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lesberrian · 2 years

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Better Yuu than me

ok first i just wanna say that for the first like three chapters AT MOST the teachers will be slight ooc bc idk how to write for them nor know how to get the plot going without making my Oc have a small y/n moment. also she isn't mc/yuu btw. anyways ty for reading and im already working on the 2nd chapter so don't be impatient

What in the anime Disney?

With a groan she shuts her eyes tighter, cracking her neck after waking up. Moving to stretch her arms she hits what feels like a wall, maybe some type of wood? She isn't able to tell.

Finally opening her eyes she sees --nothing, actually. Unable to tell what's in front of her, she feels around, coming to the rational conclusion she was trapped in a box.

"Wait a damn minute…" Now mostly awake and conscious, she starts to realize that she was trapped. Inside a human-sized box. Great.

Moving her hands around more, pushing on the walls to the front and side of her, the girl realizes that it was coffin-shaped. She was in a coffin.

Panic sets into her mind as she closes her eyes tighter than before. "Just wake up, just wake up, wake up, wake up, wakeupwakeupWAKEUP!"

She bangs her head against the front of the coffin and the panic turns cold and dead. She… she had felt that. As much as her head hurt, the dread forming a knot in her stomach was worse than anything she ever felt.

"I am… six for under, in who knows where trapped in my own coffin." Her throat feels dry and her knees give out slightly. "I am… so dead."

Groaning, she decides to at least try and live. Bringing her leg up she has just enough room to put it against what she hopes is the door to the coffin. She uses all her strength she had to push it or anything at all that would prove it wasn’t bolted down or buried.

Luckily for her, she was able to push the door to the ground. Unluckily for her, she had gotten in a fight with someone and karma came to kick her ass. She fell down with the door as she managed to push from the back of the coffin. What she meant to be several curse words that would have her aunt make her wash her mouth out with soap came out and a grumble of ineligible groans.

“Holy shit what the fuck?!” Those words come back as a man with a bird mask looms over her. Her leg shoots up to kick him in the face but he stands straight up, leaving her leg standing above her awkwardly.

The two stare at each other for a moment before she dashes off like a frantic squirrel. The man chases after her but to his dismay, she was unnaturally faster than him. After losing sight of her he dramatically sighs, sending out a message to anyone on campus there’s a lost teen that needs to be brought to his office.

Away from the man in the mask, the young girl had found herself in what seemed to be a library. Wandering around she fears what would happen if she ran into the masked man again. He was only slightly taller and she was without a doubt physically faster and stronger than him, she had already proved part of that earlier. Still, there was something about him that made him seem so… powerful. Like he had some kind of magic power that could beat her without trying.

After a few minutes of hiding out in the library, she decides to move somewhere else. Maybe get off the campus or find a phone. “Oh my god, a phone.” She facepalms. She facepalms and goes to grab her phone out of her pocket. “....Or not. Actually.”

With no phone, she had no way to contact anyone. Also missing her wallet she had no identification as well. With a long, tired, sigh. She manages to make her way out of the library and onto a street lined with statues.

Because it was dark she couldn’t properly see the statues but some of them seemed to resemble… “Is that the fucking lion king dude?”

She could make out the Queen of Hearts, Maleficent, and Ursula as well. The others she decided to leave alone when she heard whistling not far from her. Hiding behind a statue of what she would assume is another Disney villain she prays to God that the person would just walk by her. This place was weird and with Disney statues, she can only assume the amount of trouble she would be in if she was found. Disney can be scary.

Unfortunately, the world decided to say ‘fuck you’ in any way possible and the whistling only got closer, stopping right in front of the statue she was using as a hiding spot. Everything falls dead silent as she waits for something to happen.

As if nothing happened the other person started whistling again and right when she thought she was safe, a man with magenta eyes hung over her upside down, his hat falling onto her lap.

“Why hello, little imp!” He smiles and just as his eyes close she takes the chance to move away. Before she could he grabs her by the wrist with the same smile from before. “ Hey hey, no need to run! Besides you still have my hat, no?”

She tosses his hat back to him with her free wrist and sits there. What does she do now?

‘He wasn’t insanely creepy like the birdman from the coffin room and so far hasn't tried to kill me yet. Then again he’s a dude so…’

“Sorry bro I’m still underage.” Probably not the smartest thing she’s said but at least he was laughing. “So uh, skull dude, how about you uh, ya know, just act like this never happen and let me go?”

Regaining his composure the man stands up with a smile and offers her a hand. She doesn't take it and stands up on her own, once again trying to walk away, only to turn around to see the so-called ‘creepy bird man’ staring at the two of them.

“Shhhhiiit…” Looking behind her, ‘Skull dude’ as she dubbed him, just puts a hand on her shoulder and smiles. Now that there was no chance for her to leave, she decides to try and plea. “Listen y’all I don't even know where I am. I didn't mean to break in but I’m pretty sure this is more on the kidnapping side since I woke up in a coffin and-” Her hand shoots up to catch what was flying at her. “That was rude.”

In her hand was a baseball with a faint golden glow to it. Her hand stung from the force of the ball but she didn’t let go. Both the adults stare at her, not knowing what to say. This teen girl had just caught a ball thrown by Vargas that was also enchanted.

The man with the bird mask clears his throat. “Uh, well then… As I’m sure you’re aware-”

“I’m not.”

“As I’m sure you’re aware,” He continues on as if she wasn’t there. “You’ve somehow landed yourself at Night Raven College, a prestigious school for tho-”

“Fuck you.” She barked, crossing her arms and glaring at him. “Who the hell wears that shit?”

As the young girl continues to hurl insults at him, the ball she caught flew out of her hands. Only to come right back at her with the same force as before.

For the second time today, she wakes up confused. Laying in what was most likely a nurse's office she sees the two men from earlier and three others. 'What's up with there only being dudes here? Am I in some creepy otome game that the captain like to play? I'm too young for this shit.'

Sitting up in the bed the group look over at her, neither she or they say anything until she slowly brings her hand up to her mouth and bites down.

"Ok so not dreaming this, had to check." She mumbles to herself. Looking up at them she says fuck it and try to act normal. "Sooo… I'm Mica Kingston… and I have no clue where I am or how I got here."

"Well, Ms.Kingston," The bird guy steps forward and stands infront of the bed instead of sitting in one of the many chairs. "Do you have any sort of identification on you?"

She shakes her head and he asks if she could tell him where she was. "Well you said Night Raven college. So there? And like I doubt you were able to bring me out of the country so at least America."

"America?" He asks, looking back at his colleagues to see if they recognize it. None of them seem to know where it is.

The oldest one there shakes his head. "Theres been no country named 'America' throughout Twisted Wonderland's history."

Unimpressed, Mica looks at them like they're drugged out. "Well considering I dont know what the fuck a 'Twisted Wonderland' is that's probably why. Now can we all stop pretending like we arent on Earth and-"

"You must be from another planet." The bird man cuts her off. It's not like it wasnt fair after the verbal attack she gave him. Pulling her up from the bed he tries to lead her out the door. "No matter, we will go to the mirror to sort this out."

Mica tips her arm away from him and steps back. "You cant just say shit like that and think I'm seriously gonna follow along? Are ya' on crack? I dont even know you!" She gestures at him aggressively before turning around and doing the same thing to the other men in the room. "Or them! Listen I'm not good at basketball just for speed or strength. Its cuz I'm not fuckin' stupid like you clearly think!"

"How old are you?" The one that strangely reminded Mica of Gaston asks.

"Right now? Sixteen but seventeen in- what month is it actually?"

"July 14." Mica looks over to the man and gave up hope on ever going home. This was a gender bent Cruella De Vil speaking to her right now.

Starting from the begining of the year she counts when her birthday would be. "Three months. Why?"

The bird man watches as the gym teacher, Vargas questions the girl like he wasnt there. Vargas looks at him with a smile and his hand on her shoulder (while she looks ready to kill him) and says, "The basketball team needs a manager and having a strong assistant would help!"

Scrambling away from him she makes angry hand gestures. "STOP JUST SAYIN SHIT THINKING I'LL AGREE BRO!"

A hand lands on her head and she blanks. "There. Be a good pup and behave."

'This bitch…' Mica takes a deep breath and claps her hands together. She stays silent a moment longer before sighing and opening her eyes. "Okay. First of all, I am too good to be reduced to a pathetic 'manager' and you could at least tell me your names. I'm currently calling you things like bird man and skeleton dude. Plus, I wanna go home."

if you read this far ty and yes like i said ooc but it will get better probably next chapter. also this take place a year b4 the main story so no overblotting for a bit. And since it happens a year b4 im gna have some other oc ppl so if u wanna have ur oc in the story or give sugestion lemme know bc ill put them in = obvi give credit and I'll send u the chapters theyre in so you can see if it works

for I am gracious

#LMAO SORRY I HAD TO ADD THAT #twisted wonderland #twst #twisted wonderland x oc #twst oc #twisted wonderland fic #dire crowley #divius crewel #mozus trein #anyways shes so much fun #also kinda based her off aomine so idk if she shld get along w leona or hate him lol #hes just the lion version of him tbh honest

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reidgraygubler · 3 years

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a different type of high (spencer reid/reader) part ten

Title: A Different Type of High (part ten)

Request: no

Couple: spencer reid/gender-neutral!reader

Category: angst

Content Warning: kidnapping, needles, being drugged (unknown drug), hallucinations (as a side effect of the drug), other side effects, mentions of guns/other weapons, being tied down, struggles with sobriety/addiction, hospital stays, swearing (if I missed something that needs to be tagged, please message me and let me know!)

Word Count: 2,605

Summary: after being missing for several days, reader is saved by spencer and the BAU team. spencer begins to help reader recover through all their new struggles

A/N: this part is very heavy! please take the content warnings SERIOUSLY. the next part won’t be as dark and heavy. this part will be a lot like the episodes where spencer was kidnapped. it won’t be word for word the same, but there will be a lot of similarities. i left most of the torture out and as vague as possible bc im not a big fan of writing that. the drug that is being used is unknown, but for the most part i imagine it being pcp… thank you all for the love and support on this series! It really means a lot to me! check out my masterlist!

last part series masterlist next part

THIS PART DOES CONTAIN TRIGGERING THINGS! PLEASE GO BACK AND READ THE CONTENT WARNINGS BEFORE CONTINUING! THE NEXT PART WILL NOT BE AS HEAVY!

{***}{***}{***}

It was hard to say just how long I had been gone. I knew I was in an abandoned warehouse. A musty smell stuck out the most, taking over my sense of smell. And my sense of time was skewed by the black tarps tapped over the windows. I could no longer tell if it was night or day.

The two men who took me weren’t here. They had gone, left some time ago. It should be a relief, right? That they were gone and I was alone… Maybe in the time they were gone, Spencer and the team would come and save me.

But for some reason there was an uncomfortable ball growing in my stomach. A cloud and a looming sense of uncertainty grew over me. I couldn’t say what was going to happen next, but I was scared.

My only hope right now was that Spencer and his team would find me. A different part of me, however, was telling me that he wasn’t looking for me. I ignored that part of me.

The two men returned. They only caused the doom feeling to grow. The silence and tension in the room was so tight you could cut through it like it was food. I wish I’d known their names. They won’t give them to me, for obvious reasons. I don’t think it’d make my situation much better honestly, if I had their real, or fake, names.

They walked past me and went towards a table set up on the other side of the room. One of the men carried a box, and my body shivered at the thought of what might be in it. They stood close together as they dug through the box. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell that it wasn’t good.

One guy turned to face me while they spoke, and I could see the dark look on his face. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. The sick feeling in my stomach only grew. If my stomach wasn’t empty, it would be empty now.

“I’m sure they’d like it… I’ve seen them popping pills before.”

I swallowed roughly, staring at them from where I sat. My throat closed up when I wanted to argue back that I haven’t done that in a very long time. But it’d end up being useless even if I tried. My words betrayed me and all that came out was a whimper. That caused the two men to look over at me with annoyance on their faces.

They were standing off to the side for a while before one of them stepped closer to me. I didn’t look up at his face. No, I was too preoccupied looking at his hands and what he held.

A small syringe was in his grasp. My body froze up as I realized what was about to happen. The terror took over me as he lifted it.

“What is that… what…” I asked as I looked down at the needle in the man’s arm. I tried flinching away from him, but it was so hard when I was tied to a chair. “Please… Please don’t. Don’t…” I whimpered as the needle pierced my skin. I cried as my body reacted to the sudden irritation on and in my skin.

My head fell back as a breath of air escaped my lungs. My body felt… loose. My mind was empty. All my worries melted away, and I suddenly didn’t care where I was, or what it was I was given. I felt… good. And that was all I cared about.

Some more time passed, but it was hard to say how much time. Whatever they gave me had kicked in, and the effects had started. If my body felt loose before, it felt like I was floating now. Like I was a weightless balloon a child had released into the sky.

That was when the hallucinations started and I saw Spencer standing beside the two men who did this to me. He wore a worried expression on his face, but his eyes were blank. I was so happy to see him that I didn’t care whether or not he was actually there.

“Spencer… It’s so good to see you,” my words slurred as my head fell forward. In fact, my whole body fell forward, and if I wasn’t restrained to a chair, I would’ve fallen from the chair.

“You’re safe…” Spencer whispered as he knelt on the ground in front of me. I smiled and nodded.

“Who’s Spencer?”

“My… My best friend…” I smiled softly as I thought about him. “He’s standing behind you… He works for the FBI,” I swallowed roughly as my head fell forward. I looked away from Spencer and at the man who was talking.

“Shit the boyfriend works for the FBI,” one of them whispered to the other. I closed my eyes and threw my head back as I imagined Spencer behind me. He looked down at me with a soft and loving smile.

“Yeah,” I sighed deeply before nodding. I lifted my head back up and looked at the men. “He’s gonna find me… And then he’s gonna find you.” I could feel a lazy smile grow on my lips as I stared at the men. My limbs and head felt… heavy. It was only a matter of time before whatever they put in me knocked me out for who knows how long.

“Seriously doubt that,” one of the men said. I furrowed my eyebrows and shook my head. “You’re not the first druggie we’ve taken. And you most certainly won’t be the last,” he added.

“You might be good… But they’re better…” I spoke softly as my eyes slowly started to close. “Then you’ll be in jail for the rest of your lives.” And that was the last thing I said. In fact, that was the last thing I remembered, period.

Because the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a field though. Tall wheat stalks swaying beside me, the sun warming up my skin, and a soft breeze blowing through my hair. It made me feel… Happy and safe.

But a voice in the back of my head told me I was not in fact in a field. And I was actually sitting in an abandoned building. Nothing about that should make me feel happy or safe. I was in danger… But my brain couldn’t comprehend the danger because of whatever drug I was given.

My back was pressed against the wall behind me. My legs were extended out in front of me, and my arms were limp beside me. A rope was tied around my torso, keeping me to whatever it was I was sitting against. A syringe sat beside me and the contents that were once in it… were racing in my blood. It felt really good.

“Hey, hey,” a familiar voice spoke up from next to me. I blinked and smiled as I looked towards where the voice came from. Spencer was looking down at me. The worry and concern on his face was no bother to me. In fact, I only saw it for a brief moment before I ignored it.

