#her guilt complex and constant anxiety about not showing love enough....

[fantastic-mr-corvid]

An edgy ask for Celia: 2, 11, 23 please!

Thank you Dujour!!! ohh interesting questions! [last two under cut]

2, What's something about your OC that people wouldn't expect just from looking at them?

Ough... with how Celia looks now there's a lot of assumptions people make... but im gonna have to go for her struggling- for respect/power/ to just live. Celia looks like and is a powerhouse now, easily able to show of her physical strength to earn respect, but that only really started when she was in her 20s, when she was a teenager her and Conficcare were at the bottom of the social ladder and felt it- Celia is such an effective and terrifying fighter now because she was so used to having to do everything to magnify her little strength. not only that but her sharp ability to understand people comes from being in desperate situations and also being deemed so little a threat no one cared about what she saw, whereas everyone was a threat to her so she was always hyper-aware.

she actively encourages people thinking shes always been this good, that she ascended to the position of power she holds with a perfect balance of hard work and skill that was easy compared to what she actually did, but the truth is she spent almost a decade clawing for every little thing and it affects her in every way. [and she still struggles! she just hides it with confidence and intimidation]

11, What is your OC's weapon of choice? Have they ever actually used it?

In terms of actual weapons she regularly uses, all manner of knifes [fixed blade & switchblade depending on the situation] as well as guns a few times [shes a snob about them. 'less personal, lack of skill blah blah' shes wrong-ish but petty about it even if she wont avoid them if they are needed] and whatever heavy thing she can hit someone with.

She would probably say her weapon of choice is a larger bladed weapon like a machete [axe has too small a blade and shes not rural enough] but in truth she prefers using her fists. unless someone else has a weapon that's escalating the fight she will always rely on her own body before anything else.

the technical answer would probably be ball bearings of all things. small, easy to get your hand on, and combined with Human Algebras powers of force it creates a lot of tiny projectiles moving at fast speeds, much easier than propelling something larger

[Bonus answer for when she was younger: Hockey stick. im not sure if americans have non-ice hockey but over here girls hockey is not a normal sport its a blood sport. the sticks are easy to pretend are for practice, and the nail polish method makes them practically indestructible as well as hurt like hell, and the curved end can easily be used to snag on clothing or ankles to even more damage. its long so Celia can use lever principles, and is just all around nasty in a match fight [same difference- its not technically a contact sport but there were hell of a lot more injuries and fowl play from us than the boys rugby] so its the perfect weapon for her to use as a kid]

23, What emotion is the hardest for your OC to process? How about express?

ough... i feel like ive thought about this before but here's my answer now: regret. actually that's not right because shes actually really good at processing it, if by that you mean justifying her actions and then sweeping the feelings under the rug.

debt. what she owes people. guilt. the people she did fuck up with. Guilt at the effect her actions had on the people she cares about. she hates it being brought up. she may be good and not letting herself regret her actions, but she sure as fuck will always feel guilty, no matter what happens or how much time has passed.

Express? my first answer would be love. not even just in how she struggles to express it, but how even when she does in her own way, she never feels like she can express the depth and sincerity of that love. she loves few people but those she does she loves the shit out of for her whole life. honestly if i made one of her friends betray her [and not just like Elena leaving to pursue a better life] it would be the worth thing i could do to her. no matter how many times she whispers or laughs i love you and again and again show it through actions, she will always worry that she isn't doing enough

[fan-dot]

Adora’s Abuse

I cannot stand how people minimize Adora’s abuse.

The form of abuse Adora suffered is insidious. It’s the kind that if you attempted to lay it all out, it doesn’t sound all that awful for most people. After all, she was being praised! She was the preferred child. She was the golden child. 

The thing is, the abuse she faced is just as damaging and traumatizing as a ‘classic’ examples of abuse.  

A Brief and Incomplete Breakdown

The primary form of abuse Adora faced (as far as we know) was emotional abuse. Shadow Weaver manipulated, terrorized, and traumatized her in an attempt to mold her into a weapon that she could use.

Adora’s Need For Control

Adora was placed on a pedestal. If she acted out, the people under her would be punished for her misbehavior. This bred a guilt complex in her- if bad things happened, it was her fault. She had to be good, whatever that meant to her in that moment, because if she was bad or misbehaved or wasn’t good enough, others were punished in her place. 

On top of that, others around her were taught to look up to her. She couldn’t make mistakes because not only would she be letting Shadow Weaver down (and potentially getting her friends and squad mates hurt- or worse) but she would be letting everyone else down. And even further, if she messed up enough she could be the one getting hurt or tossed aside. Children need the love and affection of their caregivers. Potentially losing Shadow Weaver’s affection and attention could be terrifying for Adora. 

But it wasn’t just Adora herself that had to behave well to avoid Shadow Weaver’s ire- it was the people around her. Shadow Weaver made Adora responsible for the behavior of others from a young age. When Catra misbehaved, messed up, or didn’t live up to Shadow Weaver’s expectations, Adora was blamed for it and Catra hurt- physically and emotionally. This again deepened Adora’s guilt complex. Now, other people’s behavior was her fault as well because Adora should have worked harder to make sure that her people behaved and did well. She should have checked in on them, pushed them harder, done more, anything- it’s her fault that they got in trouble. She needs to fix things.  Everything has to be perfect because if it’s not, that’s dangerous. People are going to get hurt.  

Adora is constantly on alert and seems to operate from a place of fear and anxiety a lot of the time. She needs to be the best, because if she isn’t, people are going to get hurt and she’s going to lose the people she cares about. She needs to do x  because if she doesn’t, bad things will happen. If she isn’t perfect, if she’s not good, if she doesn’t fix things, if she, if she, if she-

The Effects of Witnessing Physical Abuse

We haven’t seen Shadow Weaver explicitly strike Adora yet as a child in the show. Even if she has, however, just witnessing how Shadow Weaver tormented Catra would leave scars. Children growing up in households where one parent is physically abused become fearful and anxious and hypervigiliant. Even if they are not being hurt directly, they have to watch someone they care about be hurt by someone else they care about. 

There is a constant fear that the abuser could turn on them. Self-blame becomes a huge specter- if they had stepped in, if they hadn’t upset the abuser, if they had said something, if they were better, if they were good, would the abuser not hurt the other person anymore? Why am I not getting hurt? What did the victim do wrong? Sometimes the witness of the abuse can get angry at the victim for upsetting the abuser. 

Adora grew up in an unstable, dangerous environment where as far as she knew, she could be hurt as badly as the others around her in a moment’s notice.  She blames herself for a lot of what happened- after all, “if I was good, if I was better, maybe Shadow Weaver won’t hurt Catra.” She puts herself in danger to protect Catra, the same way a child might try to intervene if a parent or sibling were being  abused. 

Despite us never seeing Shadow Weaver hurt Adora while she was in her ‘care’, we still see Adora flinch from her and anxiety when she touches her. She tracks Shadow Weaver’s hands and squeezes her eyes shut when she pats her head, as if expecting a blow. That alone is sign that she fears violence from Shadow Weaver, whether or not she ever physically abused Adora as well. 

Physical Abuse

The only physical abuse we have witnessed so far in the series comes from the episode where Shadow Weaver attempts to mind-wipe Adora. 

Adora is in pain at the hands of the person who raised her. 

Though we haven’t seen much evidence for physical abuse, I think it’s possible. Adora was raised to be a soldier and I wouldn’t be surprised if she faced a lot of direct or indirect physical violence as a result. A rare strike or electric shock could do a lot for Shadow Weaver’s attempts to keep her ‘in line’. A ‘I hate that you’re making me do this’ could be one way Shadow Weaver would use it to manipulate her.

After all, Adora is terrified of her touch. It could be from witnessing Catra’s abuse, but there is potential that Catra wasn’t the only one who faced physical abuse, even if she was the primary target.

Beyond that though, there is a form of physical abuse that is a bit fuzzy on whether it is emotional or physical abuse in nature that both Adora and Catra experience in spades.

Body blocking.

Shadow Weaver is always looming over Adora and Catra. She exerts her power over them and nonverbally threatens them. She traps them into rooms and into her space and takes away their power. 

Adora’s Weak Concept of Self

Like many abuse survivors, Adora has a weak sense of self. This is only compounded upon by her being raised to be a soldier. The failures and successes of herself and the other cadets were pooled together as a group and attributed to the leader- Adora. Adora’s successes then were attributed to Shadow Weaver, and so on and so forth. Adora’s sense of self was eroded away through attaching her sense of self worth to what she could do for other people and making people happy with her. 

Her identity is completely wrapped up in being a leader, being a weapon, and being responsible for others. She needs to be perfect or what else is she? Adora is put in charge of Catra after seeing her get shoved around and frozen, cementing that need for perfection in her. Others suffering and success rely on her, making up a key part of her identity. 

It takes seeing first hand the horrors of the Horde for her to change sides because Adora wrapped up so much of her self-worth and self-identity in being  Shadow Weaver’s ace. It takes until then for her to start to break through Shadow Weaver’s manipulation. Catra knew that and could recognize on some level what Shadow Weaver was doing to the both of them- after all, she faced the overt abuse, saw how differently (and negatively) she was treated from others. Adora could not, especially with Shadow Weaver beating into her head a lack of self-identity. 

Becoming She-Ra, as much as it was her idealism and innate sense of justice, was a way of clinging to a new external identity after her old one was shattered. She sees the sword as her identity, her worth tied to how good a weapon she can be for the Princesses now instead of the Horde. When it shatters, so does her sense of self and purpose. 

Overt Emotional Abuse

When Adora does go against Shadow Weaver, without Catra around anymore to be a scapegoat, there is a reversal from covert to overt emotional abuse  and manipulation being the primary tactic.

Shadow Weaver attempts to reinforce Adora’s lack of self worth and self concept. Whether explicitly or more subtly, she told Adora over and over and over and over again that she was nothing. That she was worthless if she wasn’t what Shadow Weaver wanted. That she didn’t matter.

All the good things about her? They were conditional on Adora’s obedience.

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Other Side Notes

- Shadow Weaver stalked Adora during that episode where Adora’s trauma and PTSD is on full display (the first Mystacor episode)

- In that same episode, she took Glimmer’s form and said awful, manipulative, and abusive shit to her

- Adora knows Shadow Weaver is willing and capable of killing- and knows that’s a potential consequence for failing or not ‘keeping Catra in line’; that’s a lot to put on a little kid

-  How often did Shadow Weaver go a little too far (on purpose or on accident) and weaponized affection to bring Adora around and make her feel guilty for being upset or upsetting Shadow Weaver?

- When Adora rejects Shadow Weaver’s attempt to manipulate her with affection, Shadow Weaver switches gears to praise. There’s groundwork there, years of conditioning and manipulation that lead to this exchange.

- Adora’s childhood was filled with gaslighting, but that’s a topic for another post

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Shadow Weaver traumatized Adora to the point that she had panic attacks and a breakdown over the thought of her being around her. That alone tells you how much that woman traumatized her. Her abuse is not lesser because it was primarily psychological and covert. That just makes it harder to recognize and harder to heal. Don’t minimize it. 

[randomestfandoms-ocs]

I thought Kirsty got along with Emily? Like in the gifs it looks like she gets along better with her grandparents than with her mom?

She does!  It’s sort of complicated but one of the big themes of her story is that you can love someone and still hurt them, and that really applies to Kirsty’s relationships with both Lorelai and Emily.  They both love her and genuinely think that they’re doing what’s best for her, but they both cross a lot of lines into emotional abuse territory. 

So the thing about Kirsty and Emily is that Kirsty really loves Emily, and Emily is often a really great grandmother.  Like when Kirsty gets cast in the nutcracker in New York and Lorelai can’t take time off from the inn to take her, Emily goes with her every year until she starts high school, and Kirsty has amazing memories from that time.  She brags about Kirsty to all of her friends and has their lawyer look over any contract Kirsty gets for ballet, she bought Kirsty leotards and dance shoes when she didn’t want to ask Lorelai because she knew they couldn’t afford it, all sorts of things.  But she was also relentlessly critical, and a big part of why Kirsty has an anxiety disorder — in Emily’s mind, Kirsty is pursuing a career that comes with a lot of spotlight and harsh criticism, and she wants Kirsty to be prepared so she can be extremely harsh trying to make her ‘perfect’, she has no problem with guilt tripping and manipulating Kirsty into doing what she wants (but in her mind she’s just trying to guide her to make the best choices), and she definitely makes Kirsty feel like she’s in the wrong (or just going crazy) if she tries to address the fact that Emily can really hurt her.

