#having an identity crisis at noon sure is fun actually

[wolfythewitch]

Putting the Chinese flag in my bio because I thought it was a citizenship thing but apparently it's an ethnicity thing anyways fil-chi exclamation mark (my church ruined this term for me LOL)

[thenerdywitchofthenorth]

Have I mentioned, that I suck at drawing small details and that besides the leo raph was the hardest one to start drawing?

So, I think this is The Godly outfit that has strayed the most from my original idea. I was planning on giving him the full body armor situation. But the more I think about it the more I decided not to. And believe it or not it wasn't due to laziness I actually can justify my actions.

Ralph is a war god, but he's so much more than that, and while his outfit is the most practical out of all of his brothers. And I do picture the details on his shirt and the ones on his middle, are not fabric it is armor, or made out of metal courtesy of Donnie, to protect his most vital areas. He doesn't wear heavy armor, because not only does he have this Nimpo to protect himself, but he doesn't want to be slowed down by the Heavy armor. After all part of his job on the field is trying to protect others and he wants to get to the most vulnerable people on time. His colors are simple but neutral, his outfit is open and you feel like you can approach him, if you get past the initial shock of seeing a giant snapping turtle. He has his weapons on, and the armor covering his arms is not just there to protect him but to make it more effective.

Now let's talk about the tattoos.

The one in his right arm speaks for himself, it's supposed to be a giant flower with all the colors of his siblings. I'm pretty sure later on he adds something that represents both the Casey's to.

And his other arm is a little, the most notable one, is of a rat protecting four eggs. The rest are just pretty designs with bright colors that make up for the lack of colors on his own outfit. And there's even tattoos of his preferred weapon hidden in there.

Ree, this is the part where you inspired me, I wasn't sure what to draw on his tail. Then Ree, suggested clouds and that gave me the idea.

Much like I did with Leo's outfit where I referenced the time of day that he was born, Ralph has not only his time, but his brother's and in the order they hatched.

We have Raphael at dusk, Donnie at midnight Leo at dawn, and Mikey at noon.

As we go down there are more fun colors and flowers and even a small tattoo of a teddy bear. Now the reason why I gave Raphael three tattoos alluring to the origins of his family is because, at that moment he needs a reminder.

The tattoos are there because they're covering gruesome scars that he got during a Savage episode, that afterward Mikey helps to cover them up. So when Ralph looks at his own body he's reminded of who he is ,where he comes from, and the things that he loves Like colors and animals and his family. and who he truly needs to protect.

Right now Ralph is having a full-on identity crisis, he's being pulled in five different directions. His family has just suffered a great loss, he feels like he's losing his second youngest brother, thanks to the selective and brutal worship he's getting. Is now distorted even to him. So right now he's using his family as an anchor, and going to do what feels the most familiar, and that's being the protector / Big Brother .

Much like Leo using his family as a security blanket and it's a way to define himself. I think later on not only will he get it more elaborate outfit that isn't afraid to lean more into the God of War aesthetic, and without forgetting his softer side, and will view his tattoos in a different light. No longer an anchor but something that he's proud of rather than depend on. And maybe even expand on them to reflect more of his own personality and growth, and.. maybe.. have a matching one with a certain badass Warrior Priestess who was newly transformed. Who knows

And here we have Savage rap, this one speaks for itself. His eyes whiten and teeth sharpen, the spikes of the shell more prevalent, I actually think that the spikes get so big that the tattoos aren't even visible. In short, if you're in battle and you're on the other end of that... there is no amount of luck that I can wish you for you to be safe.

Again very simple outfit, with similar colors but subdued and I threw in a little sun hat. And replace the armor on his hands with simple bandages.

Now another reason why I made his outfit so practical, is not just because he needs to be battle ready at the drop of a hat, but because of his favorite spots to go to when he's done in the mortal world or not just festivals and other fun locations, but in the woods to retrieve with his beloved animals that calm him so much.

Now finally we have clinging to a very special offering. The first offering he's received a long while that not only he appreciates, but get some hope that he'll be more understood in the future.

Yes @furiousjellifish , it's from the story you posted alongside your drawing of Mona.

There you have it the oldest brother, like always I would love to hear your opinions and if you have anything to add or suggestions I'm happy to hear them , because you guys know better than anyone that all of this is still beta and it might drastically change in the final draft.