“Spencer,” I sighed and smiled at him before dropping my head to my shoulder, “Isn’t it nice outside,” I rolled my head and looked up at the sky. “I’m so happy you’re here,” I whispered as I tried to lift a hand to touch his face. My arms felt so heavy though. It felt near impossible to even try to lift them.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked, dropping to his knees beside me. I furrowed my eyebrows before blinking. Suddenly I was no longer in a wheat field but in a cold hard reality. Spencer pulled a knife from his pocket before cutting the rope off me.

“N-no… No, I don’t,” I whispered as I looked around the room I was in. Several of our friends, and Spencer’s co-workers, were standing in front of me, and I was very anxious. But that could be because of whatever I was given. “Can… Can they leave? Can you tell… Can you please…” I sniffled as I started becoming very aware of my surroundings and my current situation. Tears were rolling down my cheeks and my body started twitching lightly.

“Guys...” Spencer looked over his shoulder at his friends, silently asking them to leave. They all holstered their weapons before leaving Spencer and I. I could feel tears racing down my cheeks but I couldn’t do anything about it. I glanced at the ground and stared at the syringe and empty vile beside me.

“I don’t know what that is. I don’t…” I started blabbing but ultimately stopped when words just wouldn’t work. “I didn’t… I didn’t want it… I prom…. I promise.”

“Hey, hey this isn’t your fault.” Spencer looked at me as he cupped both my cheeks with his hands. I stared at him for a moment before a weird hyperactivity took over in my eyes. “It’s okay,” he whispered as he wiped the tears from my eyes.

“I don’t… I don’t know where I am,” I whispered and closed my eyes. I fell forward into Spencer’s arms. He cradled the back of my head and allowed me to cry into his shoulder.

“We’re gonna take you home, okay? We’re gonna take you to the hospital, and you’re gonna be safe,” he kept talking softly, trying to calm me down. But it was so hard to actually calm down when I didn’t know what was happening to me. “I’m gonna pick you up, okay?”

I swallowed roughly and nodded. My arms, though they were heavy, wrapped around his neck. Spencer wrapped his arms around my body, holding me in a traditional bridal fashion.

I felt safe again once I was in Spencer’s arms. I could tell that my safety was Spencer’s main concern. Which was understandable… I wasn’t sure how long I was gone for… So if I was gone for a long time, he’d be more than worried. So that’d explain why I felt safe.

Spencer didn’t leave my side the second I was with EMTs and in an ambulance. His hand held mine, to ensure I felt safe, the whole trip to the hospital. I hated the eerie silence that fell over us. I wanted our usual banter and comfortable silence instead. But… the eerie silence is what he had. It was what we needed though.

I’ve never been in a situation like this before. But Spencer? I’m sure he’s been in them many times. He works for the FBI, solving murder cases, for a living. He’s probably ridden in an ambulance more than once, whether it was for him or for a friend or for an unsuspecting victim.

{***}{***}{***}

I couldn’t say how long I would stay awake when I was awake. And I couldn’t count how much I was in and out of consciousness. All I knew was I was in a hospital, and I was safe, and I didn’t have to worry.

Spencer was sitting on the chair beside the bed. I knew he hadn’t slept one bit. Part of me wondered if he slept at all since I first went missing, or since I’ve been back. But the exhausted look on his face told me everything I needed to know.

His eyes were on me as I pretended to be asleep. I only knew his eyes were on me because I could feel it. Then again he hasn’t left my side since he first found me… how ever many days ago that was.

I gave up my charade of faking rest and just looked at him. And I was right, his eyes were on me. I wondered if he thought I was going to disappear again, vanish from his sight for who knows how long. I wish there was a way I could tell him I wouldn’t. But at this point it was hard to say whether or not that was the truth.

“Go back to sleep. You need rest,” Spencer whispered once he noticed I was actually awake. I stared at him and shook my head. It felt impossible to get comfortable in the bed. Although, it probably wasn’t just the bed. It was probably a number of factors.

“I can’t,” my voice was soft, quiet. Tremors worked through my muscles, making my body shake. Even if I tried to still my body, it only failed and made my body shake more.

Spencer stood up and, with two large steps, appeared by my side. His hand brushed over my head before falling to hold my own hand.

“You’re okay now. You’re safe,” he whispered as he looked down at me. I swallowed roughly and nodded.

“That still doesn’t stop the images…” I furrowed my eyebrows as I looked up at him. “Can you sit with me?” my voice wavered as I spoke. The worried crease in Spencer’s eyebrow melted away as he looked at me.

“I can do that,” he replied, nodding his head before sitting beside me. I shifted over so he could have some space. His body was tense as he sat beside me. And I hated that.

“How long was I gone for?” I whispered as Spencer wrapped an arm around me. He looked down at me, the exhaustion on his face worrying me. “Please don’t lie either.” I quickly added when I realized he was probably formulating a lie. Though, I don’t know if a lie would make it better or worse.

“Three days,” he whispered, looking down at me. I swallowed roughly before grabbing his hand. I didn’t like how small my hand looked with his and with all of the IVs and shit. In fact, I hated it. I hated it so much. I hated everything about my life right now. I hated everything except for Spencer.

“How’d you… How’d you know how to find me?”

“Well… We went to my apartment and saw the mess… I remembered you said errands. One thing led to another… Laundromat… Groceries… It took a day before we found the... men who took you,” Spencer explained. My body tensed as I thought about it, even though my memories were a little… foggy, I knew what happened.

“What did I do to deserve this though?” my voice was low and so shaky I felt like I imagined myself saying it. But it was the way Spencer looked down at me with a somber look in his eyes that told me that I did indeed say it.

“You didn’t deserve this. We’re working on tracking the men who did this to you. And when we do find them, they’ll be going to jail for a very long time,” Spencer whispered as he brushed his hand over my hair. I swallowed hard and nodded my head lightly.

“I just… I just don’t understand.” I looked up at him, feeling tears fall to me cheeks. Spencer looked back at me, his hands holding mine like his life depended on it. “Please don’t leave… Just… Just stay here.”

“I won’t. You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll stay as long as you need me too.” He lifted a hand and wiped my cheeks. “Can you try to get some rest? Your body needs it.”

“I can… I can try but I don’t think I’ll sleep.” I shrugged before pulling the blanket tighter around my body. Spencer stayed beside me, his arms around my body like he was a shield.

if you want to be a part the series taglist or have any comments/questions about this part, let me know here

series taglist: @itsametaphorbriansblog , @bxtchboy69 , @sammypotato67 , @seninjakitey , @thatsonezesty13 , @thebluetint , @honestlystop , @herecomesthewriterwitch , @mediocrity-atitsfinest , @honeyboysteezy , @aluna190 , @mggsprettygirl , @vampiracontessa , @cielo1984 , @anotherlokismind , @muffin-cup @misshale21 @ash19871962 @spenciegoob

tags that didn’t work: @takeyourleap-of-faith , @shameleswhorehourstm , @mediocrehamiltrash

#shadow writes stuff #masterlist #spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid fan fic #criminal minds fan fic

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deathvsthemaiden · 4 years

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Tagged by @kashilascorner to answer these writing questions! I’m not really a writer myself but her answers were v interesting+I know some other writers whose answers to these questions I wouldn’t mind seeing 👀 (I’m going stir crazy courtesy of quarantine+am nosy 🤗) warning/disclaimer/run while you still can alert: bc these qs are aimed at writers and I’m not one these answers aren’t going to “make sense” or “fit” per say, apologies in advance ✌🏽 I draw for fun though so my answers reflect that :P

1. When did you start writing?

I remember in elementary and middle school...I used to draw all sorts of random people in intricate outfits, and would get super into it, and through middle school to early high school especially I was a serial doodler who got in trouble alllll the time (I hold some petty, bitter grudges against a handful of teachers still.) (My eyes may have been on paper instead of on you but I was listening jerkwad! 😑) and like...fantasy was the 1st genre I fell in love with so I would try to come up with stories and whatnot for them but I was (am) so easily distracted and hapless that it went nowhere but I didn’t super mind. I just wanted to draw pretty outfits and the numerous (numerous) other images in my head and....still do. Writing stories requires a little more consistency and commitment than I’m willing to give 🤭😳 To sum up: I am flighty and can’t write for fun so I’ve never honest and to god began 🤷🏽‍♀️

2. Is there any special method that helps you getting to write?

(This is abt academic writing bc aside from texts it’s what I do most) I’m a mostly stationary lump of flesh and time is my catapult. I wait till deadlines are too close for comfort, pump myself full of caffeine, listen to music non stop and suffer suffer suffer.

Or on increasingly less rare (thank god) occasions when I am almost on top of things, I listen to music and pace around my room, typing in the google docs app on my phone while I type out garbled stream-of-consciousness notes-to-self, while considering the prompt, so future me has /something/ to work with. With the pacing it takes longer to write than when I’m at a desk but like. It’s less painful and I barely notice.

3. Do you listen to certain types of music to set the mood?

I have low tolerance for any slow/sad/soulful/hypnotic/crying songs so anything upbeat works and also I NEED lyrics most of the time, I have an almost as low tolerance for instrumentals. Like they’re fine but I also find myself sitting there waiting for something to “happen” (I’m sorry shcjfnfn) I listen to music while doing most things and, like pacing, I think it elongates tasks but also makes them less painful so!

4. Drawing, moodboards, character makers, music lists or none of those options?

All of those are fun, usually music and other people’s art is what inspires me to draw most though.

5. Would you prefer a big Hollywoodesque adaptation, a smaller project coming from the heart or no adaptation at all?

I usually have medium to major gripes with the most popular/big adaptations of books I feel strongly about so the 2nd option ✌🏽

6. Do you have any taboos or topics you try to actively avoid?

I’ll answer this as a reader. I have my limits to how much suffering I can read child characters in particular go through like I’ve dropped a book or two before for disturbing me too much in that regard. They weren’t bad!! I just personally didn’t wanna weather through that so I didn’t. I dropped Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things because of this, even though I loveddd the prose! :( I might try out her other book (books?) one day though. Stories dealing with such dark topics are important when done right etc. I just can’t stomach them 8/10 times

7. Are you in favor or against spoilers?

If the opportunity to experience whatever is being spoiled myself is unlikely/a long time coming/difficult to attain (because it has to be translated, localized, I need to wait a while to get my hands on a copy etc) I’m probably really really eager for spoilers and will search them out/ask people. If it’s something that consistently thrills me I /definitely/ do not want spoilers though!

Trying to get spoilers from me for things I love and have recommended is usually difficult, like I’ll do it you just have to show me you reallllly are sure you want this splendiddddd story ruineD for you! D:< (I joke. Spoilers don’t ruin good stories, not completely anyway)

8. Have you ever written something to appease or spite somebody else?

To appease? That’s my whole academic “”career”” lollll *shot* not to spite no! Sounds painstaking....like you need to make eff*rt 🥴 or smth.... 😬 mad and sincere respect to anyone out there with the drive to do that though! I’m just not that kind of gal......... I’m more than open to like. Proposing alternative versions of stuff that’s dissatisfied me when talking to friends (like x SUCKED it would’ve been so much better if y and z and t and v! Don’t u agree?) and I’ve drawn a few fan arts before where I like, edit character designs that infuriate me for being tasteless.

9. Being given the options “Candy Valley of the Lollipop” or “Cliff of Despair and Looming”, which one would you say approximates better to your WIP’s general aesthetic?

Hmm. Probs candy valley, Most of my ideas for drawing are like sunny in terms of mood, if that makes any sense. I love my fiction (as in the stuff I consume, not make) on the darker side though as long as it’s not like, pointless and obnoxious about it.

10. A media you weren’t expecting to inspire you, but does.

Hmm. Realistic fiction is nice but I can’t subsist on it, I need fantasy and magical realism and whatnot to stay sane, but sometimes I read a realistic fiction book and I have such crystal clear images of the scenes in my head and it impacts me so strongly that I really, really (really) am inspired to draw them (The Overstory by Richard Powers and The Little Friend by Donna Tartt come to mind)

Tagging: @howaboutswords @pinkafropuffs @adorakeys and anyone who sees this and would like to answer these questions totally should!! Tag me! 🏷

#ty for the tag+apologies for the delay!✨#tagged in #this is a lot of rambling shxjdndnnd

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langernameohnebedeutung · 5 years

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suzuwarahikaru replied to your post “what happens at 5 am?”

where is the essay, OP!?

@suzuwarahikaru Honestly, it’s drivel and I didn’t feel like it particularly went anywhere and it was just me monologuing about one aspect of a bigger question so that’s why I didn’t post it. But ok, just for some context: You probably know how the MCU was often criticised for having “bland one off villains” and that’s true especially in their early films - and that was time when Heath Ledger’s Joker loomed very large and Ian McKellen was famous for his performance of Magneto and the idea for a Magneto solo film had just been scrapped in favour of XM First Class. At that point apparently the MCU guys walked up with the demand that Thor 1 only has to give them 1 thing: A villain as good as Magneto which they could use in Avengers. Now, obviously it had to be Loki, because Loki is Thor’s most famous antagonist and he was the first guy the Avengers ever fought in the comics, and Loki in Thor 1 is satisfyingly complex - but now that Loki’s dead and has a solo show coming out in a while, people dug up that old quote and started arguing about whether Loki actually became a villain “as good as Magneto” - which I honestly wouldn’t care about, except this argument spilled a few “But Loki is great and Magneto is boring”-posts into the Magneto tag a while ago (which mixes with a lot of: Why did Cherik get a happy end but Stucky didn’t that’s so unfair!!!! posts) and then some comments started lowkey implying that Loki is a character who’s more attractive to sophisticated fans and that Magneto fans are usually men and Loki fans women (with the not so subtle implication being that Magneto fans are comic dude bros who like him for his cool powers and because he’s a Bad Guy(TM) I don’t really care about that, but over the course of this argument someone made a rather interesting post, wondering about what “went wrong” with Loki and while I love Loki as a character and as a villain, it made me ponder what could have been done to make Loki (even) better and to help him stand on his own 2 feet as a character and this was their post:

Now and this was going to be my response: Personally, I don’t think that having spectacular powers or anything make a villain good (they make good visuals though) but whether the hero learns something from fighting them, whether their motivation maybe reflects something that we experience as well and that maybe they unmask something that we usually don’t feel comfortable to address. And Loki has all these qualities.

I’m not going to try to objectively pinpoint where it ‘went wrong’ but it’s actually interesting to look at the XMCU and the MCU and to compare notes. The XMCU is often criticised for being too wordy, too slow-paced and “what’s with the constant time jumps and decade-hopping?” But I think that’s something the Thor franchise could actually have profited from, because…these guys are immortals and it just feels rushed in my opinion to watch their world fall apart in what is for them a matter of a long weekend.

For example, a bigger distance between the events of Thor 1 and Avengers would have lent more weight to Loki’s disappearance and Thanos torturing and brainwashing him, Thor’s and Jane’s relationship would have been given more time to develop (making their reunion in Thor 2 more meaningful). They could also have given her more time exploring Asgard/battling the Ether. We could have learnt more about the Dark Elves, the Frost Giants, the Nine Realms in general.