There’s also a lot of the same thing that we see with her and Rory in season 6, of really seeing/treating Kirsty like a second chance to have the perfect daughter, so if god forbid she ever messes up, Emily is completely brutal in tearing her down and making her feel awful (but again, in Emily’s mind she’s just trying to help her not repeat her mother’s mistakes)

And Kirsty... Kirsty who’s a child who’s always felt like her mother would be happier without her, whose mother has decided that she’s going to be the family fuckup, with abandonment issues a mile wide, she assumes that she’s the problem.  She has all of these amazing memories with her grandma and Emily has done so much for her and obviously loves her so much, so when she crosses those lines and treats Kirsty like shit, Kirsty assumes that it’s her fault for just not being good enough and that Emily really is just looking out for her and she just needs to do/be better all the time

And then Chilton happens, and Friday Night Dinners start, and suddenly Rory is around.  And Rory is perfect to them.  Much like with Lorelai, Rory is the perfect angel and Kirsty is always just a bit too wild, a bit too independent.  Where Rory has literally never spent a night away from Lorelai, Kirsty regularly goes to sleepovers with the older girls from her dance team, where Rory’s idea of a good Friday night is reading or watching movies and eating junk food with Lorelai, Kirsty would rather be hanging out with her friends, that sort of thing.  And while Rory gets the occasional guilt trip or verbal lashing, it’s nothing compared to what Kirsty has been getting for her entire life.  And that really fucks her up because even though she was never Lorelai’s favourite, she was always her grandparents’ favourite, right up until Rory showed up, and all of a sudden her inferiority complex is kicked into higher gear because no one ever loves her as much as they love Rory.  And suddenly nothing she does is ever enough anymore because she’s never as good as Rory, she’s always compared to Rory, and anytime she’s anything less than perfect, it’s not just Emily’s vicious criticisms that she faces but a constant stream of “why can’t you be more like Rory”

And it takes a long time for Kirsty to realize how fucked up it is, and that she shouldn’t have to earn their love, and that the way that Emily talks to her is completely not okay.  And it’s difficult for her to reconcile that with all of the amazing memories that she has of Emily because how can Emily love her and do so much for her and also treat her like garbage the moment she isn’t perfect.  Like, Emily (and Richard) bought her this ridiculously expensive but absolutely amazing apartment and just gave it to her, so how can she call any of Emily’s behaviour abusive, right?  and it takes her a long time to process the fact that just because Emily loves her and just because she thinks she’s doing what’s best for Kirsty doesn’t mean that Kirsty isn’t allowed to be angry and hurt and to really start establishing and enforcing boundaries where she’s concerned.

She does love Emily, and Emily loves her, and they definitely start off a lot closer than Kirsty & Lorelai, but sometimes the people who love you can still really hurt you, and that’s something that I wanted to focus on with Kirsty because I almost never see it in any media or fanfiction — it’s always either the horrible abusive monster or the perfect flawless angel, and life just isn’t like that and my salt at how Lorelai is treated like a perfect mother despite fucking up a lot led to, well, Kirsty’s entire existence tbh

[parabellum-rpg-archive]

Congratulations, Isabella! You’ve been accepted to play Dahlia Jessup. Please make your page and send it in within 24 hours.

Admin note: I absolutely cannot. This app was freakin’ beautiful! I was already captivated just reading the part where you describe her in your own words. I loved the little details like what she has her degree in and her mother’s response to it. I love how you dissecting her down to her desire to please, but didn’t limit her to that. I can say, 100%, I am soooooo excited to see you bring her to life on the dash! Welcome, welcome, welcome! - Admin C

IC INFORMATION —

CHARACTER DESIRED

Dahlia Jessup.

DESCRIBE THE CHARACTER IN YOUR OWN WORD

I think what defines Dahlia so visibly, is her abandonment issues. Her mommy issues. Her people pleasing. These are all very humanly understandable flaws, and I adore them. I love flawed characters, especially when they’re so relatable to the audience and the person portraying them. I think what makes her so special to me is that I resonate with her on a deeper level for my own personal reasons, but also because she’s filled with this amazing potential to either become a great heroine or an awful villain. She does a lot of things in the name of love & family, but who is she? Strip the girl bare, leave nothing but her heart and soul, and you’ll find that she becomes nothing. Because Dahlia needs and finds her sense of identity within her family, within others.

Of course, she’s more than that, but I think she hasn’t seen herself outside of other people’s perspectives. Perhaps she’s been too self-sacrificing in the name of family (hell, she even sacrificed her own morals to join the Sinclairs) and now she’s paying the price. There are so many sides and nuances to her, I would really love to explore it on a more thorough level.

WRITING SAMPLE

Her figure stands by the kitchen doorway. Hollow, quiet – almost non-existent in its own right. The then sixteen year-old Dahlia is left at a loss for words by her mother.

These are the moments where she catches a glimpse of her mother’s humanity: right after work, when she comes home hours into the night, dark circles and all. She knows Serena works hard, for the both of them, but sometimes Lia wishes she had a white picket fence kind of life, you know, the kind of life they show on television. The kind of life that probably doesn’t exist.

But she stands by the doorway looking at someone whose face is unfamiliar, yet still so ambiguously close to hers. It’s uncanny the resemblance that Dahlia and Serena share.. and as much as Dahlia hated herself for looking so much like her mother, she took some kind of comfort in knowing they shared at least one thing.

These are the moments in which she wishes she felt loved, felt wanted – anything.  “I– I missed you,” Dahlia whispers, like some kind of confession she could never speak of. Her mother nods, unable to look at her own daughter, and grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and walks past her daughter.

“Did you hear me?” Dahlia inquires nearly defeated. “Mhmm?” Serena turns to her, in confusion. Either my mother is deaf, or simply out of tune with other people’s feelings, she realizes.

“I said I missed you, mom.” Dahlia gestures, empty handed.

Again, no response. It seems that the main focus of Serena’s attention lies on the television right now – or maybe she’s just pretending to watch the news. “Since when do you even watch TV?” Dahlia points out the obvious, but it’s unclear whether or not Serena bothers listening, simply turning off the television and walking out of the room, avoiding her daughter like the plague.

Silence falls upon them, like a soft numbing blanket caressing each and every word unspoken. Dahlia sits by the couch, unable to look at her mother any longer. Somehow they’ve become strangers and Lia knows she’s not the one to blame, but her heart dips a little further into guilt whenever Serena neglects her. It’s like she’ll never be enough. She’ll never know her mother. She’ll never be Serena’s daughter.

Tonight, she’ll take comfort in her metal science books, in her journals, in her midnight coffee.

Tonight, she’ll also probably cry herself to sleep while her mother leaves for work at 5am in the morning and won’t even notice her big, puffy eyes… but that’s the thing about Serena: even if she did notice it, she’d blame it on ‘teenage hormones’, instead of taking actual responsibility for her daughter’s constant paranoia of abandonment.

                                         ______________________

Hours later and Dahlia sits by the balcony, looking at her old photos like usual. Beside her, by the small wooden table, there’s a box of photographs and old dusty memories thrown into the abyss. Lia has taken it upon herself to sort out which ones are relevant and which are not, but in nights like these, she always winds up too emotional over these memories to ever ponder the idea of throwing out a picture or two.

She doesn’t remember her mother being this fond of her, this close. Pictures of Dahlia giggling, playing or simply smiling right beside her mother are all over the place, and what seems abnormal is that her mother doesn’t look consumed by work, or by life itself. She looks happy, proud… She looks like someone else.

But she doesn’t remember it at all. She lived through it, but she was only a baby… And memories? Memories are too important to lose, like pictures… So tonight, she’ll dig through anything she can find, and maybe she’ll find the father she never had, or perhaps someone to take her mother’s place. If anything, she’ll do whatever it takes.. For what’s left of her family, for herself.

EXTRAS

HEADCANONS:

Dahlia strikes me as the kind of person who’s a little too much of a people pleaser – when it comes down to the people she loves, she’ll go to extreme lengths to please them, earn their love, affection and approval. It goes without saying that Serena left a mother shaped hole in her heart, and without any kind of mother or father to look up to, she took on the role of the people pleaser to ensure she has a place in people’s hearts. It’s almost automatic, and it hurts her when people dislike her. Just the thought of being unwanted makes her skin crawl, triggering her anxiety to the point of having nightmares about her mother – and the father that she never had.

Her MBTI type is ENFJ, who’s also known as the giver amongst people. ENFJ’s are extremely loyal, loving and self-sacrificing to the point of no return. They are also very dedicated, connect easily with people and often forget about their own needs, putting others’ before their own. Because of their intuitive side, they’re excellent troubleshooters, and often ponder about the ‘what ifs’ (in Dahlia’s case, she thinks a lot about her future when it comes down to the consequences of her own actions, and how reckless it was of her to join her aunt’s shenanigans simply because she needed her approval). ENFJs can also be very crafty and artistic, and often can be very pessimistic and overly critical and logical under stress (when she realizes the damage of her actions).

She’s a Virgo. They are known to be perfectionists, logical, practical and very pragmatic. This excerpt taken from an astrology website showcases a lot of the traits Dahlia possesses:  Above all else, Virgos want to help. They are kind, gentle, and supportive friends and lovers who use their incredible intellect and resourcefulness to problem-solve. Virgo’s opposite sign, Pisces, offers guidance through spirituality, but Virgos want to assist on a practical level. These earth signs are always striving to provide workable solutions and improve broken systems. Methodical, committed, and hardworking.

Her Hogwarts house is Ravenclaw. I wasn’t sure if she’d fit into Gryffindor, but I think Ravenclaw encompasses her wit, her intellect and her detail-oriented personality. It’s very incredible to me that someone who’s a feeler (ENFJ) would also be so logical and pragmatic as a Ravenclaw. Dahlia is a fun, complex contradiction to write – and I’m very eager to explore how her head goes against her heart every time.

She has a degree in chemical engineering, specializing in copper, aluminium, iron and steel. Dahlia is a qualified Metallurgist, chemistry is her passion – and she goes to great lengths to ensure that she’s on the right path. Serena laughed about it to Dahlia’s face when she first told her mom she was going to be an engineer. To her, it was a ‘men only’ profession, and it broke her heart not to have her mother’s full support. She wanted to show her she could do it, she could become great, she could do something special. But even after graduating, her mother did not take her seriously.

I have crafted a proper pinterest board for Dahlia. I’m still in the process of organizing it and adding more pins to it, but the essentials are there. I also have a tag for Dahlia on my blog, which you can find by clicking here.

[hufflly-puffs]

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Chapter 37: The Lost prophecy

The entire conversation between Harry and Dumbledore in this chapter remains one of my favourite in the entire season. Something J.K. Rowling is extremely good at is to write about loss and grief. In a way Harry experiences it for the first time – he was too young when his parents died and Cedric’s death left him in shock, but then again they didn’t really knew it each other. This time it is different. And my reading experience changed, because I have experienced a loss similar like Harry (like Rowling, who had lost her mother shortly before she started writing the Potter series) between the first time I read the book as a teenager and now again as an adult. It might be because Rowling had lost a parent that so much about Harry’s grief resonates with me. It feels real.

“It was his fault Sirius had died; it was all his fault. If he, Harry, had not been stupid enough to fall for Voldemort’s trick, if he had not been so convinced that what he had seen in his dream was real, if he had only opened his mind to the possibility that Voldemort was, as Hermione had said, banking on Harry’s love of playing the hero … It was unbearable, he would not think about it, he could not stand it … there was a terrible hollow inside him he did not want to feel or examine, a dark hole where Sirius had been, where Sirius had vanished; he did not want to have to be alone with that great, silent space, he could not stand it –“ – Sirius’s death is not what causes Harry’s depression, but it certainly factors to it. The anxiety, the impossibility to escape your own thoughts, and how he blames himself for Sirius’s death, despite all logic and rational thought saying he can’t be blamed. And it is what makes things even worse – not just losing Sirius, but the circumstances, that Harry fall for Voldemort’s trap, that it was the love they felt for each other that brought both Harry and Sirius to the Department of Mysteries to save the other. That Harry should have known better, that Hermione (who always represent logic and rational thought) even warned him it could be a trap. Harry let his heart decide for him, he did what he felt was right. And whenever we make a mistake because we let our heart decide for us we feel foolish and weak. Dumbledore will tell Harry later that it was his heart that saved him, but to Harry it is his heart that failed him.

“The guilt filling the whole of Harry’s chest like some monstrous, weighty parasite, now writhed and squirmed. Harry could not stand this, he could not stand being himself any more … he had never felt more trapped inside his own head and body, never wished so intensely that he could be somebody, anybody, else …” – The thing about Harry is that the moment he entered the Wizarding World, the moment he learned he was famous, he has always been confronted with the image others have of him. The boy who lived, the tragic hero. In the last year he has been portrayed as a liar, mentally unstable, attention seeking. He has never let himself defined by these things, knowing they are not true. Now though he sees himself different: as the one responsible for Sirius’s death. He never claimed to be a hero, but it has never been less true than now. Ironically it is his hero-complex, as Hermione calls it, that brought all of his friends in danger, that did cost Sirius his life (at least from Harry’s perspective). It is unbearable to connect himself with the image of a hero others have painted of him, now that he has made a terrible mistake, that he did not save the day, but is the one who brought everyone in danger in the first place.