@annonniiiiieeeee

@fatalflawsy

[dear-trashpanda]

Slightly longer incoherent post instead of five separate shorter incoherent posts

So like I wanted to point out a couple things.

1, I was in an earlier post talking about how my parents used to tell me to pull it together when I was younger. And I realise that from that post without context it might seem like they have been emotionally abusive towards me or something. And I just wanted to point out that this is not at all the case.

Basically my dad is a poster boy for undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome, he was abused and neglected as a child and he has lost 3 out of his 4 children, and my mum is a half-orphan who grew up with no mum of her own and a dad who never got over having lost the love of his life and so he couldn't really be there for my mum when she needed him most. Looking at them through this lense, yes they are two incredibly damaged people with their own respective plethora of psychological issues, but they have honest to god tried their best to raise me in as loving and caring of an environment as possible. What caused most of the troubles is that I was a special needs child and they were most likely not equipped with the skills required to fulfill those needs. Basically, no matter how hard they tried, what they could offer in terms of caregiving was not aligned with my needs as a child. Probably, someone of a different temperament would have turned out perfectly fine, and it is an unlucky coincidence that in my case, this turned out to be severely traumatising. I do have some repressed memories, so I can't speak for this with a 100% certainty, but as I remember it, our trauma didn't come from direct abuse, but from a series of way more subtle, but nonetheless traumatising events, that involved being physically sickly, having been in painful accidents in early childhood that required long periods of hospitalisation and frequent isolation, having difficulties setting and understanding my own boundaries, social isolation, cultural context (e.g. no availability of child psychiatry, obtaining a diagnosis, mental hygiene professionals etc.), the misalignment of my and my parents' love language and like a ton of other shit that one by one seems like small crap but in total it managed to fuck me up for life.

2, I keep thinking about system roles. Like, the thing is, for the past 5 years I locked myself away from all information on OSDD/DID and on other systems' experiences, because I know how suggestible I am and I didn't want to accidently make things worse for myself by adding a layer of maladaptive daydreaming and pseudo-symptoms to my preexisting condition. But by now we're relatively stable as a system, so I thought, what the heck, let's see what the literature and the people of the internet say. And while I'm still trying to figure out the popular terminology and stuff, what I've learnt so far has provided me with enough context so I could start overthinking analysing my own situation and thinking about ourselves in a whole new, systemic approach. (See what I did there? What I DID there? Holy fuck Brain, go to sleep.)

So yeah, different roles. And like, what the fuck is even going on with our other alters because ACTUALLY while we're trying to pretend that it's a very small and neat system of two people, that's very much not true and in general, we're like a fucking mess. So I guess quick system rundown follows:

The Actives

Fox - Host/primary. Xe's what we call a fighter/survivor. Fox is the product of some extreme stress and xe represents the part of us that fought xyr way through all the life-or-death crap we've gone through and that's what xe thrives on. Xe has a hard time these days because life is lovely and stable and it's kinda giving xem a full identity crisis... So I guess in a way xe could be considered a protector?

Bunny - our very own little, and an absolute cinnamon bun. She is a soother, and while she never fronts alone, she's the only one of us who can co-con and she mostly comes out when I'm in distress and she just hugs me until the world is all better.

The Dormants (these guys don't have animal aliases so I'll just use their real names)

The Demon/The Bitch - she's a terrorist, or what people call a persecutor, if I understand it correctly. She used to be able to co-con and apparently had all of our memories, and her sole role was to torture and threaten us, sometimes actually breaking into front and making a very bad job of pretending to be one of us to confuse/manipulate our loved ones, but she couldn't resist making a mock version of us, so it wasn't super effective. She's been very active for a while, but mostly dormant for the past years. Maybe we just realised she was just a scared little girl and hugged her to death...

Emily - she used to be some weird form of a protector. Like, the kind that threatens you with the coconut she wields as a weapon because that was the first object she could grab and she shuffles into the bathroom to barricade herself in just so she can call it job done and go away again. She was kinda problematic and one-dimensional, and while she has been fully dormant for the past 3 or so years, I definitely "inherited" her jumpiness and way of getting startled by literally anything and everything, so I guess we kinda fused together accidentally or something...? Like, did I eat her? Ugh...

Dylan - she was a short-lived one, and mainly a reaction to a certain life situation, where we lived in deep poverty, starvation and extreme daily stress, so her singular goal was to have fun. We basically denied her a chance to front because... Well, because that was what seemed to be the right thing to do at that moment.