And that’s at least part of the problem, in my opinion: We don’t know enough about Asgard. You can’t just throw in an alien word without world-building and you can’t introduce characters who are millennia old by showing us 6 years of their lives and maybe 1 flashback. There is a reason why a show like Good Omens spent basically an entire episode on Crowley and Aziraphale’s lives through the millennia. Captain America got a film set in the WW2, Wolverine Origins covers over a century of Logan’s story. Magneto isn’t a better (or worse) villain than Loki, because as you said, the writing makes the character and both get pretty good and pretty bad writing at times. But a big difference is: We know a lot more about Magneto than we know about Loki.

One example of this is personal relationships. Something I never realised before I started typing this is how little space Loki is given to let him form/have/maintain/test/strengthen meaningful relationships.

Basically, all his meaningful interactions are inside his family. Magneto (to be clear, I’m bringing up so often bc the MCU apparently insisted on being rude af and asking Kenneth Branagh on drawing inspiration from a character who’s basically the opposite of Loki in every regard) gets a lot more screen time to develop his relationships with other characters, even if it means less CGI action scenes.

In fact, I’m currently tempted to find out how many 1 on 1 dialogue scenes Loki gets per hour of film vs. how many Magneto gets. Loki enters the picture with a family, ‘friends’, a biological father, servants, an entire kingdom of people who know him, but he barely gets to have any meaningful interactions outside of his family environment. Seeing him interact with a friend or even someone who hates him for reasons unrelated to his relationship with Thor or someone who supports him would in turn show us a lot about how he sees other people, how he sees himself, how he treats them, what he values in a person, what kind of people trusts (if he trusts) – that’s a lot of potential that was left pretty much wasted in my opinion.

One of the first things Agent of Asgard did was add Verity Willis to its main-cast so have a character for Loki to interact with, to serve as a moral anchor, and to call him out on his bullshit. Having relationships is powerful. In the MCU, Loki’s relationship with his mother is such an important, humanising element to his character. Also a lot of headcanons and metas and thoughts about Loki are inspired by those few scenes where we see him interact with the Warrior’s Three and Sif before Loki finds out about his parentage.

And even when encounters the Avengers, they meet once, they talk once, then Loki he returns to Asgard and they never meet again, except Bruce - and even then there’s barely any time to talk about what happened in Avengers 1. He doesn’t get to form any meaningful relationships with his adversaries when he talks to them in Av1, these scenes just exist to present the Avengers in a certain light. And in the end it’s canonised that Loki was brainwashed so it’s all pointless anyway. (pls (don’t) make me write an essay on agency and the MCU, because honestly, between Bucky, Gamora, Nebula, Loki and everyone else was brainwashed it’s actually worth a conversation)

Even in Thor 1 Loki never meets Jane or Darcy, one of the main-characters. And we never see a single frost giant after the first film. Erik Solveig is the only Earth character from Thor 1 Loki actually meets and he’s brainwashed for most of that and in Thor 2, they don’t get to meet again.

Imagine if Loki had had someone he trusted in Thor 1 and told them about finding out he’s a Frost Giant and they reject him and treat him like a monster. This could be three or four scenes that don’t throw off the film but would have been very powerful. Or imagine if Loki keeps his heritage a secret from that friend/trusted person and they find out in Thor 2 and confront him about it. Valkyrie and Loki never talk about him invading her mind or the things he saw.

We never get to see him alone on Sakaar to deal with what he presumes is the end of his home world and the death of everyone he knows and we never see him interact ‘win the Grandmaster’s trust’.

We never see him interact with the Hulk before they’re suddenly fighting side by side in Infinity War. We never find out exactly what the Aesir’s sentiments towards him are, what kind of prince he was in the past, how present he is in public, what reputation he has beyond silver-tongue mischief guy and which specific events shaped it.

If the MCU wants a villain “as good as Magneto” (which is already annoying bc they imply that Loki is not as good a villain which is such a subjective measure – Magneto done wrong is a horrible and downright offensive villain and trickster characters done right are amazing for revealing the flaws of a hero.*) then they have to give writers and actors the same means to do that with. The X-Men franchise, for all it flaws, always gave Magneto screen-time (so much that people criticised it).

There’s a Charles-and-Erik dialogue in pretty much every film, allowing us to follow the state of their eternal argument at every step. We see his friendship with Mystique grow and fall, we see Wolverine call him out on his bullshit, his attempt to make young Hank and Mystique feel better about their visible mutations, we know how he treats his followers, his new recruits, his enemies, his students, his wife and his daughter, (daughters, if we count The Gifted and his legacy), his colleagues, his lovers, his ex-lovers, allies and former allies, politicians, police, prison guards, Nazis, soldiers, insane Egyptian gods – and we get to learn his feelings and thoughts about all of these through personal interactions, decisions and gestures. And in turn we know how they feel about Magneto. What do we know about Loki’s feelings about people outside his family? How does he feel about Fandral? What are his thoughts on the Valkyrior? How did his views on Frost Giants change and when? Did he challenge them at all or did he just become cynical about them?

As I said, Loki is a formidable villain but I think that he suffers from the same problem as many MCU characters: We hardly know them. Think about Natascha whose been part of the franchise since Iron Man 2 but we hardly know anything about her. How much do we know about the family Drax lost? Or about Wanda’s family? About Pepper’s private life? We hardly know anything about them and especially when characters are thousands of years old and we know nothing about their past, it really creates a gaping hole in their biography and that really leads back to my original point: If we could spend more time with them, we would know them better and care more. One of the reason Dark Phoenix is a bit under-whelming is because we know very little about Jean and Scott in this time line.

There are two DCEU films I actually own and watched more than once: Wonder Woman and Aqua Man. And while I personally didn’t find Aqua Man that good, this film actually tells us a lot about him and despite my lack of knowledge about the DCEU and me being a giant Marvel nerd, I preferred Wonder Woman over Captain Marvel and that is because I felt closer to her character. It really boils down to a “show don’t tell issue” and for me, that would mean: Maybe fewer giant CGI battles. more people living their lives. *(which should also highlight why setting Magneto as a mark for K.B. is so off-mark. Loki is about unmasking hypocrisy, Magneto himself is a hypocrite who regards himself as a hero but often does immoral things and that for example gets unmasked by Wolverine, another social outsider with littl care for social conventions)

#suzuwarahikaru #fandom #marvel #mcu #Loki

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thecloserkin · 5 years

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fic rec: Are You Mine? and I Want Some More by PoetHrotsvitha

fandom: Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

pairing: Evie Frye/Jacob Frye

word count: 54k and 50k respectively (one is a direct sequel to the other)

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: this is the most explicit material i have thus far reviewed on this blog

Is it endgame: yesssss

Is it shippable: yes

One thing you guys should know about me is I don’t read a great deal of smut. I don’t actively avoid it either, and I for sure consume more smut in the context of fanfic than in professional published fiction because I feel the following quote in my bones: “It wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized.” So when I stumbled on this fic that is 80% smut stretched over the thinnest pretext of plot, based on source material I have zero familiarity with, what did I do but fall headlong for this pairing and this story. Bless you, anon who brought Fryecest to my attention, and praise the Lord for modern AUs where knowledge of canon is not mandatory.

Jacob and Evie Frye are twins born into an Assassin family and raised by their exacting taskmaster of a father to take down the Templars. There’s no Templars or Assassins in this modern AU of course, just Evie’s looming A-Levels and their absent academic of a father. Evie’s still the golden child, of course—she’ll follow in their father’s footsteps and get her Ph.D. Jacob is the problem child. He’s already fallen in with the Wrong Crowd, he’s impulsive, he drinks and gambles and mostly solves problems with his fists. His relationship with their dad is hella strained. And because this is supposed to be PWP the author wastes no time in ratcheting the sexual tension up to 11 by having Jacob pick Evie up from her posh school on his MOTORCYCLE, each of them pretending not to be so turned on they could have combusted from desire by the end of the ride. Cool cool cool.

Their relationship begins barreling in a dom/sub direction almost from the word go. Evie is one thousand percent the take-charge, Type-A personality, so the idea is that she needs to relinquish that control in the bedroom, and Jacob is the only one she trusts to dominate her. Because they’re twins and they balance each other out adfkdfkdfjdkfd. The scene in the beginning where Jacob tells her not to button up her blouse while she’s making breakfast, and she actually listens to him instead of ignoring or insulting him, holy shit that was hot. It starts so small but eventually he’s got her wearing a wireless vibrator to class and begging for her “punishment” when she takes it out without his permission because it was too distracting.

I imagine this is what the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon was about. I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey myself, but I’ve interacted with people who rave about it and clearly got something out of those books, bad as they were. I’m not trying to compare the quality of this story to 50 Shades of Grey—it’s lightyears superior to that dreck—just that when I finished this fic I had the dazed realization that this was why people read smut.

There’s a throwaway line in Jacob’s internal monologue where he muses “they seem to be going about this backwards,” because he’s buying flowers for her the day after fingering her to a screaming orgasm, and yes I am 100% here for this trope. Ffs he sits with her in the library to keep her company while she studies! He waits for her/escorts her to her one hundred and one extracurricular activities! He’s a really immature 17-year-old and he’d never dream of doing this for anyone else, but when it comes to Evie he becomes suddenly sweet and thoughtful and solicitous. He’s constantly pausing in the middle of sex to ask for her enthusiastic & affirmative consent and reminding her to use the safe word. At the same time he’s madly jealous when anyone else shows a flicker of interest in her and he regularly makes her admit he “owns” her during their role-play. They are each other’s firsts which for some reason is really important to me in these kinds of they’re-teenagers-exploring-their-sexuality setups. This is Evie hitting up the lingerie boutique in preparation for their FIRST WEEKEND GETAWAY:

“I’m going away for the weekend with my-” Evie almost stumbled on the word, “-boyfriend.” What a strange concept.

I AM TRASH FOR THIS INCEST TROPE i love the way she stumbles over that word. Bc that’s not the box that Jacob occupies for her, is it? He’s much more than that. I love the way she alternates between begging him to put it in her cunt and calling him a prat and a shitheel; just because he’s the love of her life doesn’t make him stop being her insufferable little brother. You know what else I’m trash for? ALL the sneaking around tropes. One time while sexting with him in a storage closet at school she’s busted by one of the teachers and only barely has time to lock her phone before he confiscates it.

So the first fic ends with their dad finding the sexts and nudes on Evie’s phone, disowning them both, and Evie choosing to go to University of Edinburgh because their dad knows too many people at Oxbridge. The twins get a flat together and it’s happily ever after. Except no! In the sequel it’s ten years later and Evie and Jacob have returned to the house they grew up in to say goodbye to their dying father, and they’re ESTRANGED OH NO WHAT HAPPENED. Evie has a four-year-old in tow. We find out in fairly short order that the kid is Jacob’s, but Jacob doesn’t find out the truth until we’ve sent him through the angst wringer. The fic is about how they grieve and reconcile and how Jacob learns to parent, and this one is actually like 60% plot and I think I like it even better than the first one. This author’s note really spoke to me:

I’ve read a fair number of sibling incest modern AU fics in a few different fandoms and they all tend to end at “and then they ran away from their families and lived happily ever after/epilogue of sexy fun times possibly with the introduction of hey they've had a kid!”. And I mean I love that, don't get me wrong. But I guess I’m also weirdly preoccupied with the part about what comes after that, because it always seemed far too dreadfully simple an outcome. Normal relationships are rarely that easy, so why would these be? Then again I'm probably putting too much thought into a porn fic, LOL.

DEAR @poethrotsvitha, THIS IS A SIGNED PETITION TO PLEASE NEVER STOP OVERTHINKING THE PLOT OF YOUR PORN FICS. Like, nobody starts fucking their brother unless they really mean it, because the risk of the relationship going pear-shaped and the two of you still being stuck in each other’s orbit because there’s no “breaking up” with family? That’s a big risk. And also why incest pairings feel so high-stakes and I am trash for them, obvs. One of the reasons the dom/sub dynamic is so integral to their relationship was because Evie had a tendency to dictate to Jacob what he “can and can’t do,” and he understandably chafed against it sometimes. It’s what led to their breakup five years ago. And so him taking charge in the bedroom is a kind of counterbalance, and there’s a scene in this fic where she lets him role-play a noncon situation as a way to partly soothe his jealousy.

To a large extent it’s their son who brings about their reconciliation, but their son is also a hyperactive little git who throws a monkey wrench in their sex life, so now instead of hiding their relationship from their dad they’re tiptoeing around a four-year-old. And the big character development that happens on Jacob’s part is him recognizing that Thomas is Evie’s #1 priority now, and there comes a moment where he has to make a difficult decision to prioritize the two of them in his own life, too (by quitting his job and ending a toxic relationship). The other thing I really liked was how Jacob thinks ruefully he could have gone a another round if he were ten years younger, which he’s not, but Evie seems satisfied and that’s what matters. The recognition that he’s not a teenager anymore, and doesn’t have the stamina of one, but he’s also more mature and this time he’ll be able to give Evie what she needs? Oh, my heart. Like I said I loved them being each other’s firsts as teenagers but this, this second chance they’ve got as adults, this is beautiful.

Ok so this is Evie begging Jacob to fuck her in a closet in the middle of their dad’s funeral service??!:

“Please, I just need to forget. Just for a little bit- I need to forget, please-” Oh, God, this was a terrible idea. A terrible idea that she would die before she stopped- she felt like an addict after years of sobriety, pushed by stress and grief to needing that all-consuming high that she'd never quite been able to forget. Her fingers worked at his belt, pulling it open, unbuttoning his trousers to draw the heel of her palm along where he was already hard. “Evie,” he rasped, shuddering against her touch. “Shh,” she said, tucking his pants down enough to pull his cock free, giving it a few firm strokes. “Shh.” If they talked, it would be too real. It had to be rushed and frantic, to feel like it was just the once, to ease the ache in her chest.

And this is after they finish (“if only it could have lasted forever”):

Silently, she turned to let him zip up her dress … There was a warmth against the back of her neck as she felt him draw her hair aside and press a kiss to the sensitive skin, hesitant and uncertain. "Thank you," she breathed into the darkness, listening to the click of his belt as it slid back into place. He just sighed, leaning his forehead against her shoulder, saying a million things without speaking a word.

LEANING HIS FOREHEAD FOR A MILLISECOND AGAINST HER SHOULDER OMFG I AM DECEASED

Ok so to return an earlier point: When you want a canon incest happy ending in a modern setting (as opposed to if you’re both Targaryens) the most popular option is run away and live as an unrelated couple, which necessitates cutting ties with everyone you’ve ever known. This may be more or less difficult depending on the quantity and quality of those ties; unless this is Flowers in the Attic and you’ve literally been locked in the attic for years there’s bound to be people you care about other than your sibling so this is a monumental ask. The Fryes choose option B, “living openly as siblings and keeping the incest on the dl”. This option is not without risk, of course, since exposure is always a possibility, and Evie has to put up with the other moms at Thomas’s preschool eyeing Jacob like a piece of meat. Still, it means Thomas gets to bake cookies with his grandmother, who would not have let Evie and Jacob back in her life if they flaunted the truth. I mean, it’s not that she doesn’t know her kids are fucking, it’s just that a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy allows everyone’s relationships to remain intact:

She seemed to be struggling to get the words out. “Is Thomas…” There were a few ways that this question could go, as far as Jacob could see, and he didn’t particularly want to deal with any of them. He leaned against the counter, palms rigid against the cold surface. “I’m really tired, Mother.” “I know. I just…” There was a terrible pause. “Are— are you and Evie…” Still facing the toaster, Jacob closed his eyes. He couldn’t muster a lot of fake outrage, but he planned to deny everything anyway. He didn’t care about how plausible it was. It was easier for everyone that way, especially Mother. Before he could open his mouth, though, Mother’s chair scraped back. “Actually, never mind. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

Every Wednesday Evie (who’s moved back in with her mom) leaves Thomas with his grandma and goes to “book club” which is really date night at Jacob’s. And the two of them get right up to their old tricks:

When he gave her just the slightest nudge upwards with his hips, she finally let a broken whisper rasp out. “I can't- I want- please-” Jacob clicked his tongue. “You know what I want you to say.” She twisted her neck around again, and he could see that her eyes were now glassy with longing. “Huh?” “It's simple— just ‘My greedy cunt belongs to my brother’. “ “I will not."

