#generaltional trauma

[centuryberry]

HIIII :D.

Just a smol question? But can I pleseee has some more lore on Erlang and the Jade Emperor’s screaming match?

Oof. Ok. So. When I said there's family drama, there's family drama.

There are many myths and iterations of Erlang Shen, but the one I'm using for this fic is of Yang Jian (Erlang Shen), the Jade Emperor's nephew. His mother, Princess Yaoji, fell in love with a mortal and married him, violating the Heavenly Rules. As punishment, the Jade Emperor sealed her under a mountain. Yang Jian cleaved that very mountain with an axe to release his mother. Later, after an unrelated incident involving a flood, he is canonized as a god.

(There's also a story of Erlang Shen continuing the cycle by sealing his own sister in a mountain, causing his nephew to go through a similar journey.)

[felrend]

“We love you…”

[pistanthrophobiamaiden]

So I'm getting married. That's pretty cool.

I told myself that being 28 was gonna be the coolest thing in the world. I had this idea growing up that once someone hit 28, they were in that sweet spot of youth and wisdom. Now that I am, I'd say it's a cool life but I don't feel wise lmao.

Anyway, getting married is something I genuinely never thought would happen to me. I met a man, a great man, and he loves me enough to want to marry me. He sees me and gets frustrated with me sometimes, but he loves me anyway.

I struggle to communicate after a lifetime of being conditioned to keep all of my thoughts and feelings inside. I got to a point where I could have something happen to me, I could ball those feelings up like a paper wad and toss them away, never to be seen again.

Only that's not what happens. It gets put away, crumpled, and messy until someone comes along that you can't hide from. They shine a light into that void inside your soul and force you to sort the mess inside you. They will love you while you cry, kiss away your fears, and give you the reassurance that just because you're human and you deserve it. It's going to make your inner child cry, and your inner teenager rage out like nothing you've ever experienced before. It's a journey.

I'm marrying that person. That man. I don't know what I did to deserve him, but my god I'm so thankful for him. I don't communicate well, but I am trying so hard for him.

[returning-to-her]

There will be a lot of anger rising in our world over the next few years. Most people will not know how to use it properly or choose not to. They will project it onto innocent parties with different opinions instead of the people in charge, manipulating us all. It will be messy.

How do you use anger properly? By healing your wounds from being harmed that caused the anger in the first place. Then, you can rationally use your anger instead of unconsciously reacting to triggers and projecting it onto others.

Rational use of anger involves the conscious practice of emotions, logic, and behaviours. This world does not know how to do this. Find someone who can help you heal so you can.

- Laura Rose

Returning to Her

[qv3ncrazy]

Australia! Official Music Video

I need to redo this because Australia day was a very shit day for my Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Friends, You not would be the best day to celebrate as Australias national holiday!?! Fucking sorry day, get it clear, it has and always will be there land, and we owe it to Australia to heal the generaltional past down trauma, mark my  word, starting with a treaty! #thegreens #yothuyindi

[leavemeunread]

Hanging by a Thread

My fingers masochistically twiddle with the rope in my hand.  My thumb and middle finger repetitively unraveling the thick twine each time the two pieces hugged each other; they just couldn’t stand to be separated.  I stalked the perimeter carefully glancing around at how to pick apart what we had coined as the “cold room” when we were young.  It’s like we knew without knowing, what this space would become.  A void.  Empty. Uninhabitable.  

It was once just our playroom.  There were many times we had rehearsed being customers and cashiers, buying and ringing up random house items like staplers, wooden spoons, and her brother’s bootleg cd’s with music downloaded from Limewire.  We even went to war with blanket fort trenches and crumpled newspaper ammunition.  As we grew up, she eventually convinced her parents to make it her room.  Since we were so close, we would just call it our room. Our hang out.  Our not-man cave.  Our drawing-board. Our safety.   When it was taken from us, the “cold room” became a sanctuary of prayer.

A stinging takes over my eyes and they roll back from a line of incense smoke mocking my path.  I embrace a nostalgia of New Year’s temple offerings and water festival blessings it breathes into my lungs.

I am 7 and shorter than your average while she towers over me at 10 and taller than your average.  We are equally demented because size doesn’t affect the nerves running our anxious bodies as we are about to perform our first traditional Lao dance in front of all the monks and Buddhist.  At the prime of both our tomboy phases, the Siin, an elegant Laotian skirt, make-up and tight buns weighted with ornaments keep us stiff.  

“Alright, we got this,” she slaps my back too hard, and we step on stage like deer in head lights.  