Alice(?) - I actually don't know anything about her, I'm not even sure she ever really existed, I just found some clues in a journal (that's where the name is from) and some stuff none of us claimed afterwards, so I suspect someone was there at a point but I'm absolutely unclear on any of the details.

The Confusing Shit

Brain - I was recently told that not everybody's brain is talking to them and that Brain might actually be some sort of system-related stuff, but basically it's just there to entertain me with horrifying, but kinda endearing and/or absolutely hilarious shit. And to torment me with anxiety voices but you know...

The Chorus - just a bunch of jumbled internal noise that keeps screaming static at me every time I'm too stressed.

The Hollow - it describes itself as a sort of autopilot, or rather, "whatever remains when you strip all personality from the body. It's a collection of physical functions and its goal is to keep us going when noone's fronting. It keeps us fed, hydrated, safe, and periodically puts the body to sleep so maybe one of us can re-enter front.

TP (myself) - so yeah, as far as roles go, I'm like... What, part protector-part persecutor-part trauma holder-part little-part host like wtf am I even?! I know that everybody has a blind spot for themselves, but like does any alter ever know what the fuck their function is supposed to be?! I'm just so fucking confused pls someone explain my system to me?!

3, about the excessive posting today. I dunno. I really just cannot stop, but I'm also more out of it than I have been any time in the past like ever, and occasionally I'm not even sure it's me or who am I so I'm deeply sorry for the verbal diarrhea. I guess I'm partly doing this because I'm sure I won't remember any of this later, like I keep "waking up" and it's been like 50 years and it's still the SAME MOTHERFUCKING DAY AND IT'S BEEN LIKE 5 SECONDS since the last post I've written the day before yesterday, so I guess it's also like my sense of time is absolutely fucked, but seriously I've just lived a lifetime of incoherent torment this day, like, did I just die and go to hell and this is what hell is? Seems plausible.

[theliterateape]

Chris Churchill Saves the World | How "The Walking Dead" Helped Me Feel My Feelings

By Chris Churchill

I love The Walking Dead for a lot of reasons. But here’s the reason I’m so loyal to it:

When I was nineteen years old, committed to the psych ward, sitting across from my first psychiatrist, Dr. Bolan, he explained it to me. He told me I had a panic disorder (a diagnosis that subsequent psychiatrists haven’t necessarily focused on but one that seems to encapsulate a big part of my problem). He compared my brain to a house with many rooms, all of which had a light switch to be turned on when something worried me. As he explained, most people can turn the light on and then, when it was no longer needed (i.e., the thing that worries you is gone), they can turn the light off. People with a panic disorder cannot turn the lights off once they get turned on.

Next thing you know, all the lights in the house are on and it’s noon.

Good explanation, I thought.

Years later, after having been diagnosed as bipolar ii, my therapist and I began to discuss how I still at that time, once sent into panic, could not recover on my own. A concern over a missing wallet, even though the wallet was recovered the next day, turned into real existential crisis. I was so worked up about the possibility of identity theft, that I obsessed for months and months over any and all problems (completely different problems) that I could come up with. I came up with some great philosophical discoveries for myself, not the least of which being that I’ll bet most of the great western philosophers have the strictly obsessive side of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I also proved, to my own satisfaction (and really, who else’s satisfaction do I need) the existence and nature of God and figured out what science will need to do to truly create artificial intelligence, simply because I physically couldn’t stop thinking.

Forget enjoying anything. I was stuck in the emotional state of extreme vigilance. Extreme vigilance, without a real target, forces you to create problems to solve.

But why is that? My therapist and I talked through this for months. She explained to me that people with the type of childhood trauma I sustained might never learn to soothe themselves (without doing something). That’s why, in order to soothe themselves some people nervously shake their foot or tap their fingers or click pens, stay busy, or develop obsessions and sometimes, as in my case, some people can’t stop solving problems even when there aren’t any. They feel compelled to obsess over certain ideas. Fun fact: even when you solve the problem, you don’t feel any better.

As I was recovering from my most recent breakdown, I started gathering with a few good friends each week to watch bad movies. We enjoyed poorly conceived science fiction, unscary horror movies, and bizarre concepts in action adventure. A highlight from those movies was, of course, Roadhouse. Another was the Bart Conner (yes the Olympic gymnast) vehicle called Gymkata, where Mr. Conner played a character who kept getting into mortal danger but, luckily, this always occurred when he was near gymnastics equipment.