“‘I know how you’re feeling, Harry,’ said Dumbledore very quietly. ‘No, you don’t,’ said Harry, and his voice was suddenly loud and strong; white-hot anger leapt inside him; Dumbledore knew nothing about his feelings.” – Dumbledore of course has experienced loss and grief himself, but he also knows how it feels to think you are responsible for someone’s else death, as he blames himself for his sister’s death. But Harry does not know this, and he does not ask Dumbledore either, because we always feel like our pain is individual, like nobody could ever know how we really feel. Grief and loss are very personal feelings, because everybody experiences them in a different way, and at times it feels like it creates a barrier between yourself and the rest of the world.

“‘Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human –’ ‘THEN – I – DON’T – WANT – TO – BE – HUMAN!’ Harry roared […] ‘I DON’T CARE!’ Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. ‘I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANY MORE –’ He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that, too. It broke apart on the floor and the legs rolled in different directions. ��You do care,’ said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. ‘You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.’” – This always reminds me of a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” Dumbledore, in his age and wisdom, knows that experiencing pain the way Harry does, is part of being human, or as he even says it is a proof of being human (and therefore would make Voldemort unhuman). We can’t understand pain like this when we right in the middle of it. Harry experiences it for the first time really and he feels like he will never get over it, like nothing will ever be whole again, that this is the final straw. In time he will learn that you can live with the pain, but you never get used to it. And once he understands what Voldemort has done to his soul, he will understand Dumbledore’s words and what a great gift it is to feel that deeply.

“Voldemort’s aim in possessing you, as he demonstrated tonight, would not have been my destruction. It would have been yours. He hoped, when he possessed you briefly a short while ago, that I would sacrifice you in the hope of killing him.” – But in the end that is exactly what happens: Dumbledore sacrifices Harry in order to kill Voldemort. And that might have been a part of Dumbledore’s plan as well: that after this night Voldemort was convinced that Dumbledore would never do such a thing, that when Harry sacrificed himself in the end Voldemort never assumed that it was part of Dumbledore’s plan.

“‘Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry,’ said Dumbledore.” – It is interesting that it was Sirius who told Harry that in order to understand someone’s true nature you should look how they treat their inferiors not their equals. Of course Sirius did not hate Kreacher because he is a house elf, but rather because he was a constant reminder of the family/home he hated so much. He could not show Kreacher even the simplest form of respect. And house-elves, bound to their families, always become a product of how their masters treat them. And Dumbledore, unlike Voldemort and many other wizards, never underestimated house-elves. They are individuals, they have feelings, and they have magic of their own. And they are always overlooked, which can make them incredible dangerous.

“ ‘Five years ago you arrived at Hogwarts, Harry, safe and whole, as I had planned and intended. Well – not quite whole. You had suffered. I knew you would when I left you on your aunt and uncle’s doorstep. I knew I was condemning you to ten dark and difficult years.’” – I think this is the first time someone actually acknowledges in words the abuse Harry had to endure. That what happened to him was neither right or fair, despite Dumbledore explaining the reason why he had to stay with the Dursleys.

“Did I believe that Voldemort was gone for ever? No. I knew not whether it would be ten, twenty or fifty years before he returned, but I was sure he would do so, and I was sure, too, knowing him as I have done, that he would not rest until he killed you.” – Imagine though it would have taken Voldemort 70 years to return, the book series would have been quite different.

“‘While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort. He shed her blood, but it lives on in you and her sister. Her blood became your refuge. You need return there only once a year, but as long as you can still call it home, whilst you are there he cannot hurt you. Your aunt knows this. I explained what I had done in the letter I left, with you, on her doorstep. She knows that allowing you houseroom may well have kept you alive for the past fifteen years.’” – First, I still can’t believe that Dumbledore could not be bothered to explain this in person, that all he did was to write a letter. Second, the very complicated relationship Petunia has with her nephew. Harry claims that she does not love him, which might be true. Regardless she loved her sister. She took Harry in because her sister gave her life to protect him, because she knew that if she wouldn’t Harry would die. And yet Harry is a constant reminder of Lily, of Petunia’s loss, of all the complicated feelings she had towards Lily. And interesting enough both Petunia and Snape help to keep Harry alive, they both protect him in their own ways, but out of respect and love towards Lily, because he is her son, nothing more. It is not just her blood that protects Harry, but also the relationships Lily made while she was alive, the people who loved her.

“‘I cared about you too much,’ said Dumbledore simply. ‘I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.” – Dumbledore thinks that his flaw, that the mistake that he made, was that he cared too much about Harry, that his happiness became more important than the lives of others. And many criticized Dumbledore for his final plan: that in the end Harry had to give his own life in order to defeat Voldemort. But this is exactly what this is about: that Harry’s life is no more important than the lives of thousands. Some see Dumbledore as cruel and manipulating, and perhaps they are right. But he still cares. He cares so much about Harry and yet he knows what he needs to ask of him, knows what it will take to end Voldemort. And one could ask what is more cruel: to sacrifice one live so thousands can live or to accept the pain of the many in exchange for one man’s happiness?

“I had gone there to see an applicant for the post of Divination teacher, though it was against my inclination to allow the subject of Divination to continue at all.” – I mean honestly, it is the most useless subject ever.

So, the prophecy. It reveals something that to the readers might be obvious, but this is the first time we actually hear it: that Harry is the only one who has the power to defeat Voldemort. And Harry of course is famous because he survived the Killing Curse, but perhaps he thought that there might not be a special reason why Voldemort wanted to kill him and his parents. After all Voldemort and his followers killed so many. Perhaps Harry thought Voldemort simply wanted to finish what he had started, that this time he wants to kill Harry because of what has happened to him. Maybe deep down Harry had wondered if there might be more about it, what the real reason was that Voldemort had considered a baby as a threat. If he did he probably ignored that thought, because as Dumbledore explains, it is an incredible burden to live with this knowledge.

Then of course there is the fact that it could have been Neville as well. There are many speculations what would have happened if Voldemort had chosen Neville instead. I always assumed that Alice Longbottom, just as Lily did, would have sacrificed herself for her son, giving Neville the same kind of protection Harry had. Neville would have still grown up with his grandmother (and through her blood he would be protected as well) though with even more pressure put upon him. But I always loved the fact that it could have been someone else, that in a way there was nothing special about Harry, and that of course the irony is that in choosing Harry Voldemort marked him as an equal and gave him the power to destroy him (though Voldemort of course was not aware of this, as he had not heard the whole prophecy). And Voldemort did not choose the son of two Aurors, the pureblood wizard, but Harry instead, the halfblood, because as Dumbledore explains, he saw himself in Harry.

The thing about prophecies is of course whether or not they become true, and in fiction they usually do, especially if people try to avoid their fate. Voldemort did not hear the full prophecy, he did not know that he would be the one to mark his enemy as an equal. The question is, if he had that knowledge and never had tried to kill Harry or Neville, could he have avoided his fate?

Also, we don’t know it yet, but of course it was Snape who had overheard the first part of the prophecy, which made me wonder what he was doing there in the first place. Was it a coincidence? Was he there on Voldemort’s order, spying on Dumbledore? And how come he would not know or figure out that the prophecy could refer to Lily’s son, and therefore would put her in danger by telling Voldemort about it?

“In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.” – Harry has never been and will never be the most talented wizard, but that did not matter. It does not matter how advanced the magic is that Voldemort works. It is Harry’s ability to love, and the love of his mother, that saves him. And that is something you can’t learn or achieve. If Voldemort has ever been able to love he successfully got rid of this ability. To him love is a weakness, something he never understood and always underestimated. And in Rowling’s work it is essential our ability to love what makes us human. And losing that has made Voldemort dead long before he actually died.

“‘So,’ said Harry, dredging up the words from what felt like a deep well of despair inside him, ‘so does that mean that … that one of us has got to kill the other one … in the end?’ ‘Yes,’ said Dumbledore.” – Just moments before Harry told Dumbledore that he doesn’t have powers like Voldemort does, that he can’t kill someone, and yet he has to or he will be killed. In the end however he defeated Voldemort without actually killing him, and I always loved that he didn’t have to become a murderer.

[touchmycoat]

kinktober: day 16

day 16: rape fantasy, emphasis on fantasy

TW all the way!

*Realized I needed MORE TW: shoulder dislocation with intent to harm

Continued from day 15

Okay, so boyfriends are a dead end, at least for the time being. Which was fine! Sabo could hardly blame them (especially given the fact that this has been an entirely solo endeavor on his part so far). The problem still remained though, gone itchy with irritation.

The solution was, once again, provided by Koala.

Fantasize about it, she recommended over dinner one day. It's still shit, but it's the least shit, y'know what I mean?

What do you fantasize about? Sabo asked, only belatedly thinking it might be rude or too private. But frankly, he and Koala have crossed the line of rudeness when he had to grab hold of her knife-gouged shoulder slippery with blood to reset the dislocated bone there. They crossed the line of privacy when she had to help him buck naked out of a torture chamber that one time (she had gotten there right before Sabo would've finally gotten to practice) and share three pieces of clothes and one pair of boots between them on the resultant trek through kilometers of desert.

Robin-san, Koala answered matter-of-factly. The self-consciousness was only visible to someone like Sabo, who's known her through all the thick and thins. How she used to work with Crocodile. Her fruit powers, you know?

She can hold you down, Sabo surmised.

Deal damage from every direction. She set down her food, settled back on her arms, and sighed deeply. Was it a sigh of disappointment? If so, what exactly was she disappointed about? She'd be so gentle, but brutal about it. As in, it wouldn't be about damaging me from the outside, but pushing and pushing me until it's all I can think of, and it's all I know. Can you imagine being held like that? Hands everywhere to catch you when you squirm, and still more hands to work you over.

Do you imagine yourself screaming?

Yes. Koala smiled, a little abashed and a little innocuous, given the filthiness of the subject matter at hand. But Koala was cute like that, Sabo thought, the simultaneous embodiment of the worst and best of humanity, in so many ways. I'd really love to scream, I think. When I think about being held down, being tied up, being in bondage again... I think it'd be nice to scream my head off and fight her every step of the way. And when we're finished, come out of it knowing—

—that she loves and respects you—

—and I'm perfectly okay, yeah. She cocked her head wryly. How about you? What would you fantasize about?

He would fantasize about crying. That's the endgame, that terror-stricken mess of tears that only arises out of sheer helplessness. More than anything, Sabou thought, RA officers felt the threat of helplessness as a constant looming specter; it's what their vicious agency was born out of. That anxiety, that paranoia got so damn large sometimes though, that it felt like the only pressure-relieve valve was to blow the whole damn thing.

Ace, he thought, could hold him down. They've sparred a million times but Sabo could imagine Ace relentless, not pulling back even after Sabo's tapped out, not relinquishing the stress position he's wrestled Sabo into. Or, he would. Shove Sabo back onto his feet and wordlessly kicking off another round, before Sabo was ready. Drive in with a left hook, an uppercut, a wrestling move that would down Sabo again. Then Ace would pin him for real.

You forgot me, Ace would say, expression dark. You forgot Luffy. And you have the audacity to traipse back in after ten fucking years and act like nothing's wrong?

Sabo would physically lash out, because that's what he's trained to do, but Ace would find another grip. Flip him this time, ground his face down into sharp gravel. Put a hand on the back of Sabo's neck.

Don't fucking move. And he would summon his flames.

(Reason number four hundred eighty-nine for why he can never ask this in real life. You know how if I'm forced to, I might just admit that fire is a source of trauma for me? Yeah I also want you to use it on me, threaten me with it until I cry.)

The fire would lick quickly over his neck, but not so quickly that Sabo couldn't feel the burn. Nothing damaged, no blistered skin, but enough. Sabo could already feel his hands and feet numbing in shock, cold sweat dotting his forehead.

I will take back, Ace would snarl, what I'm owed.

Please, would escape Sabo's lips. What he's begging for he could never be sure.

Or, it could be Marco. A Marco who ran out of that patient smile. A Marco who, when Sabo asked, would sigh in resentment, reply, do you really think I have nothing better to do than entertain your vapid little games? Whose teeth might come flashing. You think you want pain yoi? I'll show you pain.

How would it feel, to be tag-teamed this way by the First and Second Division Commanders of the Whitebeard Pirates? These were men feared by the world, who made their fists out of flames. This was Ace and Marco, whom Sabo hurt, and Sabo owed. It shouldn't be hard to imagine them taking their due.

During the fight, Sabo thought, they'd get his clothes off. Every pesky protective layer between his scars and the world. He didn't have a complex, really. He could still be perfectly functional with everything exposed. It was just that he'd rather—not. That's why it'd hurt when the buttons went scattering. That's why it'd hurt when fistfuls of cloth went up in flames, but maybe that was really too harlequin romance, too teasing and nice for someone like Sabo—

Ace would get that dagger to his throat, and Marco would come up behind him. A nod of the head from Ace, and Marco would be pulling his jacket off. A swipe of that blade, and his shirt would come flying open, edges stained with fresh blood.