The process of turning that initial “no” into a “yes” is scorchingly hot so there you go, I love these two, I love this fic, I have definitely seen the light and I'm ready to embrace smut.

#fic rec #jacob x evie #evie x jacob #fryecest #jacob frye #evie frye #poethrotsvitha

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m-rm-r · 5 years

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So I was sick in bed all day and today I’ve been thinking

and I’ve been processing things— some things I thought I was done processing, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to re-evaluate your evaluations sometimes. It’s weird to type things out so specifically since I feel like I don’t really do this kind of thing anymore— I’m usually more ~vague~ bc I like to keep things private these days— and I don’t know why I feel compelled today to write a whole-ass diary entry on tumblr as a 27yo woman, yet here I am.

I don’t really know how to start so I guess I’ll just jump in: it’s ironic to me how much of my current lifestyle, particularly some of my favorite parts of my lifestyle, I adopted (?) from my least favorite ex (who is one of my least favorite people just in general). Idk what made me think of this today, really, considering I haven’t actually thought about this person in idk how long, aside from vague memories that surface from time to time (understandable, since I still live in OR and I pass by some place or another we had visited together almost every day), but even then it’s more a memory of the event than the person. I haven’t sat down and thought about them as a person in a long time, and I haven’t really needed to. Even now I’m not thinking so much about the person themself, but like.. how knowing them affected my life. Not in the sense that I have them to “thank” for the parts of my lifestyle I adopted during the process of knowing them— because honestly, just.. just no, you get no thanks from me— but more like it’s just… odd to me that, again, some of my favorite parts of my day to day life were borrowed from them. Does that make any sense? I guess it’s really not very ironic bc, yeah, looking back, these things were what I liked about this person in the first place. I remember thinking, “wow, they’re vegan and omg I love their birds and look at all the cool places they’ve visited, I want to do that!” I guess it makes sense. And I guess the fact that I was only so attracted to their lifestyle was also part of the reason it was so easy to get over them so quickly when we broke up? I mean, there were still deep emotional scars from being cheated on and from those horrible, cruel things they said to me (which they never took seriously, even when I would bring up how much it hurt me— the, “oh, you’re mad about that?” … uh, yeah, I was), but honestly, once I realized that literally everything I liked about that person was all shit that I could easily adopt into my own world in my own way, it became clear that I didn’t miss them as a person at all. Like, really. I liked that they were vegan? Okay, I’m vegan too. I like that they go outside and hike and camp and adventure? Cool, I can do that stuff too. There was nothing about their personality to miss, so I stopped missing the person.

Arianna though. She is someone who I really love/d as a person. The whole person. Lifestyle, too (though I think she hadn’t yet fully come into herself when I knew her as much as Alisa had when I knew them, but I mean, we were young when we knew each other), but especially her personality. Like, I have never, ever loved someone as fully and wholly and genuinely as I love/d her. And it suuuuucks bc I still (still!) catch myself looking for her in every potential romantic partner I meet, even though I know that’s unhealthy and I know that’s unfair and I know I’m setting myself up for failure bc I know that no one else can be her (and they shouldn’t be!) and I’m sure she’s not even the her that I knew anymore (and she shouldn’t be!).

—quick side note that I will acknowledge how it was also unfair to Alisa to start that relationship even though I was still so obviously not over Arianna, and it was also unfair how I denied that that was the case to both of them when asked, but in my defense, I wasn’t even aware at the time just how not-over-her I was... I guess some things are more clear in retrospect. But also I fully doubt that my time in Alisa’s life had any effect on them whatsoever so I guess ultimately it doesn’t really matter and I’m cool with that—

It’s weird weird weird bc I know I’ve grown and changed a lot in the past few years, so like, why am I looking so hard for something (someone) from my past? Can I break down her personality into traits that I admire and then just look for those as a green light in potential romantic endeavors? I loved how genuine she was, how real she was, with whatever emotion she was feeling. I loved the look of love in her face, directed at me or not— I loved watching her do the things she loved. I loved watching her watch movies. I loved how easily they made her cry, happy or sad. I loved her look of accomplishment at the gym when she had a particularly good workout. I loved her struggle to make decisions and how she always fought with whether or not she was making the right choice (loved it, except for the times when I was what she was debating. But I guess my slate wasn’t clean there either). I guess if I’m boiling it down to core of it, I loved her humanity, and I haven’t met anyone nearly as genuinely human as her, or I guess, as she was. As certain as I am that she’s changed (again, as she should, and as we all should), I hope that’s something that hasn’t changed. I hope there isn’t any hardness that has stolen her humanity.

But I guess more to the point, whatever the point is.. what was I saying? God, I wish I cared a little less about finding love again. Why is this so heavy on my mind? Is it bc I can feel the cold loneliness of another winter looming like the dread a thousand Mondays? Nah, who am I kidding, I’m a lovey dovey bitch and I’m literally always obsessed with affection and companionship. I wish that the love of my friends was enough for me.. don’t get me wrong, I really really love my friends, but I do get that social exhaustion after a point. That’s another thing I loved about Arianna: being alone with her felt like being alone, but never like being lonely. I know she didn’t always feel that way— she often needed genuine alone time, and while I don’t remember if I really understood that back then, I can understand it now.

I guess I’m just looking for someone to spend time with without draining my energy. So much of my day to day life anymore is such a performance piece that each night I have to stare at myself in the mirror and remind myself that I’m a real-life human being. And then I have to remind myself that everyone else is a real-life human being, too. It’s true that in the story of my life, people have come into certain roles, and that’s fine! As long as I can remember that what they are to me isn’t all they are. Like, Alisa may be the bad guy in my story, but that doesn’t mean they’re a bad guy in general. Arianna may be the girl who broke my heart, but she also has feelings and opinions and weaknesses and goals and regrets and reasons… I don’t know where I was going with this. I guess to say that no one is one-dimensional? And it important to remind myself of that? And to be kind even when someone hurts me? And to be kind to myself even when I am less kind than I want to be? Because I am also not one-dimensional, even if I have to be reminded of that sometimes, too.

#arianna #alisa #일기

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oflgtfol · 6 years

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bc i cant stop thinking abt that dream.. im gonna elaborate on it because it was so detailed and so long and felt so real

so it started off with me in a small library but like, it was so cramped and the lights were off. bookshelves were everywhere, and most were like only waist high? strange adults were everywhere, standing against the walls/shelves or sitting in the aisles. all had their hands cuffed behind their backs or in front of them and they all had like, tape or something over their mouths. but there were some adults among them in bullet proof vests and with guns in their hands. i dont know the situation like i dont even think i acknowledged it in the dream but from context clues im p sure it was like a hostage situation

so im in there sneaking around, in the back of my mind i just Know that my parents and my brother are also in the room also sneaking thru the aisles. all the hostage adults are staring at me like, acknowledging that they know im here to help rescue them. so after a few close calls around corners almost getting caught by the gunmen i get to a somewhat open area, meanig that its still cramped but its a small square between bookshelves with a table and 2 chairs. theres a TON of hostages squeezed into this area. i knew that that was the objective, that i had to get there

so me and my family burst forward and the gunmen spot us, but the hostages all help us overwhelm the guys. the gunmen are shooting blindly into the crowd, aiming mostly for me and my family, and SOMEHOW everybody else dodges it but me. literally it went in slow motion and i saw it like in third person, watching it come towards me and i was like “watch it hit me lmao. oh fuck its actually gonna hit me”

so i get shot in my stomach during all this and the pain just, it wasnt all that bad really? like it felt like uhm. getting hit with a water balloon actually (i was just in a water fight yesterday and now upon realizing this its like.... did that contribute to this dream....) so then its all clear like the bad guys are defeated, it gets kinda blurry at this point but i know in some disembodied way that i told my parents after everything wrapped up when they were asking if everyone was okay that i was hit, and they like, didnt care. i was like “HEY i got SHOT in the stomach!” and theyre like k and it took them foreverrrrrrr to get me medical attention. and i wasnt even.. bleeding outwardly? so i was so worried about internal bleeding because like HEY i have a bullet in me so i must be bleeding somewhere like,,, come on lmao

the next like visual thing i remember is in the hospital. its been a while since like, i woke up so this is kinda blurry too but i remember being put into a wheelchair by some nurses.. ive been in a wheelchair only once and that was in 2nd grade but this one i was allowed to use like, on my own, so it threw me off? and at this point i was like, fuck, i’ve been shot before when i was little. i’ve done this before. i had to go into surgery and everything. but it was all vague flashes i could barely remember it but it felt a lot like when i remember the major things from my childhood that i just COMPLETELY forgot about for so long, like speech therapy? like i had gotten injured from a gun when i was less than ten years old and i just, forgot about that? i was like HOW did i forget about this

so i was already in the hospital at this point but for the one room, i wheeled up to the entrance and it felt kinda like the 11th/12th grade cafeteria entrance that i use in school?? a small double door, blank walls, kinda dark, empty, and there was a nurse checking us in. at this point i was surrounded by all my classmates from my ap lang class, or maybe not ap lang in particular idk since like all the ap kids are mostly grouped together despite class? idk man. but my classmates were literally all fine idk why they were there? they werent even there for checkups or anything (disregarding the fact that you dont get a check up at a hospital you get that at a normal doctors office..) so i was there in my literal wheelchair and the nurse was like “wait your turn!!” she was really snooty it was annoying i was like, word for word, “uhm HELLO i have a GSW in my abdomen!!!!!!” and my one classmate finally spoke up as he was being checked in he was like “uh hey brot is here and like, got shot, so i think she should go first lmao?” so the nurse finally smiled at me and admitted me in

and it led to this small cramped room where they scanned your entire body for every single thing wrong with it adn they displayed it on a board where everyone could see, including my classmates, and i was like ohh my god. oh my god. the nurses were like “hm you could eat better but overall you’re in good health!” and i was like DUDE thats embarrassing i dont want everybody to see all my minute issues and LIKE I AM LITERALLY INJURED I HAVE A BULLET IN MY STOMACH WHY ARE YOU DISCUSSING MY DIET WHEN THERE ARE MORE PRESSING ISSUES...

so finally we go into the actual room and its this giant giant mostly empty room, im remembering this room from my first go at this from when i was a kid. theres a table in the middle thats pretty big but has.. no chairs around it... but theres puzzles and weird bookmark things scattered around on it to keep you occupied, and then theres a single table far removed from everything else, only long enough for a body and slightly wider, and theres one identical to that on the other side of the room. and i know from when i was a kid that those are for surgeries and like, i KNOW this but i was like, wrow thats unsanitary lmao

so i go to the table in the middle because thats where you’re supposed to wait till you’re called for surgery, but im so ANXIOUS because like.. its surgery... and now im remembering more of it from when i was a kid like im remembering going into it, waking up from it... my classmates are all sitting on the table like its some casual after school thing, theyre all talking

and then i remember from the first surgery. i remember the surgery itself. i apparently wasnt put under for it. i was conscious during it. i was numbed out obviously but like, i was AWAKE, and that makes me SO fucking scared for my upcoming surgery. like, enough that some of my classmates sense that im getting more and more anxious so they start shoving the bookmarks in my face, and the bookmarks are like the weird ones from the library irl that have quotes on them, and like i cant even read any because im just so anxious like im keeled over in the wheelchair so anxious about it, and the fact that my classmates are trying to interact with me during this is just making it worse like i APPRECIATE trying to make me feel better but i CANNOT read right now

and like, i was never called for surgery? im sitting there until the sun sets, but i only know that because i eventually leave the room just needing to do SOMETHING and the hospital lobby, for all the people waiting for patients? is empty and the sky outside is the dark blue kind of like, twilight

i really dont know how this dream suddenly turns, like i cannot remember the breaching moment and idk if its because its been almost 12 hours since i woke from the dream or if there even WAS a breaching moment

but the next thing i know is that me and shannen are running (me wheeling furiously) along the top of some like, wall. and the hospital looming in front of us is now some sort of fortified citadel, and we’re on one of the defensive walls around it, theres towers and spires everywhere in the distance around the citadel. and theres fucking. ANGELS attackign the place. the angels are classic white dress wearing, harp playing, type creatures but their eyes are all closed and black tears are running down their faces, and literally everything else about them is white. the dresses are this weathered white, their skin is weathered white (like, like marble but without the darker lines yknow?), and their eyes + tears are the darkest things on them so they stand OUT. and their mouths are flat lines, also black like as if its like, lineart or something yknow? like their faces look like masks but they arent. they have harps in one hand and then LONG ass swords in their other hands and they are fuckign terrifying

so me and shannen are outside of the main area of attack and we stumble upon this part of the wall thats like, collapsed, and theres a fucking OCEAN next to the citadel. so the stones that have fallen into the water, theres some sort of chariot on it with the same kind of look as the angels, white + black accent kinda look to it. the chariot is low lying and theres a figure laying over it, collapsed, reaching forward at nothing almost like a zombie trying to move? and he.. god i wanna say it was icarus but i really dont know because i feel, deep down that his name started with an e but i have no idea what dude it would be then bc i know it was a guy from greek mythology somehow but IDK WHO... so this guy also has the same vibe as the angels but his face is like, a fuckign mess, like it looked like he was melting (maybe thats why i wanna say icarus idk) but the melted parts were black, plus the black eyes (whcih were semi open) and the black tears and his mouth was kinda open in a silent wail (also black). i wanna say he had black hair too but idk maybe the whole black mass on his overall head was just the melting.. and this melted black liquid is strewn all over the chariot and the stone block thats barely out of the water. and out of the water, behind the chariot, all the angels were bursting forward and heading to the citadel like as if it was the Angel Spawn Point

IDK it was such a weird fuckign sight it looked like a fallen angel but i just knew deep down that it was some guy from greek mythology but I DONT KNOW WHO IT WOULD BE especially with a name starting with e..!!!

anyway yeah i woke up then. the whole angel sequence was super short compared to the rest of the dream, but it was more on par with what i normally dream than the rest? like i dont recall ever having guns in my dreams except for maybe one dream in middle school that was like,,,,, nuclear apocalypse type thing......... and never have i ever been like, INJURED like that in a dream? i’ve died in dreams yeah but ive never been like.. shot.. the closest thing i can think of was that one weird borderline nightmare earlier this year where i died of internal bleeding in school due to school negligence..... hm!

like idk this was just such a weird dream i normally have very very wild dreams with a more fantasy element to them, and the mundane ones are just me in school or on tumblr, like ive never had like, an ACTION MOVIE kinda thing??

and it felt SO REAL like when i woke up i literally thought that i had some sort of repressed gun related traumatic event from my childhood that i was only uncovering now and it was only when i realized that i was in bed and not like, at the hospital with a gun wound in my stomach, that i was like oh haha no thats not real

#gun violence #the bread has spoken #i should just start a tag for ym dreams lmfao more often than not i post abt them here #OK WAIT NOW I WANNA SAY THAT GUY WAS EREBUS BUT I THINK IM JUST SAYING THAT BC LIKE.. BLACK TEARS.. DARKNESS... IDK #IDK.. IDK!!!!#i dont even think its anybody in particular but in my dream i had a specific name #i saw the guy and i was like oh shit its ____#maybe i did call him icarus. maybe i did call him erebus #but for either one its not like.. accurate irl but in my dream? whoever it was i called him. it was supposed to be actually him #my dreams

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universalfanfic · 7 years

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@peach-princess-paige Oh dang. Your wish kinda came true.... :p

(This ran away from me a bit, bc I was trying to work on setting an aesthetic mood.)