I exhale and now the stench will forever bring me back; to this cold room.  I find composure as secrets taped behind posters on the walls recall my attention.  We tagged the room up quite a bit with farm animals and dirty poetry.  She hid the writing on the walls.  I peel off a Simple Plan “Perfect” album poster to reveal a message I left her the last time we were together.  

“Aren’t you afraid of your parents finding out?”  Posters of our favorite punk bands and Anime already littered every surface.  I nonchalantly worry as I scribe my love for her on the wall nonetheless.  I’ll be taking a Greyhound bus back home tomorrow.  I imagine if minutes could be hours as I come to terms with another abandonment.  She reassures me nothing will change between us, and we can keep up on Facebook like always.  I admire her cheerfulness; her world hasn’t fallen apart like mine.  She holds my sanity during visits to my mom.  I have polar relationships with my parents; my mom is the negative.  

“I love you so so much.” I stare at her admission written beneath mine.  I had told her not to read my note to her until I was gone... I am stunned to discover she left a response; a last message to me specifically.  

I’m overwhelmed realizing I mattered.  

I hope I mattered.  

I didn’t matter enough.

My dad let my cat die that same Summer I was away from him.  I had gone on a depressing tirade all over Facebook posts about how much life super sucked.  It was seriously the last straw when I lost Orange, and I was not going to deal with any of it anymore.  She replied to my posts and offered to give me another kitten the next time I visited.  I shafted her because I didn’t know if I would see her again as my emotional relationship with my mom overwhelmed the physical distance between us.  

I snap back.  My feet follow the hint of flowers and sage until the incense smoke is cornered to a shrine decorated in vibrant, orange marigolds and trees made of clipped dollar bills given as offerings to our mourning family.  Goosebumps prick up my arms as I realize... This is my first time here without her.  

My cheeks stream an unwelcomed wetness but the only effort my emotions make are the blinking of my eyes. I’m numb, but the taste of iron mixes with spit as a choking swallow brings me back to our morbid reality.  My hands seek her urn through wet vision, and my fingertips meet ceramic; It’s cold.  Her portrait is sitting above.  Unrecognizable. Unfamiliar. Unreal.  

I fixate on her mole, but then my attention is stolen by a reflecting dead stare and haunting smile. She was beautifully captured mid-laugh.  Spongebob’s maniacal giggle invades my thoughts and provokes me out of grief. She put on the best shows.  

I sink before the shrine and place the piece of her noose back where it belongs.  My impulses dull as my mind loses itself in memories.  My head cradles into my arms on my knees to fetal my body tighter.  My senses seal into a void blackness.  Despite this, I’m persecuted with an attack of what-ifs.

What-if I had responded to her offer of comfort?  

Would she have disclosed her misery to me as well?  

What-if I had vented less about myself and listened to her more the last time?

Would I have been able to be the person she was for me?  

What-if I paid more attention to her posts?  

Would I have been able to alert someone states away of a pending tragedy?

What-if I was more put together like she was?  

Would I have saved her?

What-if I lived with my mom instead?  

Would we be together now?

I fix my skirt as I exit the bathroom stall.  I pause at the mirror and fix my braid and reapply my eyeliner.  After school my dad is taking me to the DMV to get my driver’s license.  I consider the possibilities of freedom with my almost adulthood. I am two years away from 18, but I have been playing with the idea of becoming an emancipated adult for a few years.  Being able to drive meant I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, so maybe I wouldn’t have to go through that drama.  I could get a job and make my own money.  I can plan my own trips out of the mercy of my parents’ custody and life could be simple enough.  

“Meow.” My text tone chimes.

“I need to tell you something.” My older sister shot me with anxiety.  She was living with my mom after almost dying from Opiates at our house a month ago.  She had come home in a staggering blunder and threw herself into her room.  I wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong if I hadn’t needed my backpack from her car.  When I went to grab it, I found vomit all over the cupholders and passenger seat. I ran back inside and found her drowning in her puke on her pillow.  I didn’t know what else to do besides call her boyfriend.  

He came over quickly and rushed her to the hospital.  I stayed behind and cleaned up. I called my mom.  My mom forced her to California after that.  Andrew had cheated on her again; she attempted an overdose.  She was not safe in the hands of her abuser even if he saved her that day.  We had your typical-rocky-sibling relationship, but I really needed her.  But I needed her alive, so I accepted she had to go.  Her message alarmed me as I contemplated what she was capable of.

“Just tell me, don’t tell me you need to tell me.”

“Is this a good time?”

“Just tell me.”

“Rosie, she killed herself.”