You owe me, Ace would claim, everything. He'd eye Sabo's torso, then fixate on the waistband of the trousers when Marco got the belt off, got the RA accoutrements out of the various pockets. Take your fucking boots off.

At knife and fire point, Sabo would kneel and start working on his boots. He'd stop, when he felt a sandal sole step on his back, right over a patch of scar.

Sensitive, are you? Ace would snort, before a booted foot socked Sabo right in the ribcage.

Hurry up yoi, Marco advised, or we cut everything off.

The moment the boots fell away, Sabo would feel rough hands grab and lift him by the armpits. Marco. He'd kick out, but Ace would be quick to bat his feet away, get within Sabo's striking range and get some vicious grips onto sensitive tendons. Shove his way right between Sabo's legs, holding them akimbo. If Sabo bucked back, he'd just slam into the unyielding line of Marco's torso, and if he kicked forward, Ace would just twist his legs until he screamed.

I finally get everything I've always wanted, Ace would say, and you come crawling back, like an infestation. What are you trying to do, huh? Make sure I'm just as ruined as you?

I'll leave you alone, Sabo would choke out, all rage and panic and guilt. If you let me go I'll leave, you'll never have to see me again—

But you've already wasted so much of our time, Marco would snip into his ear. We really ought to get something out of the services already rendered, yoi.

And as punctuation, he'd take a pointed stride forward, bending Sabo further in half and thrusting his hip forward. Proof of where he wanted to take the night would press, hard, right into the still-clothed cleft of Sabo's ass.

In a fit of hysteria, Sabo would thrash, trying to get out of those arms with all his strength. Amidst the kinetics his elbow would fly free, catch Marco right in the face. Broken nose, broken cheekbone, a nasal shout. Ace's grip tightened, and Sabo, instead of fighting or fleeing, froze.

Marco'd heal, of course, and come back a hundred times angrier. He'd shove Sabo's weight completely into Ace's hold with the exception of one arm. He'd get a good grip on Sabo's wrist, the other hand on Sabo's scapula, and before Sabo could really figure out what's going on Marco would yank. Sabo's shoulder bone would pop out of its joint with a nasty sound and a nasty scream.

If I were a worse man, Marco would whisper close in Sabo's ear, as Sabo helplessly shook. I'd fuck you just like this yoi.

Fuck you 'til you're damaged, Ace might hiss, and Sabo knew that'd be what he deserved.

But lucky for you, and he was bracing both hands on Sabo's shoulders again, and Sabo was already sobbing for him to stop, fuck, please, don't, I'm a doctor.

And he'd shove the joint back into place.

Oh that chilled you out. Ace's snort would be accompanied by hands caressing down his back, but at this point Sabo would be too shaken to flinch away. He needed those gentle touches, because if they were gliding softly across his skin those hands couldn't be hurting him. He'd lean in, when the touch appeared to be pulling away, and Marco would chuckle.

Slut, he'd say, and shove a hand down Sabo's pants.

[imtiazstores]

Mental health:

A strong topic on which people cannot even talk about or just maybe talk but cannot accept in reality.

This why most people fall into depression, which leads to killing themselves, they got enough courage to take their own life, but no courage to talk to people about this. Because again people don’t like talking about depression neither can they help a depressed person?

They say depression is nothing but only a person knows about it. Surrounded by everything yet feeling empty from the inside, and a constant fight with yourself is a form of depression. When you cannot openly tell and say things because people won’t accept you or won’t accept the thought you have, led you to depression. There are multiple reasons for a person to fall into depression. A heartbreak, losing a friend, a guardian, a lover, a close relation, even losing a pet can trigger that phase of depression into you.

Depression is something that you should be careful about because it comes over unannounced. It doesn’t have any sort of cautions or alarms, it’s just the attitude of being unsatisfied with anything and everything at all. Sometimes lack of confidence will lead you towards depression. A fear can too trigger the mode of depression.

You might read millions and trillions of things on depression and the cure to it, still!!!! You will find yourself vulnerable and at a point of depression….

Susceptible, hopeless, helpless, weak, defenseless and exposed – these are merely words for you but for some, they are not words - they are knife’s that cut them that make them bleed out, maybe not in front of the person who is hurting them but in front of the world who don’t even know the story and don’t want to know about it.

Sometimes people say that; hey, we are here for you - we will listen to you!!! But, in the end they don’t, they don’t listen, they don’t understand and end up saying he/she is a loser, they don’t know how to communicate, they don’t know XYZ things, they are crazy and all such hurtful comments or even no comment will lead to misleading their mental state. (so, if you say that you are available please be there listen and response because no response is also a response). And listening to this, the family used to say what’s wrong you have everything and still, you are that way, sometime even when they listen, they will say stop repeating the same thing again and again. But no one knows if they are repeating it in front of you for 2nd time they are actually repeating it 100th time. Their mind is stuck to the same shit they can write it on walls and never get tired of it. That what a depression feels like and that’s what a person might be.

You will never know about the person, thou they are open they are clean they are smiling and everything, still they are fighting, fighting to look normal, fighting to be the best fighting for god knows what not. Be humble and low to everyone.

Sometimes, even the positive words will stand against you and you will feel like what is wrong with me or with the world out there who are blind enough to not see and judge. Or if judging they are making me guilty of using my freedom of speech or freedom of thought. When you are low on anything you will curse everything, you will be guilty not because of people, but because you yourself is not in a state of accepting things. That’s also a kind of way that will lead you to depression.

Depression merely a word and for a few people, it is a joke. Some will say its “Deen se Douri.”

Now let me tell you something:

There is this dua, I will be narrating down with “Tarjuma” and will try to post the link to its explanation. To which few people might agree and few won’t because of the perception they have. But this is not about the perception, it’s about making a point.

 Video links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUgD91WrSFg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBJVZrwC-0I

When there are things mentioned in our Deen, when there are duas, regarding the cure of sadness and regarding the cure of depression, anxiety, then why people don’t accept that it is real and it can happen to anyone anytime?

Why do we not talk about it and listen to it peacefully?

Maybe because we are scared of being in the same position?

Maybe we are scared of our own reactions and our own judgments?

Just maybe, there are so many maybes which we hide in ourselves and this is what makes us stop from helping others.

Sometimes we start our own story while cutting them out, and that’s where they stop talking about themselves and start helping you or go all silent because they can’t help you right now they are the ones who need help, but our response made them silent again, and with our response we say, hey see this is how I manage and this is how I overcome you will too, but these words won’t help them these words usually kills them more, and why do you do this? because deep down we have issues, deep down we think that oh shit that’s exactly my the point, omg they are saying our heart, omg how abruptly they are saying things that even we can’t say or haven’t said and are scared to share or say, because what will society think? That how we kill the voices inside us and inside that depress person thinking that they are better now and will be better, and after a while when we hear the news of suicide we say to ourselves that “Kitna samjhaya tha, samjh he nhi aye” when in actually we silent her/him a voice and we overcome, “use nhi samjhaya nah he use samjhaa, ulta khud ko khud samjhaya aur uski sunne bagair he wahan s chal diye” that how he/she was killed. And that’s how we killed her/him.

The society thinks you are dead!!!

The society wants you dead even before you are on the deathbed.

They – the society will kill you; because you are better than them, because you have all what they need and what they desire.

The confidence, the courage, the strength, the beauty, the power, the use of freedom of speech, to embrace yourself, the power to speak truth to show the world a mirror from which they all are hiding, and being all that which society wants to be but are afraid of, there are people who love you and accepts you the way you are…. The society is jealous and wants you dead and that’s how the trap of depression comes.

Still, this world, this society, will make the world against you and will make you guilty and will make you hate yourself and will make you all suicidal and then this all love and positivity will go all in vain and will take your life from you. Because you have a heartbreak or because you got hurt by the most unexpected person... because you are leading into depression because the depression is around you because you are surrounded by negativity or by so many other reasons.

But is it worth?

Taking your life!!!! Would that make society happy?

No!! they will find another weak person and will do the same with others. But why??? Why trusting the world when they can’t handle the charm and want to steal your power? why showing them the weakness, why not tell them that; hey! The more you mock me, the more I will rise, because it’s you!!! Complexed, undesirable, weak, feeble, resentful, jealous, envied, unpopular, shunned, with all the negative power and negativity, and it’s you who should be in pain, depressed not me. It’s you who needs help! Who needs to seek positivity, who needs to change company who needs to change the mindset!!!!!

Usually, the one who gives you the reason for tears and who gives you pain is in peace…. peace as we thought!!! But in actual they are the ones who are in pain, who needs help who are betrayed and who doesn’t know how to deal with the situations. You?? You, are the one who is in guilt and pain because you are pure at heart and soft and raw who needs to heal and stay strong.

Patience is the key to everything if you are the storyteller or the listener you have to be patient and that’s the start of positivity around you. When you help others and listen and make them grow you feel happy, your soul feels happy and positive.

When you visit the doctor for depression, they listen! They listen to you, to your story, to all the factors which nobody listens, without judging or interrupting to make you relax and feel good, then they prescribe you anti-depressants, which makes your mind relax and easy and gives you a peaceful sleep. These are sort of sleeping pills, which makes your mind slow and relax and dizzy and gives you a peaceful sleep. That’s also a slow poison, by which you don’t really want to face the world, and you want to sleep all day long. Its cure if you take it occasionally but it's harmful if you get addictive to those pills.

Depression, mental health is such a topic that you can write books on and still it will be never-ending because of the experiences and the perceptions of everyone will be change. The theory about depression will change the battle against depression will change and the audience fighting with depression will change.

The movies like “Dear Zindagi,” “Tamasha” and few more, was all about mental health awareness all in a different way, with amazing lessons.  

So, let’s join hand together and cry for our losses, for the Trust that we did on Wrong people. Let’s cry together and all at once today, together and overcome the fear factors. Let’s share the story and fights and success from depression because together we will rise and shine. Let’s focus and join hands together for building each other rather than breaking each other and mocking each other.

Until next time 😊 take care and be patient with the people you meet because you never know and you can never judge.

[pinkpaganofficial-blog]

Content and trigger warnings for:

- eating disorder[s] (eds), i.e anorexia, bulimia

- me talking about my suicidal thoughts and venting (I'm ok i just need to like... "word vomit" i guess)