Sutton twirled the flute of sparkling cider she held between her fingers and looked out over the room. Warm light gave the space a peaceful glow. Twinkling Christmas lights hung from the ceiling, looking like stars falling down to meet them. The scent of pine was heavy in the air with several large Christmas trees placed in various corners, each decorated with silver and gold baubles and rich reds and deep greens. A table along the wall was spread out with every holiday dessert one could possibly hope for. Iced sugar cookies, and sharp ginger snaps, and chocolate, and candy canes in decorative glass cups. Mingled throughout it were other types of treats, a different holiday tradition. Sweet latkes, fruit pies, rugelach, and matzo crisp. At least, that’s what Wanda had told Sutton they were called. At the end of the table sat a gleaming Menorah.

The food table is where Sutton found herself loitering. Perhaps it was just old habits, or a comfort zone of sorts. She just needed a moment from all the chatter and activities. It was already dark out, not that it took long for that to happen in the winter months, but it actually was starting to get late.

She sighed and fiddled with the stem of her glass as her gaze darted towards the exit. Tony had gone all out for this party. A sprig of mistletoe even loomed above the empty doorway.

Music was playing low enough for people to be able to converse normally, but she was still able to hear it transition from The Hanukkah Song, probably a humorous request from Clint, to White Christmas.

Sutton had shown up to the party promptly at its starting time and laughed and mingled the entire duration. And still, no one had asked her to dance. Or, rather, someone in particular hadn’t. Nat and Wanda and Pepper had dragged her out onto the dance floor a couple times, sure, but that didn’t exactly count. She huffed and downed what was left of her cider.

She was being dumb anyway. No one owed her anything. And dances were a touchy topic for some people. She should swallow her own pride and be a bit more understanding, especially given the holidays.

Her dress fluttered and Sutton gasped as a burst of air smacked her in the face. Pietro was next to her, grinning widely as he grabbed the entire pan of matzo crisp and winked at her.

“Do not tell Wanda,” he said. Sutton smirked and mimed zipping her lips.

“I didn’t see anything.” Pietro laughed.

“True! I am too fast!” He disappeared then as suddenly as he’d come and Sutton was left shaking her head.

With her drink gone and the evening winding down, Sutton felt like her decision was pretty well made. She pushed off from the food table and prepared to give her goodbyes when a shadow was cast over her.

“Might I have this dance?”

A couple of months ago and Sutton would have still been sent jumping at the low, honeyed tones of that voice. She cut her eyes up to Loki and tilted her head. He was holding out his hand and her gaze trailed up from the dark black of his suit jacket to the dark emerald tie that didn’t quite match the Christmas theme, but gave the impression of trying. His dark hair was brushed back, but not actually greasy looking, for once.

“A dance,” she asked.

“Generally it’s where two willing partners move around a designated area with twis-”

“I know what dancing is, thank you.” She crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head up. “Just not sure why you’re asking me.” Loki tsked.

“Come now, I’ve been on good behavior for long enough to receive the benefit of the doubt.” Sutton cocked a brow.

“You said your people live to about 5,000 years old. You’ve been on good behavior for all of five minutes, comparatively.”

He grinned even wider at that, amused, but still pushed forward his hand.

“Just one dance. Consider it an addition to my apology for all that transpired.”

She hesitated a moment more before she relented with a sigh and slid her hand into his.

“Just one,” she said. Then she would slip out of the party and sulk in self pity on her floor until the morning.

“That’s all I need.”

“Wha-”

Loki led her out onto the cleared dance floor and pulled her closer. Sutton stiffened as he pulled her hand up to rest on his shoulder and then lowered his to her waist. She wasn’t an experienced dancer, not like Loki probably was growing up in a palace and in the courts. With feasts and parties and frivolity. She kept her eyes on his shiny leather shoes as he attempted to lead her through some simple footwork.

He let go of her hip to tap her under the chin and force her head up.

“You’re supposed to look at me,” he said. “And don’t try to anticipate where we’re going next. Just follow where I lead.” Sutton frowned, but kept her eyes up.

“This sounds alarmingly similar to some of your past statements,” she muttered. Loki rolled his eyes.

“Only when you look for it so doggedly.”

“Don’t worry. I can only mock and guilt trip you for about another seventy years.”

He quieted at that and they continued gliding around the floor. The music swelled slightly and Loki pushed her out for a twirl then brought her back in. Sutton found it was a bit easier to flow with him when she wasn’t thinking about it. Her face relaxed along with the tension in her arms.

“So what’s this really about?” Loki glanced down at her.

“I don’t know what you’re implying.”

“This party has been unbelievably prank free. And you don’t generally ask anyone to dance. So, what are you plotting?”

“Your Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace and goodwill, isn’t it? Maybe I’m trying to indulge in the season.”

“I’m just saying, you made Tony’s cake explode at his birthday party. I don’t see how you’d stick around this long without implementing even a little mischief.”

“Mmm,” he hummed. “You make a fair point.”

His gaze lifted, pinpointing somewhere across the room and he fought back a smirk at whatever he saw.

“What are you-”

He twirled her again, forcing her out further this time in a larger move. Sutton tried to catch a glance at where he’d been looking. Bucky was across the room. He elbowed the person next to him and nodded in her direction. But then Loki was pulling her back into the dance with more enthusiasm than the beat of the music strictly called for.

Sutton let out a surprised chirp as he situated her closer to him. She was nearly flush against him and his hand had drifted from her waist to her lower back. Her face heated and she shot a scowl up at him.

“Loki-” He shushed her.

“Just a second longer.”

Green sparked dimly from his fingers and Sutton let out an involuntary laugh as a tickling sensation ran through her.

“Loki!” She wasn’t sure what he was up to, but her face was still turned up in residual giggling even as she tried to eye him sternly. “Knock it off!”

He eyed the opposite end of the room again before he looked back down at her and grinned. Sutton stumbled and tried to keep up as he spun them around the room. He didn’t give her an answer, but his sharp grin only grew as each beat passed.

“Three,” he drolled. “Two… One….”

“Hey.”

They came to a lingering halt, Loki refusing to immediately stop at the interruption. Sutton’s head snapped to see Steve standing just to the side of them. His face was pinched slightly and his nostrils flared as he glanced at Loki. Loki’s fingers trailed lazily up her back and Sutton smacked his hand away. Steve’s jaw clenched.

“Are you ok,” Steve asked her. Sutton blinked and looked between the two men. She stepped away from Loki, disconnecting their hands, and tucked a stray hair behind her ear.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Loki just, uh, asked me to dance.”

“It would’ve been a shame if someone hadn’t.”

Loki’s tone was too smooth. Too honeyed. Sutton cut her eyes at him briefly. He was still up to something.

The last few notes of the song drifted off and Sutton rubbed at her arm.

“Well, thanks. That was, kind of fun, actually.”

Loki bowed at the waist, like the prince he was.

“Any time, Sutton. It would be a pleasure to-”

“Would you like another song?” Steve’s voice cut in sharp and pointedly. Sutton blinked. “What?”

The words seemed to twist inside Steve for a moment, but he breathed in deeply from his nose and managed to get them out.

“Would you like to dance? With me.” “Oh.” Sutton’s heart did a small flip and she bit her bottom lip. “Yes, of course. I mean… why not?” “I suppose that’s me being dismissed, then.” Loki sighed dramatically and Sutton’s lips twitched. Steve cut in front of Loki and held out his hand. She accepted it, only glancing at Loki long enough to see him wink at her as he sauntered away.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas was being crooned over the speakers now. Sutton remembered what Loki had said and kept her eyes on Steve. Let him lead.

He held her gently. Like she were delicate and he had to constantly keep that in mind. They swayed and spun around more than some of the fancy footwork that Loki had used, but Sutton almost liked it better. She could just breathe and not pay so much attention to what they were doing and focus on who she was dancing with instead.

Steve looked nice in his knit Christmas sweater over a pale button up. Someone had pinned a mini decorative candy cane to the left side of his chest and it was cute. This close and Sutton could even tell that he smelled good. He must have put on a cologne for the party.

“You caught me before I left,” she said to break the quiet.

“I’m glad.”

His voice trailed off and Sutton chewed on her bottom lip again. They swayed in a small section of the dance floor some more. The tension in her arms was starting to creep back up the longer Steve said nothing. She broke her gaze away from his face and looked down at his shoes.

“You didn’t have to, you know. I didn’t expect you to dance with me and you don’t have to feel like you have to rescue me from Loki.”

He moved, a jerking sort of motion, as if her words surprised him.

“I wanted to,” he insisted. “I just- I guess I’m a little rusty on the asking part.”

A hopeful flicker sparked back inside of her, and Sutton dared to look up again. He looked sincere. But he was also Steve Rogers. He wasn’t going to want to hurt her feelings.

“I just don’t want you to feel obligated.”

Steve’s face actually crinkled and he let out a short scoff.

“I don’t think dancing with a beautiful dame is ever considered an obligation.”

“Beautiful dame?”

She watched as his face glowed pink and hers heated alongside him.

“Sorry. It slipped out.”

“I... don’t mind.”

Her muscles loosened again and their footsteps widened as they took larger strides. Sutton could almost lift her feet off the floor and let Steve do all the work. He spun her around under his arm and used that same excuse to pull her a bit closer.

“Well, in that case, maybe we can do this again sometime.”

Sutton couldn’t fight the grin.

“I’d like that.”

From across the room, Loki winked at her again, giving her a subtle thumbs up. Sutton mouthed silently from around Steve’s shoulder.

“You’re forgiven.”

#my writing #writing request #kinda #sutton regan #oneshot #christmas #dancing!!

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ts-akhmim · 4 years

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Episode 3 | “It does not look good for our tribe. Honestly, we suck... Really bad. ” - Duncan

The way I absolutely flopped at that puzzle… this is why I’m a Beauty cause a sis ain’t smart to complete a puzzle and I’m not brawn-y enough to do well in a challenge hgjfdk BUT that being said, Hagthor beat the thots and apiss and I couldn’t be any happier! I do wish Brawn lost over Brain but yknow, you can’t have everything go your way (‘: it’s funny how I slayed the last challenge and flopped this one tho like a bitch really lacks consistency huh ghfjndmks

Heading into a second tribal council, there is becoming less and less room to hide. I am struggling to hold my own against the other tribes when it comes to competitions, but thank goodness it's a numbers game. If everything goes accordingly, I am taking a backseat this vote and allowing a 4-2 vote out when it comes to Trace. I appreciated Duncan coming to me with the alliance chat information with him/Scott/Trace/Isaac, but didn't like how Autumn needed to tell me first. Shows that I really can't trust Scott/Duncan after a swap comes up. In regards to Scott, he outright didn't say anything. I like him and all, but it was a slimy move to say the least. He only said something because he HAD to vote out someone in one of his two alliances. This group will be dumb as hell if they let me swap. I'll flip on them as soon as possible and invite anyone into my alliance. The tribe swap is where I made my 'Slithers' game infamous last time, so I'm hoping for a similar output. Don't forget: I swapped with the minority last time in Guyana (shout out to Jess), so I'm not worried about the numbers and how its split. ALL I NEED IS A SWAP OR TWIST. GET ME OUT OF HERE.

youtube

Wow we’re really flopping this challenge huh! I really hate this as a group challenge bc we wasted so much time believing in an algorithm that doesn’t even work!

okay so i again filmed a video confessional while walking the dog which i WILL eventually upload i promise hosts BUT. this challenge was literally torture, staring at the excel spreadsheet was so draining. TJ did so much work for it so I really really hope we win he is so sweet i was real mean to him at the start for truly no reason NNN i really really want the beauty tribe to go to to tribal, or the brains lot again i guess? i dont really wanna go to tribal even though i think Liam M is the easy vote? i'd rather not. i just feel really drained after that challenge i wish this confessional was even a little bit exciting im sorry hosts

i feel like i underappreciated dan as an ally?! the more i talk to him its like hmmm we vibe and we have similar energy? like i get very different but good energies from all of dan, jake and jordan! which i love, like i feel really good about them all. like what's reassuring about dan (and this sounds weird) is he feels fine complaining about others to me in pms? like jake does the same and that makes me feel really reassured trust wise - like i would never talk negatively about another player to someone i distrusted tbh... so i feel really good about that! i feel like particularly in a maybe swap i'll really bond with whoever i get to swap with even MORE. idk i just feel good about this brawn tribe still i don't want to GOOO.

okay so yesterday was... eventful! i watched the sequester mini with jake which was super fun and then right after... he cracked the tomb and i decided to tell jake about my idol. have i had it since day two? yes. but i told him i found it during the mini so i wouldnt seem sus. i dont regret my decision (so far at least anyway JKASD) because a) he cracked the tomb and immediately told me b) i think he is loyal and particularly since i told him i can and will idol him like i dont think he has incentive to leak my idol unless it comes down to lategame and he wants to blindside me but i don't see myself being able to hold onto the idol until that stage anyway! but yeah so jake knows about my idol so i'm hoping i can use it to my benefit, or to save him because i'm really invested in his success this season. maybe we are gonna be the two brawns at the end woo and tony style even tho i think i'm probs the woo nnnnn

Trace went home and that is yet another potential connection I could’ve had in the game GONE… like the Brains really wanna see me flop huh! It’s interesting that it was 4-2 vote tho like it has my overthinking self spiraling lowkey. I do really feel for the Brains having to lose twice though like I’ve been on a flop tribe before and morale is always low so my heart goes out to them and I hope they beat Brawn xoxo

This challenge? Literal homophobia! Like I love unscrambled eggs and I want my eggs cracked by VARIOUS men but this was not what I had in mind (‘: this challenge being my alliance + AJ is interesting as well considering that AJ was the one person I haven’t established a game connection with but I do really like him. In a way, I do think him participating in this challenge is the best thing that could’ve happened to his game since it allows him to build more connections with others? That being said, Connor on the other hand… is disappointing me in a way like the king isn’t talking much or doing much. If he has personal stuff to attend to, I completely get it and he should focus on that first but I do wanna know so I don’t assume he disappeared yknow (‘: but oh well !!!