That day, she chose to become my martyr.  Jesus Christ; my savior in death!  I hadn’t even had lunch yet.  My teacher empathetically excused me from English because my tears were a distraction in the classroom; I was not going to be harassed into putting my phone away.  I don’t even know where to begin to make sense of life before this moment.  I was a shell-shocked soldier on an empty staircase not caring if I am gunned down by any teachers or take-my-job-too-seriously hall monitors.  But anyone who passed didn’t care about the girl sitting with a stare introduced to death for the first time.  No one saw her. No one saved her.  My dad picked me up, and the day continued as it was supposed to.  My license issue date is our death date.  

“Did anyone tell you what happened?” Weeks had passed, but I knew my dad was referring to her.  He was so far removed from my mom’s side of the family, so I was surprised he heard about it.  I gave him a slow nod and dissociated for the conversation.  “I can’t believe she was able to do such a thing; something that I have thought of many times but could never do.”  My dad was a maniac, but I loved him.

I wondered if her suicide could stop his ideations as they had submerged mine in apathy.  I had come to terms that even in my misery, I could not ripple apart the lives of everyone I knew the way she did mine.  I was too broken to stay; too broken to be selfish. After her death, I was diagnosed with depression.

Instead of medicating, my dad took me to the temple and monks performed an exorcism and blessed the sadness out of me.   I chant Sanskrit every day and study Buddhist texts religiously like life could eventually mean something.  I stop killing spiders in the house like the good karma would undo all the bad I had already endured.  I light incense every night and speak to her in meditation.  Nirvana is promised as I desire nothing, feel nothing, and am seeing the truth of my life; I realize hell isn’t a place for the dead, but a world we are living.  

I compose myself at war with the urge to destroy her shrine.  

This shrine that shouldn’t exist.  

This shrine that doesn’t mean anything.  

This shrine of a sham.

This shrine that would have been mine; if it wasn’t hers.

I’m losing it.  

Positive thoughts.

Positive thoughts.  

Positive thoughts.  

I’m at peak breaking point; I’m sure I already broke.  

Think about my future.

Everyone deserves a future.

I deserve a future.  

I have a future.  

I had a future;

of the houses we said we would buy one day.  They stand right next door to each other.  Mine is blue because I’m always sad.  She told me that was okay; hers would be warm and yellow like her; all I had to do to be okay was look out the window.  

[bu-ikikaesu]

i feel like this topic has been discussed time and time again so this is nothing new, but it’s been bothering me so much especially with everyone shit takes on tiktok…i still can’t believe people who would normally obsess over shitty white villain characters are out here demonizing abuela alma for having incredibly complex trauma without the time or resources to properly heal from it…this should go without saying, but obviously it’s bad and toxic of her to project her traumas onto her family—like DUH her trauma doesn’t justify her behaviour, but the point of the river scene isn’t to absolve her of her treatment towards her family, it’s to show that she is a complicated and human character just like the rest of her family, and shows an understanding of how the circumstances she was put through affected the trajectory of her life, and how she managed to cope without any time or resources to help her. She watched her husband get dismembered right before her eyes and had to raise triplets and support a village right after, how is she supposed to properly heal from that??? So why is it that you cunts fawn over and stan “complex” villains (they aren’t even complex at all, they’re usually two-dimensional at best or literal fucking nazis), make liking that character the cornerstone of your entire personality, but then turn around and wish literal death on a woman who had a hard fucking life.

[yuktuts]

DAHLIA LYRICS TIMEE YEA YEAH under the cut WARNING its long. will do a iris one too dwdw i love u Hawthorne siblings. don't mind the weird backgrounds pls

iris loving dahlia but dollie always going back to the only thing that works for her (using people and criminal activity)

morgon ABANDONING THEM AT 6 YEARS OLD. bc they weren't "good" enough (this lyric is sung sarcastically)

3. ^ this part reminds me of Morgan wanting to KILL DAHLIA IN PRISON AND ONLY DIDNT BC SHE WAS "USEFUL" IN HER PLOT TO KILL MAYA TO GET POWER FOR PEARL

4. yeah. fey generaltional trauma real. honestly i could put all of apex predator here but i wont.

6. Dahlias desperation led to her sexualizing herself at 14 and older : (

7. do i have to explain this is dahlia all over

8. ppl do NOT talk ab how fucking DETERMINED and FIGHT dahlia had in her. even AFTER death

9. i have nothing to say besides fuck you terry fawles for dating a 14 year old at 20.

10. name one person who was on dahlias side besides Iris. u cant. also i love the fact that dahlia envies iris and pities pearl ITS SO COOL.

[returning-to-her]

Victim blaming versus actual victim? A big problem with our mental health care system.

- By Laura Rose

[pistanthrophobiamaiden]

In need of a diary

I don't know if this will take off for me, I hope it does. I just need a place to put some thoughts down that I don't really have anyone else in my life to talk to about.