- abandonment by friends

- feeling repression

~~~\\

So i doubt most people on here who follow me know that I suffer from mental illness but I do and have for a very long time. All of the symptoms and effects really came out after my grandfather/best friend passed away when I was 11, 12 years ago. I fell into a hole of depression, anxiety, and disordered eating. From the time I was 11 until I was around 14 I had a very hard time with food. I was suffering from bulimia and I would do the routine binges and purges I had set for myself through the day. I'm surprised my teeth survived all of the stomich acid assaults on them honestly.

I was lonely. I felt so fucking alone in the world. I didn't have many friends. The friends I had were pretty fairweather at the time, as we were kids. They'd hop to the coolest person in their opinions on sight and leave me in the dust, and then come back when they were done, or something happened, whatever. It wasn't stable, and I was always afraid of just being deserted again. My friend who stuck with me, my grandfather, was gone. My grandmother was so in shambles that she doesnt even remember the year after he died at all. My mother is chronically ill, and even though she is and will always be there for me as long as is possible I just couldn't tell her how bad I was feeling. Maybe it was guilt because she has problems that I felt far outweighed mine (haha oh god there's the tears that actually stings).

And my dad is... well.. a dad. Sometimes dads just don't understand things like mental illness, or being an unwell person. My dad loves me. I know that, and I love him a lot too. But he can't understand how these things affect me as he's basically neurotypical in every way. He tries. But I can't find empathy there, and a lot of the time there's misunderstanding when we talk about mental illness. So I didn't tell him anything then either.

I would stay in my room a lot, or be out in the woods a lot. I would scratch up my arms with my nails until they would bleed and I would cry. I felt like I didn't care if I died at that time. My parents raised me religiously in the church and I tried very hard to have a relationship with their concept of a god. But I couldn't because to me in was just emptiness. For me, in that sense, there is nothing there. So my loneliness was running even deeper than just the physical. It was spiritual as well. And idk if anyone reading this has experienced spiritual emptiness, or even is a spiritual person, but please believe me when I say it's Hell.

When I was 14 I rode my bicycle out to a bridge near my home out in the back woods type country. The old train bridge kind with the big cement blocks at the bottom of the pillars holding them up. I remember sitting on the very edge of it just looking down at the cement. I really wanted to jump. Honestly the only reason I didn't was because of my mom. She's the reason I stepped back, got on my bicycle and rode home. Albeit I was crying the whole way home, stayed out in the garden to finish crying, washed my face in the creek and went inside and straight upstairs to my bed and I slept until the next day.

When I was around the end of being 14 I tried repression. I started trying eating normally (which has wrecked me internally, I have major digestive problems as I've always refused to go to a rehab centre, which in itself is not good for me). I started pretending to have a relationship with "God". I tried the whole "cool hip Christian kid" spin from when I was that age until 17 or so. I pushed back my depression, my fears and anxieties and eds to see if I could be happy. And I pretended to be happy for a while. And I fooled a lot of people.

Things weren't by any means okay though. My school work was suffering as it always had, but since the work was harder it was also suffering harder. I picked up smoking cigarettes. I also picked up alcohol more and more. I dated a 21 year old and lost my virginity to him at 16, after much coaxing from him. That was an extremely bad 8 months.

My saving grace and my recharge at the time was a Bible camp I'd attend in the summers. I went for 12 years. Now that I think about it.. that camp was my only constant thing for a very long time. It was always there. And even when it wasn't camp time, the place was so close I could just go talk to the live in managers when I had questions. While my relationship with a god I don't believe in was strained and a facade, the people I met are amazing and have helped me a lot.

In fact, at that camp I spilled a lot of my struggles to my group of close friends. We were just a few girls, only 17 or so. But they had all been through things just as bad as me. Some so close it scared me. I felt accepted by those girls who are now beautiful strong women. So I opened the flood gates of what I had been through. All of my dark times and feelings, thoughts of dying and plans to do it, the bulimia and how it hurt my body, my 21 year old ex and what had happened to me, my struggles in school, my guilt towards my mother as her pregnancy with me put her in her wheelchair, my panic attacks and the anxiety that I'd felt for so long, my loneliness and my desperate want to not be alive. Basically just like, ALL of it. I don't really think that was a gate I could've closed even if I tried at that point. It was just a lot.

It took a while to talk about everything, and by the time I'd covered everything even more young folks like us had come over to sit. I was sobbing. My friends weren't very far behind either. Someone was rubbing my back and another person brought me tissues. I finished and everyone was kinda quiet and sad. One of my friends said "Hey can we all just kinda sit together and pray?" and I said that I thought that was a good idea. So we sat. And we just prayed. Even if they were words floating up to an empty space where I see no god, the solidarity that I felt with my friends and those around showing that they cared about me was overwhelming. I wasn't alone. I had friends. REAL friends who weren't looking for the next best thing. And I didn't feel as empty anymore. Knowing that I had people who genuinely cared for me and everything I'd been through and everything I was made me feel so much more worthy of living, it showed me I wasn't nothing.

A lot has happened since those dark times. I've had other dark times. Anorexia claimed me at 18 as a sufferer, and I still struggle with it to this day. I had a physically and emotionally abusive sociopathic partner in the Autumn of my 21st year. I had a whole 2 year ordeal with someone that I'm not even going to talk about, as this person and I have BOTH put it behind us and forgiven each other and are now friends. I alsp dropped out of high school in grade 11.

But I've had a LOT of light times. I started actively loving my body at 21, which was the first new constant in my life. I took action and got a breast reduction from G to C cup for my health at 18. I left the church and started understanding science better. The spiritualist in me called for more, so I delved into research on Paganism and Wicca. What I found was what I needed. It was the second new constant I needed. So now instead of 1, I had 2.

I live with my fiance now. He's someone who I was schoolmates with in highschool. After a few years of not keeping in touch, we hung out. We got close again. And after a few years we started dating. We've had bumpy patches. 1 break up due to his mental illness (again, it rears its ugly head). But that was short lived. And we are actively improving ourselves while being there for one another. Last March I asked him to marry me to which he said "Well, I was gonna ask you when we got our own place, so obviously yes." (I've dated a lot of people, so I am so happy that it was him I'm going to be with, no offense to any of the guys, girls and other folks I've been with and am friends with). He's my third constant.

I have so much more now than I ever dreamed I could in those dark times, friends.

Moral of the story is:

Friends come and go. But you'll find someone, or multiple people who will care about you enough to stick with you as much as you wanna stick with them.

Don't give up on yourself. You're gonna have a lot of bad times. Life happens and we can't do shit about it. But life also has a lot of really good times worth looking forward to and holding close to heart. You can love yourself no matter who you are or what you look like because you're more than a name or a number on a scale. You're a complex person with real feelings who is worthy of self love. And love from others too.

Pain sucks. Life can suck a whole fucking lot. So much you want it to end. But through all the struggle, the hurt and the mental illness, you still very much deserve a good life. If not more, because you're actively trying to enjoy being alive in a very hard time.

So yeah. Thanks for reading this. I just needed to talk. I felt like I was going to explode and my Instagram isn't really the place to put this.

Take care of yourselfs. Cherish yourself and your time here. Make the best of your situations as much as you can. Hold your loved ones close in mind and heart. And don't be afraid to talk.

[vitalpen]

A criticism of Persona 5

So I’m gonna preface this diatribe with three disclaimers:

First off is going to be the SPOILER WARNING.  This post spoils the game all over the place as it needs to given the nature of the discussion.  That’s why the read more is there.

Second, this post is long.  Coming in at a lover 2000 words.  So if you ready this, get ready for an essay.

Third: I love Persona 5.  I played through it twice, did every social link, filled out the compendium, and beat the secret boss.  It is a fantastic game with a fantastic story, loveable characters, beautiful art, and menus stylish enough to have their own fashion show.  

That being said, there are things that it does with each character that I can’t help but sigh at in frustration.  There are a few running themes for all of these that I’ll expand on at the end.

A lot of the issues come down to how a character is treated after their “important thing” is resolved. I’m gonna run down them in order of people entering your party.

Starting off, there’s Mona.  Leaving behind how happy I am that he was not just another Teddy, there are points with Mona that make him out to be such a whiny little brat.  Mainly, the section where he leaves the party because he thinks they’re getting too greedy.  Rather than try to get them back on track, he drops them after one bad conversation with mostly just Ryuji (the rest of the party is pretty unclear on where they stand), thus leaving them with no supervision when they seem to need it the most.  There’s also the whole constant insulting of Ryuji to the point where it’s eyeroll-inducing and the fact that backstory wise, he does end up being part way to a rehash of Teddy.  

Actually, speaking of Mona insulting Ryuji, man that guy never gets a break.  Despite the fact that he has a compelling backstory and motivation, after the first palace, he starts to lean pretty heavily toward the “punching bag” type of joke character.  He’s the one that everyone (especially Mona) calls an idiot, he’s the butt of nearly all the slapstick, and he’s the one that gets harassed by the gay stereotypes with some really uncomfortable cutting to black (and that one’s an large issue all on its own).  At the point Mona leaves (with poor justification) Ryuji, understandably, doesn’t want him back and is treated like the bad guy for it.  Even when you aretrying to get him back, suddenly Ryuji is uncharacterisitically cold toward him.  Even near the end of the game, when Ryuji does something incredibly brave and selfless, seeming to sacrifice his life, the game completely undermines it by having the girls beat the ever loving shit out of him when he makes the mistake of... surviving, I guess.

Now, Ann, aside from the way they pronounce her name.  She is a straight up different character in her Social Link than she is in the main story (which is actually connected to another problem that we’ll get into later).  In the story she is typically caring, usually level-headed, if easily annoyed, and loves sweets, whereas her Social Link turns her into little more than a ditzy blond with a penchant for competition that we don’t see anywhere in the main story.  It creates this disconnectio between the two stories that’s really hard to reconcile.

Yusuke is window dressing.  He does nothing substantial for the main plot after the second palace is done.  The majority of his unique contributions could be summed up with deadpan, straight-faced joke moments (that are legitimately amazing every time they show up), dialogue that any of the characters could have said, and saying “yeah, that’s right” in the “every party member gets to say something” moments.

Makoto’s issue involves another theme that we’ll expand on later.  Her relationship with her sister is incredibly unhealthy and never realistically addressed.  It gets to point where she’s actually afraid of her.  It isn’t helped when the rest of the party guilt trips her into installing a virus on her sister’s computer (one of the few moments that I think is legitimately bad in this game). How is this resolved?  Once you do the palace it’s all just gone, despite you not stealing Sae’s treasure.  No counseling, no baggage, no promises to do better, not believable progression, nothing.  That’s not how that works.

Futaba has a similar issue.  After her palace, she is just magically cured of her crippling social anxiety, as far as the main plot is concerned at least.  She hangs out in front of LeBlanc, plain as day, totally fine, never having any issue in the main plot with other people ever again.  No therapy, not even the slightest relapse or difficulty, no believable progression, nothing.  I repeat: that’s not how that works.

Haru... poor, poor, Haru.  She gets nothing when she should have had so much.  She’s introduced at about 3/4 of the way through the story, doesn’t get a proper awakening to her persona and reveal of her thief outfit, never gets a moment of catharsis for her father and arranged fiance treating her like an object in the real world, nor any catharsis about dealing with the emotional trauma of her losing her father in a way that is as crushing as it could ever be, and eventually just ends up kinda telling the one who killed him that it’s no big deal.  Everything about her just gets buried until you’re left with a Persona Q character, which is a game that has a serious problem with reducing complex, multifaceted characters to one-note personalities.

And then there’s Goro “I have daddy issues disguised as an interesting take on personal justice” Akechi.  A character that was waaaaaaaaaaay better before the heelturn.  The switch from morally aligned but methodologically opposed antagonist to mustache-twiddling, muhahahing, train-track-damsel-tying villain sucked all the depth out of him.  They had a three-dimensional character that portrayed an interesting foil in both personal beliefs and public opinion of the party.  And by the end, all of that was stripped away because you have to have a bretrayal in a Persona game, and he gets with nothing resembling a satisfying sendoff.  The fact that he has essentially disappeared from the real world is never even addressed (this is yet a third thing that we’ll get into shortly).

All of these issues culminate in three specific themes.

The first is that the Social Links feel very disconnected from the plot.  P3 escaped this because the party member Social Links were specifically tied to events in the main story and sometimes couldn’t be progressed through until certain events occurred.  P4 didn’t have this problem because the Social Links all resulted from the personal issues that came up in their dungeons with their shadows, so there is connective tissue to the events.  

But the Social Links in P5 feel so distant.  Ann’s modeling stuff, Ryuji’s track team, Yusuke’s painting, Makoto’s friend, and Haru’s arranged marriage and coffee stuff, all have nothing or very little to do with the story.  The only one who didn’t quite have this issue, is Futaba, who got the P4 treatment, complete with confronting and accepting her shadow to gain her persona.  But even that deals more with her social anxiety than her acceptance that her mother’s death wasn’t her fault but actually an assassination.  Because the Social Links, which are literally “character development as a game mechanic”, are separated from the story, it gives the feeling that they’re inconsequential.  We never see the fruits of the character’s labor as they try to better themselves.  As far the main story is concerned, they may as well have not happened.  This is especially salient if you do the Moon social link, wherein you have to teach Mishima not to let the power go to his head, only to later have your party let the power go to their heads (or Ryuji at least, like I said earlier, it’s not super clear where everyone stands during that part of the game).

The second issue is that, for a series whose core themes are based off Jungian psychology (personas and shadows), it’s really bad at handling psychological stuff.  They want to have the drama of things like:

“a character who has social anxiety and intrusive thoughts of guilt about her mother’s death that have haunted her for years” 