I do think me honing in on the fact that Kendall and I are two peas in a pod in this game has her really thinking that which is awesome! I do adore that girl but I gotta keep an eye out (for Selener). She did tell me that her goals this round include the following 1) Set up an alliance with us + Austin, 2) Get AJ to be our alliance’s fake 5th, and 3) Get out Adam. While I am glad she told me all of this, I’m just very cautious of her connections? Austin and I are super close and he likes her, that’s fine. My thing is with AJ because while we were calling, I did pick up on the fact that those two have played before and whatnot so who knows. I’m just a naturally stressed person so ye !!! I do really like Adam though so I hope we don’t lose at all (‘:

I hate myself for being on a call for 9 hours in this game ghjfkdls but that being said, I do genuinely love everyone on this tribe and the thought of losing makes me super emo because I feel close to every person here in one way or another. It’s a dilemma too because us winning this challenge would be ideal but if we do win and Brawn goes to tribal, the Beauty Tribe becomes public enemy number one in a swap scenario because why wouldn’t the other tribes wanna get rid of the tribe that has the most members yknow? It’s a nail-biter regardless ;-;

youtube

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fpSJvDJxy38LcRI4MjwzIa64zT_tytXC/view?usp=sharing

So I'm not surprised that we lost AGAIN! Lowkey I feel like I did everything during this challenge so not only do I feel more defeated, but I'm annoyed that not too many people contributed. Like I have to constantly ask people how they're doing in the challenge, and they provide me with NOTHING!! And I'm tired of voting people out :/ Anyways, I feel like voting out Isaac is a dumb move for my game going forward, because Duncan/Autumn are clearly a duo. Duncan even said to me that he wouldn't mind voting out Devon if we needed too. If we don't swap next round and lose again, I have the feeling Duncan and Autumn are going to try and pit Devon and I against each other. I like to think they'd choose me over Devon since I don't have any connections to anyone. The smart move would be for them to utilize Isaac and blindside me, but I like to think they wouldn't be doing that anytime soon. I feel bad voting out Isaac because I know how much he hated being booted early in Malaysia. So to do that to him again is really sad to me. I would try to convince Devon to split up Autumn/Duncan, but he's all about the 4 going forward. Everyone is and as much as I love the 4, that type of game is boring. Idk maybe my style of gameplay is different than theirs. If I see that I'm in a sinking ship, I make sure to grab a life vest and swim to another boat. I don't sit on the boat and say "okay, time to drown now". Luckily none of them know me for the numerous times that I've flipped on alliances before. If we do swap next round, my plan is to remain loyal to whichever brain is on my tribe. However, this won't stop me from trying to make connections with people from other tribes and making new alliances. If I need to ditch my brains to solidify trust with my new tribe, then that is exactly what I am going to do. In the event that I do leave tomorrow, this game was fun! After being out of the tumblr survivor community for 3 years, I don't think I'd come back for a future org/season because the amount of stress i've been in this past week is more than I've endured with online learning since corona came to town. Idk I wouldn't be surprised if a #blindside came my way.

it's only day 7 and we havent even been to tribal yet and we STILL arent going because we won again, and im already going off the deep end like am i crackedt?? what the hell is happening on this tribe like am i the quiet one or is there just a collective quiet going on since we're just sliding through the game rn?? im not gonna lie it's kinda boring... it's getting weird.....the fact that there's an idol just looming around and someone has it and isnt telling me is making me crazy, and then to make me even more crazy i foolishly decided to sit out of the challenge today, i knew i probably wasnt gonna be good at anything with the letters all jumbled together, im just being real so i decide to spare my tribe and myself mostly the misery and sit out, i dont want to be perceived as weak completely and be voted off right now for it, but i do want to start to make sure people think im not that good at the challenges so i dont have a target going foward- also, im really just not good at the challenges. BUT apparently everyone was just like on a call together all day because of the challenge and obviously i couldnt be in it so :// my own fault! i didnt think it through completely and luckily we won, but if we hadnt, i mean... a day long on/off call is more than enough to bond over and pick a first boot from those not in it, but aj updated me on everything and at least according to him, my name wasnt mentioned and they were mostly working on the challenge and discussing white men, so that means i didnt miss much! im still working day by day on trying to water my relationships with everyone and make sure theyre ready to bloom into my little alliances once its had enough time to absorb all the sunshine i naturally radiate!! However.... others arent doing the same gorl.... like connor, literally messaged me out of the blue just to have a conversation and when i tried talking to him he stops messaging me right away ... like hello is it something i said?? i literally feel like parvati when she was going is it me?? am i being punkd??? also tried talking to kendall again today, i do enjoy her i will say she's growing on me but as of now she hasnt responded to me yet, which is ok since i never respond to anyone either oop hopefully its just not everyone vs. adam already in other news i guess a swap could be coming?? i really just dont want to be on a tribe with jakey because im not ready to dig up the hatchet from cvc lets keep it buried please!! unless he's completely forgotten that and wants to work with me and be my shield again but um... dont think he'd be up for that! im here to play a NEW game not my old one, in any case, no matter what happens i feel like as long as i have any of my fellow A name sisters- AJ, Augusto, or Amir with me, i could possibly be fine... i dont think Amir was really playing me anymore either like i did yesterday smh i think that was just a tangent of paranoia my mind created (maybe ..)

I feel like we have to be swapping tonight like this brains tribe has lost so many challenges in a rwo, that ifit wasnt planned i feel like the hosts have to be like "put it in sis they movin" Im gonna spendthe rest of the of today working on my relationships with the rest of my brawny boys, so no if we do swap, on matter what configurations it lands on I should have options. Still dont know jac shit about the tomb and that is bothering me but thats a problem for another day.

Well, thank god that we were able to pull that challenge out. I knew if we lost it that my ass could potentially be on the line given how large of a role I played in organizing that challenge, so it would have been sad (and hella scary) to have lost that. But I do think I've shown that I can be a valuable asset to this tribe now in the event that we somehow stay in tribes for another round. I'm anticipating a tribe swap here this next round, so I kind of just need to prepare to meet some new people and hope that I'm on a tribe with some people that I've gotten along with. Ideally, I'd have Jake with me and we'd act as if we weren't that close, but I'd be happy to see basically anyone but Liam there with me. He's a great guy, but I know he doesn't trust me, I know I don't trust him, so I really don't want that to be my only lifeline on a swap tribe.

okay so in the event we swap out of the brawn tribe tonight... which would be TRAGIC i wanted to do an in memoriam of apis 1.0! TJ - i was SO rude and wrong about him! he is genuinely so sweet and lovely, and super hard working. i think he would be a good one to swap with, it would build our bond and he is a challenge workhorse! i hope he isn't mad at me for my round one confessionals, just know tj that i was WRONG and that i was the clown! Lovelis - I get really good energy from him but we also... never talk so idk where I'm getting that from? I think he is definitely going to be a casualty of the swap, I see him definitely getting picked of? Which would be sad! idk we will see Liam M - He is really sweet, but we also talk super infrequently? I feel like he trusts me which is good?! But I think he is definitely gonna go premerge unfortunately just since he isnt super active? we will see ahh Jordan - I really like Jordan i think he is great! we are working together but something about his energy has seemed... off recently? and jake has noticed the same thing and idk what to do with that it just seems off? idk i feel like we potentially are gonna drift apart as allies which would be a shame! Dan - I really love Dan, he has such good energy which I really vibe with him? I think I kind of underestimated his potential as an ally which I really regret I like him a lot tbh.. I'd like to build that trust further for sure, he just gives off such good ally energy Jake - ahh yes have left my favourite for last. ugh i love jake his energy is the best and i trust him 100% unequivocally. he knows about my idol (may've kept it a secret for two rounds but i told him eventually which is what counts jasldfkas) i want him to succeed in this game so badly, im really hopeful for him to SNAP also quickly about the brain tribal, i just hope isaac/autumn/duncan are safe. those are my only preseason connections and would kinda love to see any/all of them in a swap situation tbh i think i want that devon slithers man gone he seems sneaky (is it just because slithers sounds like a snake yes)

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It’s been way too quiet around here so I’ve accepted that Duncan/Autumn/Devon/Isaac are all voting me out tonight. Devon keeps talking to me about the swap and really emphasizing about it, so I get sketch vibes from that. Plus that Duncan/Autumn duo is very strong so it makes sense for them to want to vote me out. Plus apparently Isaac is writing my name down tonight so... it’s been fun! I enjoyed my 7 days that I spent here and can’t wait for the perjury trip with Trace and Bodhi 🥳🥳🥳

Lowkey kinda bummed we won this challenge. Which probably raises a few death flags but whatever. I would have liked to put our alliance to the test before a swap :/. It also would have been neat to have the fucking idiot who voted with Trace as a spare vote, now they are definitely going to get fucked. Luckily the challenge provided some new optunity for alliances. For starters we can make a natural extra alliance with AJ without drawing conclusions to a mysterious third faction. Even though Connor did jack shit... I'm not bitter just... disappointed. :/

PERIODTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT, WE WON HOES! Like I am incredibly shook that we won because I was ready to jump off of a ledge hgfjkdl so yay for that! The Brains lost and I really do feel for them but Brawn winning makes our numbers equal and the Brawns are more threatening overall so that should mean that Brains would want to work with us in a swap scenario yknow? I’m just shook I’m on the winning tribe ghjfdks

Now that we won, I SHOULD be chilling right? Well, I hate myself so I’m not doing that one bit. I am deathly afraid of a swap next round because the makings of a swap are all there (a flop tribe that needs a swap to save them, us being at 18 people is perfect for 3 tribes of 3, etc). I’m scared I will get swap fucked in some capacity so I’m just aaaa. That being said, I do want to make sure I leave on amazing terms with everyone before we swap in case I am separated from anyone or I join some of these legends on a new tribe.

honestly, our tribe has been pretty much on a high. our most recent challenge seemed like something tailored for us to lose, and while i was nervous for a second, we were able to best the brains tribe and send them to tribal for the THIRD time. (i really thought they'd have that one in the bag!) i feel sorry for those nerds, they just can't catch a break :( but seriously, the challenge itself really opened doors of opportunity for me in the game i feel. me/kendall/amir/augusto were on call from 11AM est to the time challenge results went up.. and it was an experience. we all got along pretty well and put our braincells together to get through that challenge, but their company was what made it worthwhile! connor was also participating in the challenge, but he didn't really do anything. although i know he's been pretty busy lately so i'm not too bent about it and completely understand, just wish he said a little more in the chat other than the two messages he did! i think what i'm preparing for right now is the swap. i really wanna cement solid relationships and allegiances with the people on my tribe as we anticipate going into bigger tribes as of next round or the round after. i wouldn't mind just staying on this tribe, though. our dynamic is great, the people are great, and we're even better in competition. there's really not much of a loss there if you ask me!

So in the past 24 hours I've worked my ass off to try to get Autumn and Devon to vote with me against Scott and/or Duncan and I'm not getting my hopes up. Like everything they've given me has been so vague and I've tried to go the extra mile to try to get Autumn and Devon to trust me. I think I'm going home tonight and if I do that's tragic but not exactly a #blindside. It might be my curtain call but I hope I at least made them doubt each other.

Also #FuckThoth, Jess rigged me out

Me waiting for tribal to happen: https://66.media.tumblr.com/c327b3a59ef66f9835241d079c1fbe39/tumblr_n20f10EtZH1rkuhmio2_400.gif

Me if I make it out alive tonight: https://media1.tenor.com/images/664df9da1de6fb8913ff67b2ca8234e0/tenor.gif?itemid=16269462

Me if I get voted out tonight: https://media.giphy.com/media/aUW1R5qccvQ3K/giphy.gif

I HATE IT HERE I WANNA GO HOME!!! I feel like the underpaid babysitter that the parents forgot about cause these boys are triiippppinng. I’m selling the vote so well to Isaac I actually wanted to vote Scott with him and I was going to but my damn alliance has him secondguessing and now everyone is all misty eyed about being split while Isaac is panicking so the solution is a CALL. Even though we call EVERYDAY so there ain’t shit to talk about??? Isaac has been blowing my pm’s up all day so no sir, no farewell calls. My emotional energy has been spent for the day lying for 6 hours straight thank you very much. Scuncan and Devon need to cut the melodrama out cause we have a whole game left?? So we will see each other again??? And if we don’t, we don’t. Also we could not get swapped tonight??? So simmer down. The Lord NEEDS to take me cause I can’t do it. Everyone needs their hand held and their feelings coddled and I’m tired. Less kumbayah, more playing Survivor

So we won again! I felt terrible in our challenge chat because I really couldn't get my head around the patterns and shit everyone else was doing, honestly hope they don't see general weakness in me because of it.. I'm good at like, everything else, but I dunno, this season's just not been looking favourably on me yet. After the flag incident and then that challenge, I feel like I probably am in the most danger, and I still don't know what to do about it except spam everyone all the time in hopes they feel some social tie to me... I hate it here I rly do. Hopefully we'll start to get more comps I can excel in because so far it's been flop after flop and I rly hate to see it.

Not AJ telling me that I am the person he is closest to on this tribe… I’m crying ugh, I feel so bad for wanting him to leave first like I didn’t get to know him well until recently but I really do like him… why was I blessed with these iconic people on my tribe? Game aside, I do like them all and want them to slay in life <3

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I'm so screwed if I don't win this immunity challenge. I know I'm a weak link, so if I don't win this, hopefully *dan* doesn't either cause I might have to target him to save my skin. This is where I'm really gonna have to be social over the next day, cause my ass is quite literally on the line right now. I'm not getting 18th-16th, screw this.

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Okay I’m gonna say it, I love my alliance so much.I will not play with my heart and I’ll kill them if I have to but I really really really don’t want to, I obvi love my alliance with Augusto, Kendall, and Connor so much, but i will not play with my heart and ill backstab them if i have to but i really really dont want to. I would also like if adam austin and aj were safe. I really really like adam a lot. he is a fking sweetheart, and hes so funny. Austin is also great and super genuine and kind. i feel bad for calling him boring earlier, and aj is just funny and cool in general. the best case is we never have to go to tribal and i get to keep my inbred nocturnal intoxicated-at-all-times tribe members here. I am gonna need as many of these people in the game as possible for the swap and for the merge, and if we end up do having to go to tribal, I will do everything in my power to keep the tribe from getting divided, because we're gonna need each other to take down the brawn tribe.