Things had been pretty dark for me during those days except for those weekly breaks where we marveled at terrible movies and bonded over our own highly personalized Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style riffs on these movies.

So one day, I came across a dvd of 10 Horror Classics. I thought, “Ten? All in one DVD? They must be laughably bad.” One was the original, George Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead. I had not realized it was a classic because it was actually a good movie. I had assumed it would be terrible. I settled in for a good, patronizing giggle but instead found myself enjoying a really terrifying, groundbreaking, low-budget film.

I never had cared for scary movies before that day. I’m sure they were all funny to me. Just silly, overacted, bad effects, and unbelievable. But this movie, with its genre generating plot, hit me just right. It grabbed me with both how frightening it was and how icky it all was. Watching this movie I got legitimately worked up.

Then the movie was over and I realized that I felt pretty good.

So I thought, “Are all zombie movies this good?” (No) So I began to seek out old, Romero and Romero-like zombie films.

I was becoming obsessed with the feeling these movies were giving me. Not a problem to solve, but something visceral.

When I was running out of good zombie movies to watch, my good friend Charmin suggested I watch this new show, The Walking Dead. She knew I’d love it.

From the opening scene I was hooked. Our hero, in weakened physical state, and vulnerable, stumbles upon a little girl, dragging a teddy bear. He calls out, “Little girl...” to which the little girl responds by turning abruptly, showing that she is missing all the skin around her mouth, and rushes to attack him. I felt the horror, uncertainty, and “ickyness” of it all.

And then the hero killed it. And I felt better. Then our hero found another horrible, disgusting, dangerous monster and I was terrified and creeped out and vulnerable and then he killed it and I felt better. And it happened again. And again.

I felt scared. It felt personal. It got killed. Then I felt better.

I binged the show to catch up to its then current season (I think it was into the middle of Season 2 by the time I caught up. I got very used to getting very nervous and frightened, one could even say panicked, and then seeing someone kill that thing that scared me. And then I felt better.

Like the psychiatric equivalent of eating hot pepper in the midday sun to cool off.

My therapist and I realized I was actually practicing the primitive skill of feeling better. (She says I’m fascinating.) It turns out that learning to feel better is something you learn before you have episodic memory and only with the help of a soothing nurturer spending sufficient time with you.

So now, in lieu of having developed those skills when I was supposed to have, the show was teaching me to soothe myself. So each week. I tuned in to care even more deeply about these characters in peril. And even when they kill off a favorite TV friend, and then it goes to commercial, I realize it is just TV, and I feel better.

Then I began to practice that feeling away from my show. I worked at developing the sense memory of feeling better thanks to my beloved post-apocalyptic soap opera.

So when I read good or bad reviews about my show, it matters a little to me, but not a lot. Because now I realize that people love the shows they love because of the feelings that show repeatedly gives them, show after show, for years. Not just, did it scare them but did it help them feel better.

Horror is like comedy in that the tension builds due to a character or characters we identify with being in some level of peril and then that tension is released with a satisfying and sometimes unforeseen resolution. In jokes it happens quickly, while in horror, it might take two hours. In both cases, we often have physical reactions to the peril and release at the resolution. Laughing is a combination of tension and release. I’ve seen child psychologists explain with the example of a loving parent tossing their baby in the air and catching the child. The baby laughs when it is caught because it is relieved that everything is fine. The horror movie affects us in a similar way (often, also accompanied by laughter).

So it’s not surprising that someone like me who enjoys laughing through his days, with its repeated tension and release, also loves to pretend to care for people who are pretending to be killed. Tension and release, for sure, but with a longer arc and higher stakes.

I can practice feeling better.

So thanks Glenn Rhee for the dumpster fake out. I needed that.

Thanks to Darryl, Michonne, Carol, Carl, and Rick. Thanks for almost dying all those times. I needed that.

Thanks to the deus ex helicopter that saved Rick. I needed that too.

Robert Kirkman, thanks.

To all my psychiatrists, my therapist, and to that little half a pill I take who got me to the point where I could feel the fear and then the relief. Thanks.

Critics don’t matter. They’re not in my head. And they probably wouldn’t understand what was in there anyway.

The Walking Dead returns with its tenth season tonight on AMC.