“one of your party members has an older sister who’s her legal guardian, but is neglectful of her duties in that role and verbally abusive of that party member, thus creating a dependent relationship that revolves around trying (and failing) to gain her sister’s approval”

“After thinking that she may have helped turn her father into a better person who might love her as a daughter rather than an asset, in mid-celebration, a girl sees her father die on live TV and she may have been the cause of it”

But they aren’t prepared for the fallout that comes with those kind of elements.  Social anxiety severe enough to keep you in your room is typically going to take more than just support from friends to rehabilitate from.  Sae’s abusive tendencies toward her sister are explained by her palace, but they are not excused by it.  The palace’s are physical manifestations of the point where someone can justify anything to themselves, not a mind control device.  Nothing about Sae’s resentment toward her sister (that is doing everything she can not to be a burden) is given any kind of proper follow up.  It needed more addressing than the NOTHING it was given.  And don’t get me started on the rush job that was Haru.  

Her father is killed in gruesome fashion, eyes literally rolling back into his head and leaking blood, after she thought she had saved him from his own cruelty, and for a period of weeks, it seems a lot like it’s her fault.  She is left orphaned, and being pulled every which way by members of her father’s company in the void of power that’s left behind, once again turned back into an asset just after she thought she had escaped that.  This should have been the mother of all gut punches.  This should have been something that took her out of the game reminiscent of Shinji from P3.  This should have given her a hate boner for Akechi twice the size of Aegis’s for Ryoji.  This ruined her life just at the precipice of it getting better.  In one fell swoop, victory was ripped from her and replaced with bitter defeat and loss.  There was so much set up for her to have a character arc.  But we never see her react to it.  No crying, no depression, just back to her sweet, gardening self.  To top it all off, like a month later, she forgives the person who killed him and betrayed your party in a passing comment during one of those “every party member gets to say something” moments.  This is the pinnacle of emotional blue balls.

(Edit: @lightybulb brought it to my attention that Haru doesn’t actually forgive Akechi.  She, in fact, specifically says that she can never forgive him.  While it’s swept under the rug, I totally misremembered on that one.  My bad.)

Pretty much all of this fits into the third main issue that Persona 5′s narrative has.  It has a bad habit of not sticking the landing or following up afterward.  Which sucks for stuff like Akechi, where he was built up the entire game, and personal traumas like Haru, Futaba, or Makoto.  It sucks when it takes away a lot of the character’s depth like it did with Yusuke.  It sucks when the villain backstory and plan is literally just told to you in an exposition the likes of which I haven’t seen in years.  

This is not to say it never sticks the landing, as it very often does (more so in the first half of the game in my opinion), but there are a lot of key points where plot threads just kinda peter off into nothing or are wrapped up way too conveniently with a little bow on top.  

There are ways to fix these issues.

You wanna connect the Social Links to the main plot?  Lock ranks of party member Social Links behind story events.  This intrinsically ties the personal growth to the main plot and lets them talk about story events.  Events from the story can be used to kick of a conversation that moves it to the next level or draws a parallel to the personal situation they’re dealing with.

You wanna have satisfying and believable treatment of psychological issues?  Understand that they are not just something you deal with in a few days or weeks.  Understand that “the power of friendship” (Copyright Anime 1962, please support the official release) is not a substitute for counseling or medication.  Understand that the road to recovery is long, arduous, and sometimes loops back on itself.  It’s anything but a straight line.

There is no set remedy for sticking the landing and following up other than a pretty general good writing tip: don’t leave plot threads hanging and don’t introduce plot threads you don’t have adequate room to include.

Now as previously stated, I love Persona 5 and nothing I’ve said here takes away from that fact.  But I also want to see the things I love do even better for themselves.  That’s kinda the point of this post.

That’s pretty much all I got for this.  If you agree or disagree, feel free to add your own arguments to this, I’m always down for a conversation.  Cheers.

[rickthaniel]

Avatar Aang, Feminist Icon?

“Who’s your favorite character?” I hear that question come up a lot over Avatar: The Last Airbender, a show particularly near and dear to me. Iroh and Toph get tossed around a lot. Zuko is very popular. Sokka has his fans. But something I’ve noticed? Aang very rarely gets the pick. When he comes up, it’s usually in that “Oh, and also…” kind of way. Which is strange, I think, considering he’s the main character, the titular airbender, of the entire show.

I never really thought much about it until a couple weeks ago when I finished my annual re-watch of the series and found myself, for the first time, specifically focused on Aang’s arc. Somehow, I never really paid that much attention to him before. I mean sure, he’s front and center in most episodes, fighting or practicing or learning big spiritual secrets, and yet, he always feels a little overshadowed. Katara takes care of the group. Sokka makes the plans. Zuko has the big, heroic Joseph Campbell journey. Aang…goofs around. He listens and follows and plays with Momo. And yes, at the end his story gets bigger and louder, but even then I feel like a lot of it dodges the spotlight. And here’s why:

Avatar casts the least traditionally-masculine hero you could possibly write as the star of a fantasy war story. Because of that, we don’t see Aang naturally for everything he is, so we look elsewhere.

To show what I mean, I want to talk about some of the show’s other characters, and I want to start with Zuko. Zuko is the hero we’re looking for. He’s tall and hot and complicated. He perseveres in the face of constant setbacks. He uses two swords and shoots fire out of his hands. He trains with a wise old man on ship decks and mountaintops. Occasionally he yells at the sky. He’s got the whole 180-degree moral turn beat for beat, right down to the scars and the sins-of-the-father confrontation scene. And if you were going into battle, some epic affair with battalions of armor-clad infantry, Zuko is the man you’d want leading the charge, Aragorn style. We love Zuko. Because Zuko does what he’s supposed to do.

Now let’s look at Katara. Katara doesn’t do what she’s supposed to do. She doesn’t care about your traditionally gender dynamics because she’s too busy fighting pirates and firebenders, planning military operations with the highest ranking generals in the Earth Kingdom, and dismantling the entire patriarchal structure of the Northern Water Tribe. Somewhere in her spare time she also manages to become one of the greatest waterbenders in the world, train the Avatar, defeat the princess of the Fire Nation in the middle of Sozin’s Comet and take care of the entire rest of the cast for an entire year living in tents and caves. Katara is a badass, and we love that.

So what about Aang? When we meet Aang, he is twelve years old. He is small and his voice hasn’t changed yet. His hobbies include dancing, baking and braiding necklaces with pink flowers. He loves animals. He doesn’t eat meat. He despises violence and spends nine tenths of every fight ducking and dodging. His only “weapon” is a blunt staff, used more for recreation than combat. Through the show, Aang receives most of his training from two young women – Katara and Toph – whom he gives absolute respect, even to the point of reverence. When he questions their instruction, it comes from a place of discomfort or anxiety, never superiority. He defers to women, young women, in matters of strategy and combat. Then he makes a joke at his own expense and goes off to feed his pet lemur.

Now there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, and it’s the one that shielded Aang from the heroic limelight in my eyes for ten years. The reasoning goes like this: Aang is a child. He has no presumptuous authority complex, no masculinity anxiety, no self-consciousness about his preferred pastimes, because he’s twelve. He’s still the hero, but he’s the prepubescent hero, the hero who can’t lead the charge himself because he’s just not old enough. The problem is, that reasoning just doesn’t hold up when you look at him in the context of the rest of the show.

Let’s look at Azula. Aside from the Avatar himself, Zuko’s sister is arguably the strongest bender in the entire show. We could debate Toph and Ozai all day, but when you look at all Azula does, the evidence is pretty damning. Let’s make a list, shall we?

Azula completely mastered lightning, the highest level firebending technique, in her spare time on a boat, under the instruction of two old women who can’t even bend.

Azula led the drill assault on Ba Sing Sae, one of the most important Fire Nation operations of the entire war, and almost succeeded in conquering the whole Earth Kingdom.

Azula then bested the Kyoshi Warriors, one of the strongest non-bender fighting groups in the entire world, successfully infiltrated the Earth Kingdom in disguise, befriended its monarch, learned of the enemy’s most secret operation, emotionally manipulated her older brother, overthrew the captain of the secret police and did conquer the Earth Kingdom, something three Fire Lords, numerous technological monstrosities, and countless generals, including her uncle, failed to do in a century.

And she did this all when she was fourteen.

That last part is easy to forget. Azula seems so much her brother’s peer, we forget she’s the same age as Katara. And that means that when we first meet Azula, she’s only a year older than Aang is at the end of the series. So to dismiss Aang’s autonomy, maturity or capability because of his age is ridiculous, understanding that he and Azula could have been in the same preschool class.

We must then accept Aang for what he truly is: the hero of the story, the leader of the charge, who repeatedly displays restraint and meekness, not because of his age, not because of his upbringing, not because of some character flaw, but because he chooses too. We clamor for strong female characters, and for excellent reason. But nobody every calls for more weak male characters. Not weak in a negative sense, but weak in a sense that he listens when heroes talk. He negotiates when heroes fight. And when heroes are sharpening their blades, planning their strategies and stringing along their hetero love interests, Aang is making jewelry, feeding Appa, and wearing that flower crown he got from a travelling band of hippies. If all Aang’s hobbies and habits were transposed onto Toph or Katara, we’d see it as a weakening of their characters. But with Aang it’s cute, because he’s a child. Only it isn’t, because he’s not.

Even in his relationship with Katara, a landmark piece of any traditional protagonist’s identity, Aang defies expectations. From the moment he wakes up in episode one, he is infatuated with the young woman who would become his oldest teacher and closest friend. Throughout season one we see many examples of his puppy love expressing itself, usually to no avail. But there’s one episode in particular that I always thought a little odd, and that’s Jet.

In Jet, Katara has an infatuation of her own. The titular vigilante outlaw sweeps her off her feet, literally, with his stunning hair, his masterful swordsmanship and his apparent selflessness. You’d think this would elicit some kind of jealousy from Aang. There’s no way he’s ignorant of what’s happening, as Sokka sarcastically refers to Jet as Katara’s boyfriend directly in Aang’s presence, and she doesn’t even dispute it. But even then, we never see any kind of rivalry manifest in Aang. Rather, he seems in full support of it. He repeatedly praises Jet, impressed by his leadership and carefree attitude. Despite his overwhelming affection for Katara, he evaluates both her and Jet on their own merits as people. There is no sense of ownership or macho competition.

Contrast this with Zuko’s reaction to a similar scenario in season three’s The Beach. Zuko goes to a party with his girlfriend, and at that party he sees her talking to another guy. His reaction? Throwing the challenger into the wall, shattering a vase, yelling at Mai, and storming out. This may seem a little extreme, but it’s also what we’d expect to an extent. Zuko is being challenged. He feels threatened in his station as a man, and he responds physically, asserting his strength and dominance as best he can.

I could go on and on. I could talk about how the first time Aang trains with a dedicated waterbending master, he tries to quit because of sexist double standards, only changing his mind after Katara’s urging. I could talk about how Aang is cast as a woman in the Fire Nation’s propaganda theatre piece bashing him and his friends. Because in a patriarchal society, the worst thing a man can be is feminine. I could talk about the only times Aang causes any kind of real destruction in the Avatar state, it’s not even him, since he doesn’t gain control of the skill until the show’s closing moments. Every time he is powerless in his own power and guilt-ridden right after, until the very end when he finally gains control, and what does he do with all that potential? He raises the rivers, and puts the fires out.

Aang isn’t what he’s supposed to be. He rejects every masculine expectation placed on his role, and in doing so he dodges center stage of his own show. It’s shocking to think about how many times I just forgot about Aang. Even at the end, when his voice has dropped and his abs have filled in, we miss it. Zuko’s coronation comes and we cheer with the crowd, psyched to see our hero crowned. Then the Fire Lord shakes his head, gestures behind him and declares “the real hero is the Avatar.” It’s like he’s talking to us. “Don’t you get it?” he asks. “Did you miss it? This is his story. But you forgot that. Because he was small. And silly. And he hated fighting. And he loved to dance. Look at him,” Zuko seems to say. “He’s your hero. Avatar Aang, defier of gender norms, champion of self-identity, feminist icon.”

[shareeanne-deactivated]

Everyone’s Doing The Best That They Can

“All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.” ~Brené Brown

My favorite principle is this simple truth: Everyone is doing the best that they can with the resources they have. Adopting this belief has radically changed my relationship to myself and to others.

This idea has been explored by a constellation of religious, spiritual, and wellness practitioners. As Deepak Chopra said, “People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.”

At first, it's a hard concept for us to swallow. In a culture that constantly urges us to do more, to be better, and to excel,  “I'm doing the best that I can” sounds like complacency—like an excuse. But what if we took a step back from our culture's infinite growth paradigm and considered, “What if, right now, there is a limit to what I can achieve? Can I be okay with that?”

I first stumbled across this principle a few weeks after I quit drinking in 2016. It was a challenging time for me. In the absence of alcohol, I watched my anxiety soar.

I stayed away from bars and clubs to avoid temptation, but then felt guilty and “boring” for spending Saturday nights at home. When I met up with friends who'd previously been drinking buddies, our interactions felt stilted. I knew sobriety was the healthiest choice for me, but I couldn't accept the way it impacted my ability to be social. I felt like I wasn't trying hard enough.

I spent weeks in a frustrated mind space until I stumbled across that precious idea: “I'm doing the best I can with the resources at my disposal.”

At first, I recoiled. The high achiever in me—the climber, the pusher—scoffed at the suggestion that I was doing my best. “But other people have healthy relationships with alcohol. Other people maintain active, thriving social lives.”

But in that moment, I realized that my negative self-talk was an exercise in futility. It never boosted my inspiration or activated me toward progress. It just sparked a shame spiral that sunk me deeper into inaction and guilt.

So over time, I began to internalize this idea as my own. And as I did, I felt like a blanket of comfort had been draped over me. For the first time in weeks, I could sit back on my couch and watch Vampire Diaries without hating myself. It enabled me to find peace in the present moment and accept—not even accept, but celebrate—that I was doing the absolute best that I could.