I want to be tight with every single one of the beauties because a swap is likely coming and I need them, and the biggest issue rn I see moving foreward is if brawn and brain align, so we must snatch the brains first. every one keeps talking about being stumped about the tomb and I just keep lying DKNDKDNDD but I am lowkey scared they know I’m lying

#BackWithVengeance

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solienna · 7 years

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i was going to be like 'all of them' but that would be mean so instead im 'just' going to ask for 1, 4, 8, 10, 13, 17, 21, 28, 32, 33, 35, 47, 50,

putting this under a readmore bc meander!!! you spoil me

01: When did you first start writing? okay i actually am gonna give you two answers to this question bc i feel like i started writing at two periods in my life. the first time i actually started writing was in third grade because i had like. the BEST third grade teacher, he was awesome and in my eyes was like, the best artist i had ever met just bc he had a basic grasp of how to draw shit and i absolutely didn’t and still don’t, every time teachers tell me to draw things for an assignment i lose ten years off my lifespan but anyways!! off topic. he really encouraged creativity and i was in a class with one of my friends, his name was like john or michael or something, and i would write and he would illustrate (i thought he was the second-best artist i had ever met just bc he also had a basic grasp on drawing and i still didn’t). i wrote about like. this dog and his name was super yuff and got his powers through lightning that struck him and he just flew around and like. idk he did a lot of shit, i still have the stories i wrote. but like i was DEDICATED to this character and so was my illustrator friend. i remember one weekend i was just sitting on my bed with a bunch of folded up printer paper just writing about this dumb superhero dog that somehow ended up in like the halo universe bc even back then i was obsessed with video games. that was the first thing i actually WROTE. HOWEVER. after third grade i just took a huge break. like not intentionally, of course. i loved writing but i didn’t know it was my THING yet. i didn’t really have a thing yet, it was only third grade ok. HOWEVER. when i transitioned into middle school that’s when i picked up writing again. i don’t even remember why. all i know was that my dad had bought skyrim and he was playing it and just by watching it i LOVED it. i adored the history behind the game and i just loved the graphics, and when i started playing the game i got HOOKED. stayed up entire nights just doing random side quests for npcs and feeling a huge goddamn hero, let me save this talking dog from the wrath of his daedric master nbd, just doing my job, let me set all these beehives on fire and get mauled by a bear, cool cool. and one day i just? was like wow, why don’t i write a story about it! about my skyrim OC going to solstheim and falling in love with the aloof nd really sarcastic and interesting teldryn sero (who still remains one of my favorite skyrim npcs to this day)!! and i thought i was Hot Shit too, i thought i fucking invented fanfiction. and then i found wattpad and then that was that folks, i got hooked on writing all over again and i still am

04: Have you ever thrown a book across the room? mmmm not that i can recall? i’m not really a book-thrower, i’m more of a book-holder. like if something really shocking happens in a book i feel like i’d be more likely to hug it close to my chest than throw it08: What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten? tbh pretty much everything you’ve told me meander!! i don’t really think i’d be writing that much if not for you. honestly you flatter me on a daily basis with your compliments about my really pretentious use of metaphors in like every single paragraph and basically just with your interest in all of my writing projects even for fandoms you’re not technically in!! i’ve never really been told by anyone that i’ve got a way with words and when you told me that i was like wow!! people actually like the shit i write, that’s cool! that’s real cool my guy10: What’s your biggest writer pet-peeve? honestly i THRIVE on feedback. i took a huge writing break like a few years ago just because i couldn’t WRITE the way i used to. to just sit down and spew out 5000 word chapters on a whim wasn’t something i could feasibly DO anymore. i thought i lost my touch or something but it was honestly just because i didn’t get enough feedback. again shout out to u meander because you legit FLOODED me with feedback on like. everything. i’m still over the moon about half the shit you’ve told me like a year ago. tbh half the reason i yell in the tags is because creators read the tags!! they really do!! so i wanna leave some positive feedback for them because i want them to know that i liked whatever it was that they made!!

13: What’s your favorite writing quote? it’s not really a writing quote but!! “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” -C.S. Lewis21: Do you outline? i honestly burst out laughing when i saw this question, i do not in any way whatsoever outline anything bc apparently i hate myself. ok the last time i outlined a story was like four years ago and it worked…. really well…… so for some reason i was like wow how about we not make our lives easier. no outlining our fics we ruin our own writing projects like men

28: Which do you find hardest: the beginning, the middle, or the end? everything, everything is hard, i can’t write in a linear fashion. nah but tbh i feel like it’s the middle? like what do you even do. what is the middle all about. i’ve never met her32: How do you feel about friends and close relatives reading your work? ABSOLUTELY NOT. get them away. i am very protective of my writing bc it’s personal to me. like i don’t want y’all reading my shit and then going up to me in real life thinking you know all my secrets bc if u read my shit you WILL know all my secrets, i painstakingly pour my heart into everything i write because in everything i do, i try REALLY REALLY hard. if i let u read my writing it’s a show of trust33: Are you interested in having your work published? in its current state? probably not!! maybe later on down the road would be nice, but i’ve still got a lot to learn //side-eyes all my failed attempts at witty dialogue35: What’s your favorite time of day for writing? nighttime. like dead of the night, i’m in bed with my phone and should be asleep right now but instead i’m gonna grab my laptop and fucking dump out all the words in my brain onto this word document. other than that i honestly just write during school a lot? like when we get free time i’m either studying for a test or writing.47: If you could steal one character from another author and make then yours, who would it be and why? i want to take preston garvey out of bethesda’s hands. i’ve fallen in love with him over the course of just writing one scene for his character study. it’s the second-to-last scene (bc i cant write in linear order) and like. gosh. i want him to be my character, he’s so sad but also so optimistic and he tries so hard. ok those kinds of characters are my Type, i love characters who try really hard

50: If you could live in any fictional world, which would it be? i’m honestly not really sure? like hardcore i love daydreaming but it’s never about myself doing cool things, it’s about characters doing cool things. i kinda wanna meet an omnic tho, they seem really chill. maybe like live in falkreath? it’s really chill and pretty there and the mountains are really looming and i like that. imagine meeting the dragonborn and they buy out your entire store and then just leave. thats fucking crazy my guy

#ask #my post #about #meander #here's a wall of text meander i hope u enjoy it

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not-tryin-2-have-a-debate · 8 years

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i want to keep my original long draft for an essay abotu my Psych Ward Expirience somewhere so i’m post it here under readmore bc its super long

When most people hear the phrase “Psych Ward,” they think of settings in horror movies. They picture 1800’s sanatoriums, dark and crumbling asylums full of dangerous murderers. I don’t know if hollywood or a general societal ignorance towards mental disorders should be blamed more for that, but living with a serious mental illness is one of those things that “outsiders” never really seem to understand. That misunderstanding extends to treatment as well.

Therapy comes in many shapes and sizes, different types and intensities. There are different amounts of work expected from the patient, different ways the therapist can try to work through their issues, but the biggest range of differences is probably in the environments these sessions can take place in. One-on-One appointments with a therapist, Group therapy that meets once or twice a week, specific support groups, and anger management classes are all things that we in the business would call “outpatient” treatment. Some programs are dubbed as “intensive outpatient” or “semi-inpatient” programs, for when they want to hospitalize someone but aren’t allowed to for whatever reason (usually because they can’t pay for it, or the family in charge of their affairs won’t allow it, or they're actually a good and understanding doctor that sees the problem with taking a mother away from her job and kids from three days to three months depending on the program.)

Group homes, halfway houses, and stays in mental hospitals would all be on the “inpatient” or residential side of things. Some places are specifically “Crisis Hospitals,” a place where suicidal patients go for one or two days until they aren’t considered an active threat to themselves anymore. Depending on the hospital and how much they actually care, the patient may run out the clock of their stay and can sent to a different center or dropped back into society while still in the middle of their crisis. Every psychiatric hospital has protocol for patients on suicide watch and many have specific rooms for it, open cubbies in a big long hall with no doors or front walls, so the staff can be watching you at all times.

When someone’s in treatment for any mental issues extending beyond mild depression or anxiety, being hospitalized is a kind of vague threat always looming on the horizon. If they say something a little too dark, or they fly off the handle a little too often, the question comes up asking if they’re in need of more ‘intense’ care.

Most patients that have been around a while know how to quickly deflect a nervous doctor. We get told our own horror stories; tales of prisons with heavily medicated inmates, friends recounting abuse from their nurses, being locked up in a place that claimed to help them but in actuality just held their lives/times for ransom until they stopped complaining.

I’m asked about my safety every time I see my psychiatrist. I sit in Brian’s office once every three or four weeks and discuss how much of a failure I am at pretending to be a human being. Every time, near the end, he looks me in the eye with an uncomfortable grimace and asks me how safe I feel. We both know it's a strange and impossible question. I could say no for so many different reasons. Realistically I will probably hurt myself before our next appointment. There will definitely be at least a few times I think of dying, go over the details in my head. I could point to my paranoia, or my childhood, and tell him I haven’t felt safe in a long, long time. But he knows all of that, and he knows my honest answer, and we both know that him asking how safe I currently feel is just secret code for whether or not I want to be sent to a hospital. So I shrug and tell him I’ll be just fine.

I guess I was having a pretty rough time at fourteen. I say “I guess” because I can’t remember most of it, but what I do remember wasn’t particularly any worse than two years before or the year after. It was mainly just that when I was fourteen, people were noticing more, and feeling more guilty, and I was saying some wrong things at the wrong times.

I’d already been in regular therapy for years; I’d been through one group until my therapist got transferred and an “intensive outpatient therapy plan” after that. Every two weeks or so one of my parents would dig me out of bed and drive me to the one small therapy office in my town. I would wait for at least forty minutes past my appointment and then be called back to see the nurse, Mellisa. (Her name was spelled with two L’s and one S; I know about that because she would get very upset with the other staff for spelling it wrong.) Every time I went to that office, Mellisa would have me take a pregnancy test, no matter how many things about me made its results obvious, because when you’re a kid medical professionals will never trust a single word out of your mouth: especially if you’re crazy. My mother and I would go and sit in an uncomfortably warm room waiting for my psychiatrist go come online. I would study the boring, mass-produced ocean painting on the wall, finding anything to look towards but my mother. My psychiatrist at the time was an attractive nigerian man that I was only ever introduced to as Dr.O; one time I asked Mellisa what his full name was, because I felt disrespectful not knowing it, but she’d brushed it off as too hard to even try pronouncing. Dr.O lived somewhere else in the state and would see me for our appointments through a computer monitor, setup on a cheap wooden coffee table across from some chairs. My parents always complained about having to drive all the way to the office just to have a skype call; I always just wondered why they bothered setting up the fancy room, since you could hear what everyone was saying through the walls anyway. Dr.O mainly saw older patients and I could tell that he usually thought I was being overdramatic. I would keep my head down, trying my best to speak up so he could hear me through the microphone on the table (and often being chided by him and my mother to move closer to it when he still couldn’t hear me.) I would stay silent as my mother talked the whole time, giving half of the story with none of the context. I would stiffly and awkwardly be made to stand up and show a man on a screen the words carved into my arms, motion to where the cuts went on my legs. I would look at noe one and try not to think of the mostly-screamed “lecture” that was waiting for me once we were done there, where both of my parents sat me on my bed and stood there with crossed arms, telling me they weren’t angry, they were just frustrated, telling me they just didn’t understand why I did these things to myself. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t just come talk to them.

Dr.O decided once, while my mom was in the middle of telling him her version of what I was going through, that I needed to be hospitalized. I snapped back to attention, stopped picking at the scabs on my arm, asked what I did. I barely remember what the real reasoning was: something about how I was already suicidal and they were going to take me off my anti-depressants which were making me more depressed on top of causing me to gain weight, and I would probably feel even more suicidal when I was in the withdrawal from those so I needed to be monitored, or something. That’s a series of events that I’ve gone through about five or six times with five or six different drugs, and that one (paxil, for anyone wondering) wasn’t the first. I’m still not sure why that time it was any different...maybe those reasons were an excuse for some kind of psychic doctor vibe he was getting from me. My mother was, of course, completely furious for all the wrong reasons. I was calmly sent out of the room to wait with Mellisa while she screamed, asking if he was really about to lock up a fourteen year old girl with a bunch of “violent drug addicts” because I was having “some issues adjusting.” When I was younger my mother would often refer to my ‘adjustment issues’--i was never sure what it was I was trying to adjust to.

My mother called my father and I thought to myself that this was a really bad way to make me not want to die. He entered the building crying and confused, probably having only been told a vague three word explanation by my mother, leaning down at me chair, caressing my face like I was dying or like we would never see each other again. For all I knew, we wouldn’t; for all the information I’d been given, I was about to be shipped off somewhere for life. We spent probably another hour in that office, me sitting in my chair, watching everyone else argue and talk and come and go and give me weird looks for split seconds and then continue on talking about me like they’d already sent me to the terrifying gate of hell that a mental hospital apparently was. Mellisa tried to comfort me and pointed out that I was crying. She put a hand on my shoulder and I accidentally, involuntarily, blurted out for her not to touch me. My mouth says a lot of things I don’t want it to. That’s one of the times I’ve most regretted it. I was eventually told I would go home, pack my things, and drive to the hospital that night. That had set my mother off again right when she’d started to calm down-- “Tonight!?” she’d barked at Mellisa. “We can’t even wait til tomorrow?!” Imagine what a dinner that would’ve been. I assume I did as I was told. I remember packing the stuffed animal my internet boyfriend had hot-glued together for me, and a (paperback) Robert Louis Stevenson novel that I was trying to read and pretending I understood more than half of. You aren’t allowed to take a whole list of things with you to the hospital; anything that could possibly be considered dangerous to you or to anyone else is prohibited. No shoes with laces or pants with drawstrings. No mirror, hair brushes, toothbrushes, or soaps either, because the hospital would supply those. At one point I bitterly argued with a nurse that I could shove a sock in my mouth a choke on it if I really wanted to, and she threatened to take all my socks away. I decided to stay quiet on the realization I had that if I got really desperate I could just try to bite off my own tongue. The drive was two hours long and completely silent. My mother spent the first twenty minutes determined to squeeze as much as she could out of the time we had left til arrival, but I was in a confused haze and she was tired from screaming at doctors...or tired from dealing with her defective daughter. She tried to comfort me, assuring me that this would be good for me, that maybe this hospital would straighten some things out and set me on the road to true recovery after all this time spent struggling. I looked at the moonless sky outside and chose not to tell her that she had finally admitted something was wrong with me. It was almost midnight when we actually reached the hospital; we passed it once on accident since we could barely make out the sign. My body was working on its own again at this point. I took mechnical steps, looking straight ahead, hand held in my mother’s because she needed the comfort.

The sterile white walls and fluorescent lights in the front lobby were blinding coming in from the night. I squinted at the woman who came up to meet us, shook my dad’s hand, my mom’s, glanced at me for maybe half of a second. A man named Jesus took and searched my things while we were guided into a more traditional room for this setting, corporate representations of calming moods. Light blue or green walls, wicker and tweed furniture, mass-produced ocean paintings. I focussed on how much I hated paintings of the beach while my parents filled out forms, until the woman finally turned her attention to me. I was comforted and assured, again, that this would be good for me, and then assured that they legally weren’t allowed to use electro-shock therapy. I was told I would do regular groups and that the security wouldn’t use force unless I posed a violent threat. She explained expressive therapy to me, as if I’d never heard of art, while I signed a form saying I consented to being medically sedated if need be. I asked how they would sedate people. She asked if I was afraid of needles.

After signing my name a hundred times, with one of my parents signing after each, it was time for us to say our goodbyes. I’m sure I cried, but I can’t honestly say I remember.

