'll enjoy doing, but it also demonstrates to them that it is great to do things that please the Lord.

Websites are not the only place you can get coloring pages. You can find activity books and coloring pages in your In or local bookstore some arts and crafts stores. Because it enables them to observe the arrangement of events, giving your kid a book of Bible stories is great.

Christian bookstores usually also have reproducible coloring books or individual pages from which you can create copies so that precisely the same story picture can be colored in by more than 1 child. This is particularly useful when you want to present to color while the lesson is being taught by you.

Coloring is such a great action that most children love. It gives them chance coordination of hands, as well as a host of other matters. Having coloring books for your kid could be one of the things that you could have. If you are going to get a coloring book for your child, here are some of the Things You Want to consider:

1. Theme - coloring books have types of themes. It might be based like those of even others, creatures, vehicles, or Disney characters. When you're selecting this kind of books for the child, keep in mind that it's a way they could express their imagination rather than by expressing their feelings. So, 1 way you may make him feel brand new, is by simply choosing the one which is appropriate for taste.

2. Complexity - only know your child's degree when it's all about coloring. Coloring books give coloring that is big spaces which make it easier for kids. Their degree of abilities for coloring will surely increase after the kid gets older and also the difficulty about the book. So, if you would like your child select. Don't frustrate them about getting books with one or small images with tons of written instructions.

Coloring books are all of the buzz of late. It's apparent that it revolves round crayons or pencils and coloring pages. But, it is simply coloring? How do something like staying inside the lines be a benefit to me personally?

I was raised during the time of doodle art - ? You have a bunch of markers and elaborate line drawings on numerous themes. I would spend hours coloring these in! Little did I know then that coloring pages were a benefit to my well-being.

Well they were and still are now for people of all ages.

People are creating the adult coloring books bestsellers on Amazon! At the time of this writing, eight of the top twenty books on the bestsellers list, are coloring books for adults. There has to be something behind this increase in interest.

Coloring books' topics are intricate and based more about images, not your childhood counterparts which comprised farm animals heroes, and bunnies. You'd expect to see psychedelic patterns reminiscent of art type pages patterns, dream images including mermaids, dragons, goddesses and angels, and ancient designs of spiritual and religious character.

The fascination, and how do they help you?

The action of applying colored media to complex line drawings is an advantage to comfort and anxiety reduction. You are in a position to place the world aside for the moment and focus on the craft of coloring.

Studies have demonstrates that stress levels dropped. They did note that doodling had no impact on stress. The focus on coloring and shifting the brain allows that blocking of anxiety at the present time. Coloring doesn't have a demand for thought processes and you are able to acquire within your self, isolated from commotion anxiety, and distractions such as listening to music.

The insistent, low-stress, and "no brainer" act of colour lends itself to comfort. The calming effects not only helps to reduce stress levels, but can help to bring you back.

The wonderful part is that anyone can get it done will no skill setup required! Grab a crayon and you are ready to go. You may make it even more enjoyable and have grandkids color or your children with you. Depending upon the age of the ones They could possibly be interested in the coloring books, others still needing to colour flower arrangement that is pretty, astronaut, or a cow.

This suddenly passed my thoughts: When did sport really begin while we were searching though the bookstore shelves looking for skateboarding books for children? From my readings, it began with boards made from timber as the very first of its type, in the 1950s. When browsing was at its peak skateboarding made its way from the market. Hence skateboarders were surfers. And the rest is history, so they say.

However, skateboarding is more than a game or Simply an activity, since it boasts of Advantages to adults and children alike, including the following:

1. It may be considered as an alternative exercise for children who find exercise boring. Truth is, your adrenaline is kicking up high and when you're on board, you won't even recognize the time spent performing the action. Just like a traditional exercise, this is a fantastic way to fight with obesity and diabetes which are now starting to hit on children due to absence of bodily exertion.

2. It can be a means to satisfy new friends and build relationships. Because a great deal of children nowadays are pretty much into it, it's more fun if you share the sport with other children on the block. You may share tips and tricks on how to improve your abilities.

3. It teaches your child the value of patience, discipline, attention, balance, and sportsmanship. You'll have to learn the fundamentals and exercise a whole lot since to learn the art of skateboarding instructs your kid important values that are essential in achievement against the challenges of life.

4. According to studies, it aids in balancing some states instead of simply taking medications for it. Skateboarding teaches kids to concentrate or focus as we have mentioned.

5. It's among the pleasures that are least expensive since all you have to do is purchase a skateboard. Skateboard isn't as costly as one thinks. Prices depend on caliber and size of the board. Your kid does not have to go far to enjoy the sport. Children can play around your neighborhood.

But what if your child isn't a sport? Easy. Publish the game to them by buying fun and friendly skateboarding books. Okay, I know what you are thinking: What if your kids are not book fanatics too? Fact is, your kid doesn't have to enjoy the book as well to be a bookworm. These book authors understand that kids have short attention span, so they have made it certain that the publication is for the young ones.

Coloring pages are a easy and simple way to keep kids entertained and content while they are learning. The internet is the best medium for locating and generating products . Coloring pages are now available in electronic form e.g. pdf documents. Just find order the solution and print the webpages out. It's the use of this internet - simple and affordable.

The option is to purchase books in a store or order the coloring book on the web. If you order the publication online, it may take ages to receive it. You have to wait for the product. It is received by you within minutes of purchase, if you purchase a coloring product in digital form. After your payment is made, an email is sent to you and contains your buy.

Digital coloring pages are much more affordable than coloring books that are expensive. Whereas conventional products only allow each page to be colored, you can print pages over and over again. You can decide what pages to print. There are pages children will like and pages that they will not wish to colour. Digital coloring books give you the choice of which pages to print and volume of webpages.

There is less wasted paper, and that means you are doing your bit for the environment if you are printing pages you want. You don't have to store coloring books. All of the books are saved on your computer or storage device such as a DVD. The internet has made things easier for us, which is one example of this.