I've found that this principle has been easiest for me to internalize when I've been going through deep stuff.

After a painful breakup last August, it took all of my energy to drag myself from bed in the morning. My intense emotions were riding shotgun, which sometimes meant canceling plans last minute, postponing work calls, or calling a friend to cry it out.

Because I was so obviously using all of my inner resources to get through each day, it was easy for me to accept that I was doing the best that I could. Throughout those months, I gave myself total permission not to do more, not to be “better.” For that very reason, those painful months were also some of the most peaceful months of my life.

Here's the thing, though: We don’t have to hit rock bottom in order to show ourselves compassion.

We don’t need to be heartbroken, shattered, or at wit’s end. Maybe we're just having a rough day. Maybe we're feeling anxious. See, our abilities in any given moment depend entirely on our inner resources, and our inner resources are constantly in a state of flux depending on our emotions (pain, stress, anxiety, fear), our physicality (sickness, ailments, how much sleep we got), our histories (the habits we’ve adopted, the trauma we've experienced, the socialization we’ve internalized), and so much more.

When we consider everything that affects our capacity to show up as we'd like to be, we realize how narrow-minded our negative self-talk is. We also begin to understand that everyone comes from a wildly complex, diverse array of experiences, and that comparisons among us are useless.

Consider how this idea can be applied in some more challenging situations:

The Friend Who Is Stuck In A Cycle of Stagnancy

This goes for anyone who complains about a monotonous cycle in their life but can't seem to break it: the friend who hates their job but doesn't leave it, or the friend who complains about their partner but won't end their relationship.

Those of us on the receiving end of our friend's complaints may get tired of hearing the same story every day. But our advice to “just leave your job” or “just break up” will fall on deaf ears because it's not that simple. They are doing the best that they can in that moment because their current need for familiarity and security outweighs their desire for exploration.

They are experiencing a tension within their desires, but don't yet have the ability to act on that tension. The limitations of their emotional (or sometimes, financial) resources make it difficult for them to move on.

By accepting that we're doing the best we can, we give ourselves the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. Only from this place can positive, sustainable changes to actions or behaviors be made

The Parents Who Hurt Us When We Were Kids

It can be especially challenging to apply this principle to those who have wounded us most deeply. But oftentimes, those are the folks most deserving of our compassion.

Parents have a responsibility to their children, and parents who hurt, neglect, shame, or otherwise harm their children are not doing their job as parents. But sometimes, our parents can't do their jobs well because they don't have the resources at their disposal. And even then, they are doing the best that they can.

More than likely, our parents didn't learn the necessary parenting skills from their own parents. Maybe they never got therapy to heal old wounds or never developed the coping skills necessary to handle intense emotions. This principle can be very challenging, yet very healing, when applied to parents and other family members.

The Binge Eater (Or Other Addict)

This used to be me, and it took me years to accept that even when I was in the thick of my eating disorders, I was doing the best that I could.

From the outside, the solution seems simple: “Put down the cake.” “Don't have a third serving.” But for folks with addiction issues—food, alcohol, sex, drugs, you name it—the anxiety or emptiness of not engaging with the addiction can be insurmountable.

Resisting the impulse to fill an inner void requires extensive resources, including self-love, self-empowerment, and oftentimes, a web of support from friends and family. Folks in the throes of addiction are caught in a painful cycle of indulgence, shame, and self-judgment, which makes it all the more difficult to develop the emotional resources necessary to resist the tug of the addiction.

But by accepting that they're doing the best they can, they give themselves the gift of self-acceptance and self-love. Only from this place can we make positive, sustainable changes to our actions or behaviors.

It's worth noting: Our actions have consequences, and when we harm others, we should be held accountable. But simultaneously, we can acknowledge that we are doing the best that we can, even when we “fall short” in others' eyes. Forgiving ourselves (and others) is an emotional experience that transcends logic or justice. We can make the conscious choice not to hold ourselves to a constant standard of absolute perfection.

Believing that we are all doing the best that we can opens our hearts to kindness and compassion. It allows us to see one another as humans, flaws and all. Next time you feel frustrated with yourself, stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, you’re doing the best that you can.

Sit down with a piece of paper and divide it in half. On one side, write down the voices of your inner gremlins. What exactly are they saying? Are they calling you lazy, selfish, mean? On the second side, consider what inner and external factors affected your actions or decisions. Consider the emotional, physical, historical, and financial obstacles you face.

As you review your list of obstacles in contrast with your negative self-talk, summon compassion and kindness for your inner self. If she is struggling, you can ease her burden by quieting the self-judgment and replacing those negative messages with an honest truth: That you're doing the best you can with the resources at your disposal.

About Hailey Magee

Hailey Magee is a Trailblazer Coach, writer, and digital nomad. She envisions a world where trailblazers are empowered to explore uncharted territory and unfurl a world of possibility - professionally, emotionally, spiritually, and more - to people everywhere. She has worked with over 100 clients of all ages across the United States and Canada. Learn more at haileymagee.com.

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[ajapablog]

The Gender of History

A historical text that has been important to me, as I think about what it means to be trained to do this kind of work, is Bonnie G Smith’s The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice. It has been key in helping me think through professions as gendered. Networks, circuits, groups, associations and such are integral to any kind of profession and the historical profession, or any academic profession for that matter, is not outside of these. To think of associational/relational structures, I would argue, is to think of gender. To think of gender as a subsidiary, an additive outside of the structures and processes we seek to understand is a form of patriarchal violence. This is somewhat along Joan Scott’s point in her critical methodological piece — Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. So the question: what does it mean to be a part of a gendered structure of historical knowledge production is a question that warrants asking. I do not purport to answer this question now, in a blogpost. But I want to address my own concerns and some insights: the personal is political but also generative and productive intellectually. 

The CHS seminar discussions out of which I began to work on BP Koirala for my MPhil thesis was largely formed by female identifying membership.That gender is critical in how we learn and work was a fundamental premise for me by 2015 when I began doing this work. I had arrived at this premise through years of enjoying learning in specific contexts (1). An A levels sociology class dominated by female identifying students first peaked my interest in academic thinking. I had been raised up in a rather conservative patriarchal Brahminical household by liberal parents and sociological theory helped me make sense of my complex socialization. I had then gone through a stellar training in the social sciences and humanities at a women’s college in Western Massachusetts. 

In the pioneer valley I found my mentor in the brilliant language historian late Kavita Datla, the very erudite scholar of Indic literatures, Indira Peterson, the radical activist and educator Margaret Cerullo at Hampshire College, and the Harvard-trained leading researcher on middle class Black cultural production, Patricia Banks. I do not claim that there were no male professors at Mount Holyoke that I learned from, but the point is, these were the women I could also lean on. This is exactly the point: learning requires a leaning on and the question is who is amenable to creating professional relationships where this kind of support is not seen as a weakness. The notion of the brilliant male prodigy working entirely in solitude is a trope and the ideal type, which doesn’t exist and the making of this ideal is precisely what Bonnie Smith narrates in her history of the historical profession in Britain. 

You could say, learning with women and from women is perhaps the only thing that I knew until I reached JNU. Outside the classroom at Mount Holyoke, I was a part of a group which would become a movement within the two years that those of us in this group graduated from Mount Holyoke. Sadia Khatri and Natasha Ansari of the Girls at Dhaba movement in Pakistan were at Mount Holyoke, members of the Desi corner/chai group that convened in a corner of Mount Holyoke’s library and in Eliot house: the interfaith house. The coming together of South Asian women at Mount Holyoke cannot be understood outside the ambit of education, even formal education for that matter. You must realize that we took classes together, argued over readings, we worked with the same advisor and worked on related research subjects for our undergraduate theses. What is most important is that we also spent time cooking, watching films and discussing private and public issues and listening. This kind of community requires a vulnerability and the willingness to concede that one is both reliant on the community but also must contribute to it— a kind of horizontalism if you must. 

In JNU, it was Neeladri Bhattacharya’s 2015 MA seminar that fostered this. Neeladri has always been self reflexive of his pedagogy. His seminar discussions where he would do what Kavita Datla once described as “gently nudge” students to think on their own and through each other’s questions and comments through active listening was very productive. Neeladri’s insistence that the self—including the researching self— be understood in all its relationships was a feminist epistemology. His chapter in The Great Agrarian Conquest on the Lawrence brothers is, I think, testament to this in his own academic writing. So when I worked on Koirala,  the questions that shaped the work came from colleagues in classrooms, and in the streets of JNU, and from a generous mentor but also from a sensitivity to gender in the field developed over the second half of the 20th century. I am not entirely fond of my chapter on Koirala’s political speeches from 1947 to 1961 which I hope will acquire a different form at some point. However, the other three chapters, are chapters where I have tried to think through what it meant for Koirala to write of of men and women as gendered being and how being and thinking of himself so shaped his professional and personal life. 

In my chapter on his diaries from his two jail terms, my attempt was really try to get at the heart of how conceptions of masculinity, familial obligation and strength were constituted in Koirala’s writings. My contention is that his diaries and his letters addressed to his family and children are not outside academic analysis and in fact they tell of the complex negotiations he performed over the tensions that a public life created for his ideal of a married and familial life. Here is an extract that might give you a sense of how I tried to think through this: 

Two diary entries written in the span of a few days suggest that Koirala confronted the notion of the conjugal as a site of comfort and support, grappled with the implications of what he considered his “non-committal” behaviour toward it, and mulled over the questions of what it would require of him to reconcile with such a tension... The correspondences with others where we wrote about his wife and the diary entries where he spoke of her also suggest a deep-seated concern over his role as a husband and the responsibilities that it entailed. An affirmation of his wife’s expectations and a pledge to give up extramarital affairs that he otherwise did not deem problematic allowed for a contingent resolution for this anxiety. As I suggested above these anxieties on Koirala’s part suggest that he espoused notions about the family itself as a unified unit and a husband and father as one who is present and accountable. This was a gendered reading of the man and the woman’s distinct ideal attributes within a family. Such a reading is also evident in his characterization of Jacqueline Kennedy, upon her husband’s death, as an “ideal feminine type” who was able to maintain love and cohesion in the family.  Thus, as Koirala’s career choice was not materially conducive in his affirmation of such an ideal notion of family and of himself as a husband, his diary entries were constant expressions of guilt over his absence through imprisonment. While framed in the language of absence and separation, the subterranean concern in these entries was the over not being able to materially and physically contribute in the sustenance of the family as an ideal “breadwinner.”

I have, in a previous chapter explored Koirala’s idealized notions of conjugality in his literary and autobiographical writings. In the direct dialogue with his wife, and the immediacy of the epistolary sources, Koirala’s notions of conjugality and commitment constituted within these sources become slightly different from the kind we are confronted with in his literary writings, particularly in Teen Ghumti. If his literary sources constitute an idealized vision of companionate marriage based on love, the epistolary sources show that not only the material constraints of political life and imprisonment, but also societal notions of masculinity and femininity formed complicated the realization of such ideals. What is evident from our discussions above is that even if Koirala resorted to the complete affirmation or the denial of certain ideals, these resolutions were contingent and would emerge differently in another form. From this se can argue that Koirala’s self-formation through this tension was an emergent process that had to be negotiated with time and again in different kinds of writings. They raise the question as to whether Koirala ever resolved these questions entirely over his lifetime.

I am not bringing in the excerpt above to claim that I am doing anything new or to make any claim over original research. I haven’t read enough Nepali scholarship on Koirala to know what my measly musings on Koirala’s diaries mean in the larger scheme of things. What it means to me personally is that expressions of anxiety over one’s profession as gendered anxieties, can be gleaned from the writings of a man who lived the life of a “professional” politician. I address in another section, how the kin-like networks with their affective trappings and alliances with North Indian leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan formed an integral part of Koirala’s life, both personal and professional. These are the things that interest me. These are the things important to me. I  will most likely move away from Koirala for my PhD work. But I will try to continue to think of the gendered lives of individuals and institutions.  

And as I think of my future work, I am also actively thinking of the networks, alliances and community that will sustain me. I am thinking actively about who I will best learn from and who will make me feel that my efforts, my interests and my commitment to this life is not entirely useless. I have found immense joy this semester learning from a Russian historian who works with poststructural frameworks on questions of race. Her classrooms have that horizontal quality of argumentation, discussion, empathy that reminds me of why I wanted to continue on in higher education. If I ever find myself in the privileged position to teach a seminar course, her approach along with that of Neeladri’s are ones I will definitely emulate.  I have also found a peer mentor in a friend in the history department in a close-by institution who has been very supportive. It is not as if the decision to spend a good chunk of your life, if not the entirety of it, working in a field is an easy one. There are, you must understand, opportunity costs, constant impostor syndrome, inertia over reaching out to individuals and networks whose responses to your vulnerabilities is something you cannot measure. But as long as I can find others who understand that community is central, that those who learn are vulnerable, and that professional relationships too can and should have horizontal sensibility to them, I think I will be fine. 

(1) as I wrote “enjoying learning” I realized that many might argue that enjoying it is not important, doing it well is. To this I say, please read on. I take the affective as important in shaping any work that we do. It important in understanding why it is that we do what we do and the meanings we give to it. In other words, emotive descriptions are a way of meaning-making. 

[aion-rsa]

Away Review (Spoiler-Free)

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This Away review contains NO spoilers.

Humanity loves stories about looking to the stars. Who among us hasn’t looked up and wondered what’s out there? Or what it might be like to explore worlds beyond our own?

Netflix’s Away is a fictional take on the obvious next step in the space race – a manned trip to Mars, complete with all the breathtaking awe and constant terrifying threat of death that will naturally involve. (Whenever we get there.) At the same time, it’s the story that will make you hope we do manage it some day, an aspirational tale about the best things we, as a species, have been capable of, and how far we are still capable of going together.

Whether it intended to be or not, Away is a remarkably perfect show for our moment, a drama that illustrates that something wondrous can come out of months of pain and separation, that beautiful things often have painful and difficult beginnings, and that humanity is stronger and better when we rely on one another than when we don’t.

Also, science is awesome, and we should say so. A lot.

The series stars Hilary Swank as U.S. Commander Emma Green, an ace pilot and astronaut who has spent most of her life dreaming of being a part of the first mission to Mars. Emma is joined by a diverse group of international astronauts and scientists handpicked for their assorted skills, including a veteran Russian cosmonaut (Mischa), an Indian medic (Ram), a Chinese chemist (Lu), and a British botanist (Kwesi) who’s never been in space before. They’ve been brought together by a complex arrangement of international agreements that have hammered out things like who gets to be the first person to set foot on Mars first (Lu) or serve as second in command (Ram).

As is often the way in stories like this, the group experiences some initial friction and distrust, finding it difficult enough to work together that they wonder how they’re meant to survive three years with only one another for company. Mischa feels that Emma’s command undercuts his status, as he’s the man who’s logged the most hours in space of anyone, anywhere. Others, like Lu, distrust Emma for not being mission-focused enough, while Ram wants a more personal friendship than his commander is willing to give. And Kwesi, poor lamb, is struggling with the physical and emotional shocks of spaceflight. 

It seems worth saying upfront, that if you’re tuning into Away expecting a small-screen version of The Martian, which depicts what life for the first humans to visit the Red Planet might be like, you’re going to be disappointed. (At least until the show gets renewed for a second season, at any rate.) The bulk of its drama takes place aboard the Atlas, as Emma and her crew tackle more than their fair share of crises over the course of their eighteen-month long journey to Mars.

To be fair, creator Andrew Hinderaker, showrunner Jessica Goldberg, and executive producer Jason Katims manage to wring plenty of tension out of the trip, forcing the astronauts to navigate a variety of complex, unexpected, and potentially deadly situations and the audience to hold its breath while they do it. (Space blindness is a real thing, apparently!)

But at its heart, Away is a family drama, toggling between the triumphs and difficulties of the Atlas crew and the anxieties and problems facing the loved ones left behind. Since Emma is ostensibly the series’ main character, the Green family gets the most screen time but the show also includes flashbacks that fill in the personal histories of everyone else. 

The series sings when it focuses on the diverse group of astronauts at its center, who must learn to trust and listen to one another in the face of a series of increasingly dire problems. That they ultimately do isn’t so much a spoiler, but a natural eventuality – a found family that forms when they each realize they have no one but one another to rely upon. Yet, Away manages to deftly convey the gradual nature of their growing bonds, as small gestures of kindness and patience in early installments bear emotional fruit in later episodes. The show’s Christmas themed hour is one of its most affecting, largely due to an intergalactic puppet show that Mischa puts on for his grandchildren watching from millions of miles away, with help from the rest of his crewmates. How far they’ve all come.

Swank’s performance is as good as you probably expected, ably balancing Emma’s obvious desire to make history on Mars with the guilt and anxiety she feels about leaving her family behind in order to do so. But her supporting crew is also excellent, particularly Mark Ivanir as the grizzled Mischa, whose enthusiasm for homemade vodka is only surpassed by his deep love for being among the stars. Every person onboard the Atlas has made difficult choices to get where they are, and the question of whether those sacrifices were worth it in the end – whether the prospect of Mars is worth it – is one that permeates the series.

Awayis a lot less interesting when it focuses on the stories of those left behind on Earth. Emma’s teen daughter Alexis (Talitha Bateman) struggles to adapt to life with her mom in space, getting involved romantically involved with an older boy and riding motorbikes to feel alive. Her husband Matt (Josh Charles) frets over being an absentee father as he’s repeatedly drawn back to Mission Control to solve problems that could result in his wife’s death if he fails.

These are certainly difficult problems, but they can’t help but pale next to the struggle to fix a damaged solar panel, and many of the Earth scenes leave us wanting nothing so much as to rejoin the Atlas crew. And though Charles is a capable actor who tries his best, Matt is generally a cipher stuck between two women who are more interesting than he is, existing primarily to react to Emma and Lex. An early health-related plot largely fades into the background halfway through the season, and the vague hints that the family crew counselor has grown too attached to the Earth-bound Greens are deeply uncomfortable, particularly given that she’s also Emma’s best friend.

But viewers’ eyes will likely remain fixed to the heavens, rather than stuck on Earth. That’s where the real point of this show is – going forward, looking upward, towards what’s next. For all of us, together.

All 10 episodes of Away will premiere on Netflix on September 4.

The post Away Review (Spoiler-Free) appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[apostleshop]

Kendra Von Esh: Looking for Something More

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Kendra Von Esh: Looking for Something More

Kendra Von Esh, author of Am I Catholic?: A Struggle with Faith, Humility, and Surrendering to God, has written a humorous, frank account about her own journey back to the Catholic Church. Her audience includes clueless/ uncatechized Catholics as well as faithful Catholics at a loss about how to evangelize. Kendra has a passion for people who don’t know where to turn for answers but keep looking for “something more.” Surprised by a conversion experience, Kendra, in turn, shocked her family and associates a few years later by leaving a high powered executive career to work full time for God.

Melanie:  Kendra, describe your career before God intervened in your life.

Kendra: My career happened to me. I didn’t really study or aspire to be a Chief Information officer or an Information Technology (IT) Leader but that is exactly what happened. One opportunity came after another and I climbed the ladder pretty fast. Sure, there were a few professional bumps in the road. I lost my job a couple of times and there were stressful times dealing with merging companies. So, I was in a constant state of worry and anxiety and I didn’t sleep well. I had that “ugh, I have to go to work in the morning” feeling every Sunday night.

Melanie: So, you were unhappy. What else prompted you to leave your successful job to start your ministry?

Kendra: The funny thing, I didn’t think I was unhappy. I just thought stress came with living what our culture calls the American dream. The other thing is I wasn’t a technical person even though I was leading a technology department. I thought I should know how to program or develop code or possess other technology skills so a haunting voice of “You are not technical enough” used to ring through my head constantly for decades. Then over the past few years, I started to pray and ask God what He had planned for me.

After a lot of prayers, I felt God was calling me to something different and it was a call  I couldn’t ignore. Every time I prayed in Adoration I felt a calmness come over me, like a waterfall of warm peace washing over me when I thought of becoming a full-time disciple for Jesus and the Catholic Faith. I wondered, “How can I keep the best thing that happened in my life to myself? Living with God is the only way to live your life with joy. And hey, people need to sleep at night.”

I knew in my ministry I had to go big or go home. I have to put myself entirely out there ready to fail and fail big. I had to fight all my fears, my “not good enough” voices and finally have the humility to surrender to God. Now I am “all in” and have given Him my “yes.”

Melanie:  This is what an authentic call from God looks like. You did not initiate your ministry but simply responded to God’s promptings. How did you first rediscover the Catholic faith? God surprised you, didn’t He?

Kendra: Well, I sure wasn’t looking for it! And heck yeah, God surprised me; nobody was more shocked than I was about how quickly He grabbed me and pulled me in. Come on, I had no desire to go back to church. You have to read the book to get the full story but in short, I was starting a body cleanse. In this “cleansing diet” book was a pie chart representing different segments of your life. I had all of them except one and it said, “Spirituality.” I thought, “Wow, I have got nothin’ going on in this piece of pie!” So, I decided to go back to church.

I initially decided to go to a “big box” church and not the Catholic church, ’cause, you know, Mass is so boring and I didn’t know the Faith nor did I practice the Faith. I didn’t believe in the Church’s teachings and I wanted to sleep in on Sunday.

But, I eventually stepped foot back in the Catholic Church after decades of being away, and something changed. I was different. I left feeling a little lighter that Easter morning in 2013, and God put a thirst in me to understand what this “Catholic Thing” is all about. So, I started researching and it was fascinating what I was uncovering. Then, Divine Mercy Sunday with confession afterward changed me forever.

Melanie: Kendra, what I love about you is your self-deprecating humor. You have an uncanny ability to cut through people’s defenses with your frank, honest approach. Tell us more about what you are trying to do with your book and workshops.

Kendra: I am trying to reach the unchurched through faithful Catholics to let them know that there is something more and it is God! My “ask” every time I speak is for people to bring someone they love to my speaking events. When I will relate to them with transparency and vulnerability, I plant or water a seed. I am also designing workshops for faithful Catholics to help them share their emotional and grace-filled story in order to reach fallen-away Catholics. ‘Cause guilt and grandma wagging her finger or telling me about the sacraments ain’t gonna do it.

Melanie:  Exactly. We all know a superior attitude turns off the very people we are trying to evangelize but most of us still end up chastising rather than offering hope to people. Explain how you approach people outside the walls of the Church.

Kendra: First we must understand why people have left the Church and how they feel. There are a gazillion different reasons why people are not at Mass. People are clever, rational, and creative human beings who eventually convince themselves that their reasons are just.

A holier-than-thou complex is just gonna tick off people and give them one more reason to reject the Church. People don’t want to hear it, frankly and that is the biggest mistake I see people make. I also see nobody sharing anything or talking about anything!

Why?

Because I don’t think they know what to say. And to be frank, it isn’t what you say that is the only factor. It’s how you say it and more importantly, how you act. If you say one thing and act another way you are incongruous and nobody is going to listen to you, let alone follow you.

Melanie: Can you expand on the reasons why people do not listen to Catholics who try to evangelize?

Kendra: Often we Catholics lose our impact and quite a lot of respect when our lives seem hypocritical to those around us. We cannot show the importance of Mass or the impact religion can have on lives if we are not living it and showing the transformation in our own lives.

We cannot show the impact religion can have on lives if we are not living it. Click To Tweet

You have to meet people where they are and hit them with a deeply personal story of how God has touched your life. Listen to their pains and you will know how to tie your story to theirs and connect at a level you never thought possible.

Melanie: So, the best way to connect with people is to share your own faith journey.

Kendra: Yes, because every single person on this planet is looking for “something more” and that is how you connect on a vulnerable level. You have to gear your story at a soulful, emotional level and tell it passionately but quickly. You have to grab them in the first 1-3 minutes or they tune out! 

As a faith-based leader and speaker, I must be honest, and raw.  I have to bare it all! Every person on the planet is looking for “something more” and they, like me, try to fulfill it with food, alcohol, drugs, work, or pleasure. I have found the answer and must share it with everyone!

Melanie: Part of your work is to help parishes become more welcoming to people who feel alienated.

Kendra: Parishes must be more than just welcoming; we need to start inviting!  Yes, I believe there is a lot of work to be done to change our parish communities into a more loving and inviting culture. Parish culture is everyone’s responsibility.

I have practical, easy workshops to help change the culture of the parish and reach people on the outside. My courses and events are practical for parishes and individuals. People will feel inspired to do their part in changing parish culture and to deepen their relationship with God.

Melanie:  Summarize your message for our readers.

Kendra: My mission: To inspire others to enrich their lives through faith and prayer!

Everything is richer with God! I focus on making disciples and help awaken the ones who are asleep or those who have fallen away.

Melanie:  What about your book, specifically; why did you write it?

Kendra:  This is hilarious, actually.  Around 2015 the thought of, “You should write a book” kept entering my head when I would rest in Adoration. This was consistent for a few years.

I ignored it.

Why? ‘Cause I don’t even like to read, at least back then I didn’t! I mean, to be honest, I was a TV watcher and tabloid magazine reader when I got my pedicures! Why the heck would you, God, want me to write a book?

I now know why He wanted me to do it. It’s because my story is not only honest and relatable, it is also written in a very conversational way. I am not preachy and I share the hilarity of my story in a pretty vulnerable way.

I wrote my book in a week! Yes, the Holy Spirit was definitely in action. Then after a few months of editing, designing and formatting, it was published in paperback, eBook and audiobook narrated by yours truly.

Melanie: People who have reviewed your book seem to like that is easy to read. Was this a deliberate strategy?

Kendra: Totally deliberate! I wanted to “tell my story” and the only way I know how to do that is to “tell it like a story” as if we were hanging out over a glass of wine talking. It’s a super quick read and a very short book. I wrote it for people who are like me five years ago and most likely not going to pick up a book on Catholicism. I was living the ‘ultra-me’ lifestyle and not really thinking about love, faith, God, morality, Heaven, Hell, or eternity. My book is for anyone searching or curious why some heathen like me would choose to love and believe in that ‘rule-based’ organized and restricted religion – Catholicism.

Learn more at KendraVonEsh.com

Photo courtesy of Kendra Von Esh. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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Copyright 2018 Melanie Jean Juneau

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