Jesus reappeared without my belongings, telling me before I could ask that they were waiting on my new bed. He led me about three steps out of the conference room to a set of wooden double-doors, like the entrance to a school cafeteria. “This is the Ad Ward…’Ad’ stands for ‘Adolescent.’” he told me, shuffling out an ID card to unlock the doors. He quickly ushered me through and it the first door on the left before I could nothing anything other than a hardwood floor. Jesus handed me a paper hospital gown I never noticed him holding and instructed me to put in on, pointing at the spot on the floor on the small empty room where I should put my clothes. He said a woman would come in shortly to search them and me and then took his swift exit before I could ask any questions. I did as I was told as quickly as possible, nervously trying to make out the muffled voices right outside the door. The second I’d put my clothes in their neatly folded line the head nurse came into the room, making good on Jesus’s word. She went down the line of clothed I had made her, picking up and shaking out every part of my outfit without saying a word. When she was satisfied with them, she turned to me. For those of you that have never been strip searched, please know that it is every bit as strange and mortifying as you would expect, and that no matter how many times you’ve been through it, it’s going to stay just as weird. As my mostly-naked fourteen year old self squatted and coughed before the eyes of a stern older woman with a clipboard, I wondered again how this place was supposed to make life seem worth living. After that, and her metal detector being set off by my braces, I was regifted my clothes (but not my shoes) and handed off to my last stop for the night before bed. I finally got a good look at the Royal Oak Hospital Adolescent Ward: one long hallway with a nurses station near the exit, an elevator, and a long line of almost closed doors. A younger nurse took me into one of them, again completely different from the others I’d been in, and sat me down on an expensive medical equipment looking chair. The girl’s name was Rebecca, she told me sweetly, in the first actual human conversation I’d had in hours. She tried at mostly one-sided small talk with me and she gave me some kind of vaccination or shot. I remember being told it was just a precaution, but I can’t remember what it actually was. The second she was done with the mysterious syringe, though, Rebecca turned on me, bringing out a clipboard and a volley of emotionless questioned that seemed routine to her, but invasive and a little nerve-wracking to me. Asking if I ok with having a roommate or if they had to move my stuff to a different bed was one thing, but at the time I was tired and scared and every question after seemed to strike just the right nerve. She got about halfway down her sheet and asked, casually, what my sexuality was, before I started sobbing. She went back to the good Rebecca and sent me off to bed. We could finish the questions tomorrow. I wouldn’t get to really get a look at my new room and roommate until the morning, as all the other patients on ward were already asleep (or were pretending to be). I slid into the bed, noting the plastic covering on the mattress and the starched, motel room feel of the blanket. Jesus peaked in the doorway to tell me it needed to stay open at night and that he and another man would keep watch on the hall. He said if I couldn’t sleep I was allowed to come sit out there and talk with them; there was usually at least one kid that took advantage of that at some point in the night. I thanked him but chose to stay where I was, holding my handmade stuffed animal so tight it hurt my wrists and staring at the cracked door. I listened to Jesus and the other man talking quietly for hours until I finally passed out. I finally drifted off some time after Jesus lamented about how little time he was getting with his daughter after his divorce. Morning Routine in the hospital was as follows: wake up at 8 a.m. and line up in the hallway for Checks. Roll was taken and an always different nurse that didn’t know our names would check our blood pressure, temperature, and pulse. People who took meds in the morning were given their pills and some water in two small paper cups, and David, the nurse that later became my favorite, would ask everyone who they wanted to call on the phone that day. (Phone time was allowed during a break after lunch; we could only ask to call people on an approved list of phone numbers written during admission.) Then, and only then, were we allowed to cram into the one elevator that led from the ward to the basement, and eat breakfast in the cafeteria. After that our daily routine mainly consisted of therapy, one-on-one conversations with a psychiatrist, and school, if it was a weekday. My first morning I was greeted with a great enthusiasm by the eight other kids on the ward. Most of them were older than me by a year or two and I was quickly taken under their collective wing as a newbie. My roommate introduced herself (I’ll call her L) and wasted no time in getting to the stereotypical “what are you in for” conversation. Since my answer was pretty much a vague shrug she made up the difference, telling me a fabulous story embellished highly in her favor about how she punched her school’s superintendent in the face and was given the option of juvie or the hospital. We agreed that it was stupid of the school to give her that choice.

L loved to see how far she could cross the line before she got in trouble, but in the middle of testing people’s limits she would get angry and fly off the handle. She bragged to me that by the time I got there she had been restrained twice and medically sedated the second time. Eventually I had to change rooms when she started an altercation with Jesus and had to and was put on restrictions. There’s an immediate air of understanding and camaraderie between patients on a ward, even between people that kind of hate each other on a personal level. I think it makes perfect sense given the environment, and the fact that in a short time there everyone is going to learn a lot of deep and personal things about everyone else. I remember most of the kids I met there well: M was a small blond and the youngest on the ward at thirteen. He was extremely proud that he was old enough to belong with the teenagers. He was one of the most adamantly alive people I have ever met. He was very upfront about the fact that he had anger issues. I think I was the only one there who didn’t.

G is a girl that I think about very often, fondly and worriedly. She was such a genuine and lovely person, a heavy and pretty girl with long curly hair that was always smiling and talked with her hands. I worry about her because I was never able to contact her once i was out of the hospital; she didn’t give anyone contact information because she wasn’t sure where exactly she was going to end up after her stay there. Knowing what i did learn from her about her family...I still worry about her. But i also worry that trying to look her up now would be weird, but also only make me sad no matter what i found, even the best answers would feel bittersweet. I think that for now i prefer to just remember G fondly as a very dear friend i only got to spend a precious little amount of time with. R was nice but was also the most actively angry about being there, and none of us could blame him. From what he told us (looking back on it now I’m still not sure which side was truthful) his parents had forced him into his stay after blowing an argument completely out of proportion. R as I gravitated towards each other magically, drawn by our innate ability to Tell. from my experience there were always two or three kids on the ward or in the group who aren’t straight, and we would always find each other and group together as quickly as possible. D was the third or the two or three gay kids. I was told she made advances at me but I don’t remember noticing any of them. She really liked naruto and would tell me dramatic stories that I knew were mostly lies but listened to anyways because we were friends. J was a surprise in a lot of ways. He showed up very suddenly and had the staff scrambling. He was tall and wide and older than most of us, with gauged ears and angry eyes. I feel guilty for the amount of time I spent compulsively strategizing self-defense plans against him before we got to know each other. J had been in juvenile detention before coming to the ward as a way to ease his transition back out into the “real world.” The only person I didn’t really get along with was K, but I wasn’t the only one; she sat on the ‘normal people’ side of the social rift and didn’t particularly want anything to do with the rest of the group. Her choice. The rest I don’t remember by name anymore; the teenage mother who got transferred to a different hospital, a boy who would not talk talk about anything other than weed every time I heard him speak. A quiet boy who’s name started with a D and had a nurse communicate things for him.

The usual length of a stay at Royal Oaks was around a week, so people were usually coming and going every other day, making a rotating list of patients for David complained about because it complicated his job and phone call cataloguing. L left on day four, the weed guy the night before her. We vaguely celebrated when someone was left; we could have done more, but it would have meant celebrating almost every night, and jesus didn’t have enough change for the vending machine. We would say our goodbyes before we went to sleep, and part ways at breakfast. The new kids would be greeted with stories of who they replaced, and would be taken under our collective wing, and the cycle would continue. I never personally got to see them, but there was a ward for Adults somewhere on our floor and one for “Pre-Ads” (children under the age of thirteen) downstairs, with the classroom, cafeteria, and ET room. The full layout of the Ad Ward wasn’t much more complicated than what I had observed the night before; one mysterious room was the “Lounge,” a baby blue nightmare where we spent free time, and another was a shower--yes, the whole room, that was it. A twelve-by-twelve cube of brown tile from floor to ceiling, with a small drain in the middle of the floor and a sad faucet with the water pressure of slow falling tears on one wall. About a foot in from the door there was a haphazardly installed shower curtain, and right below the faucet was a wall-hanging soap dispenser, like same kind you find in most public bathrooms. I’d heard of 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner before, but never All-in-1 general showering goo. Every other room in the hall was a bedroom, and most of them looked identical. Blue walls, two beds set in wooden box frames, and a strange storage-shelf-table-sink hybrid on the other wall. Each room also had a small closet with a toilet in it (two of the rooms had actual bathrooms with their own, normal shower, but most of us weren’t as lucky.) Bathroom doors weren’t allowed to be closed unless they were actively being used. We could only close the door to our room if we were changing clothes, or “with permission,” which meant we could only close the door when we were changing clothes. We were each given a plastic basket of toiletries with our name on it, given it us from a locked space in the nurse’s station after break and before we went to sleep. At some point in the afternoon we would each be called away separately to go meet with a psychiatrist for a bit; a rotating door of short indian men that usually didn’t introduce themselves. The psychiatrists were nice but impersonal, concerned but not well-informed about your situation, fitting with the general theme the hospital seemed to have going. Once one of them took me outside to have our talk, in a little fenced in area with a basketball hoop but not enough room to really try playing with it. I don’t remember anything we talked about other than how I was feeling, how I felt about the hospital, same old thing again and again.

Every night after dinner, two patients that behaved well were allowed to order 1 soda and 1 candy bar from a vending machine outside our reach in the ward. I got a twix and a coke on my first full day, and all the other kids were simultaneously very jealous and proud. The art therapy room was, like all walls in my world at that point, blue, but now with past patient’s art hung up and painted onto them all over, which was a welcome change. Art therapy only involved making art about three of the times that I went. Other times We’d have another group therapy session, or try and fail miserably to play ping pong, or be forced to watch the movie “Freedom Writers” and then talk about our feelings on it. My feelings were that it was a bad film with a nice idea.

The hospital had a Classroom right beside the cafeteria that the ad and pre-ad patients had to attend for three hours every school day. We went separately; the wards weren’t allowed to mix, especially after it turned out that a girl on our ward was the cousin of a kid on the pre-ad. Every week a new sweet older lady would be our teacher, a good samaritan volunteering her time to the hospital. Most of us were old enough that we would just work on our own homework from our school; i was lucky enough that my high school didn’t want to work with the hospital at all, and was unwilling to give me any assignments but the one’s I had brought with me. When I finished those halfway through the first day of class I was given general middle school level work packets and left to my own devices. When i finished those i started trying to help the others, usually M with his science worksheets, or I would spend as long as possible with one of the medical student interns going over a graded french test. I told G how to pronounce her name with a french accent, and she excited told every member of staff about her new name for the rest of the day.

The food, unless you were on suicide watch or “Finger Foods.” Finger Foods was the general terms for when someone had their privileges taken away after an outburst or trying to hurt themselves. You could only use crayons to write, couldn’t handle any sharp objects, were out of the running for a night time candy bar, and obviously, good only eat food with your hands in the cafeteria. Suicide watch Included all the rules of being on Finger Foods but with an added element of direct surveillance at all times; there were some people on suicide watch who were still allowed to be rewarded or participate in activities with supervision, because the restrictions were meant more for their protection than as a punishment. For my first two days at every meal a bulimic girl on my ward would be light-heartedly threatened with a feeding tube if she didn't eat. She and the nurses all seemed to think it was funny, so i just accepted it. At one point we were promised a pizza for our good behavior. We never received that pizza. I’m bitter about that to this day.

Group therapy came in two flavors: there was actual group therapy where we would do therapy, but in a group, and then there was what group normally meant, which was “a nurse is going to come talk about some topic no one cares about for a while.” riveting topics covered in our sessions included personal hygiene and the importance of not doing drugs if you don’t already do drugs, which half of us did. Actual group required more emotional effort but at least I wasn’t going to be bored to tears by the end of the hour. The ward’s main therapist was a nice guy that happened to look exactly like sigmund freud. He also happened to not enjoy it very much when i blurted out that he looked like sigmund freud. We were told multiple times a day by various nurses that shoes were a privilege and you would earn back your shows after you showed staff you were deserving of them. I never saw a single person earn their shoes, and not for lack of trying. This was a problem because if a single person on the ward was without their shoes, we weren’t allowed to have time outside. Every time I’ve ever recounted this to someone they’ve seen the Immediate flaw in this system, but it apparently slid past all members of staff on a daily basis, despite continued incredulous whining from a dozen barefoot teenagers.On the fourth or fifth day, I was whisked off with no explanation to get an EEG (a test where they part sticker attached to wired attached to a machine on your head and listen to the electricity in your brain.) i was never told the results on that test or why i was getting it done. The lady washed my hair afterwards, which maybe up for the fact that i had to miss breakfast but didn’t make up for the strip searches before and after i left the building. At the very least it made G jealous i’d gotten to wash myself with anything other than the suspicious shower goo.

At some point i started routinely being woken up about a half-hour before everyone else to a nurse that would take my blood pressure. Then i would lay there, tired and confused, until we all had to wake up and get in taken as a group anyways. I asked about this every time they did it and was never given an answer as to why this was necessary. Honestly I think they might have just been messing with me.

We were supposed to refrain from asking for personal information about each other, and told that if we wrote down another patient's email or phone number whatever it was written on would be thrown away if found. Obviously we all worked around this; one girl secretly wrote names on her stomach an hour before she was processed for release, another kid wrote phone numbers in code. For me it was as simple as just remembering people’s last names so I could find them on facebook.

The hospital existed in a kind of twilight zone half in and half out of reality, where a crisis would occur every other hour but in the between times we were all bored to tears. Surrounded by such an intense atmosphere, staff trying to force an understanding of our lives being in our own hands, and we would just sit there, nodding our hands and coloring with our crayons. In a way the hospital was a sanctuary; no family to get into screaming matches with, no classmates to end up in a fist fight with. An environment meant to be scrubbed clean of all the stressors of day to day life. Visiting hours happened twice a week; kids with visitors would go down into the cafeteria while everyone else hung around in the lounge. Usually it was just me and M waiting down there for our families; the visits were always entirely uncomfortable. My parents wanted to be sure I was being treated right, and held my hand with a guilty sadness that I didn’t really want to acknowledge. Free time didn’t offer very many options. We would play cards and coloring mandalas printed out on copy paper. I finished coloring about six of the things before a decided it would no longer be a helpful part of my mental healing journey. Our card game of choice was called “BS,” initially because it was the only game everyone who wanted to play cards seemed to know. BS became a highlight of our day, because of M. The hospital had a lot of rules about how to conduct yourself. We weren’t supposed to yell, run around, or touch each other unnecessarily. We also weren’t supposed to curse. The name of the card game “BS” is short for “Bullshit.” the rules of the game are very simple--cards are passed out and someone decides to go first. In turns, everyone goes around, putting some cards face down on the pile and announcing what value those cards supposed were (someone put down two cards and says they had two jacks, etc.). Multiple cards have to be on the same value, if you think someone is lying, putting down more cards than they had to win faster, you point to them and call out that you think they’re lying. The challenged player turns over their cards, and depending on if they were telling the truth or not one of the players in penalized. Usually the thing you yell out when you challenge someone is “Bullshit,” but we weren’t allowed to say that and were told to call it something else. M thought that this was a personal affront to him and everything that he stood for as a person. Every single free time, two or three times a day, we got into the routine of playing this card game solely to see this scene play out. We would start out normally and do as we were told, politely pointing out lies. M wouldn’t say anything. We’d go on for as long as we could, before someone would make an obvious play, putting down three jacks after someone else put two or saying they had five aces. Then, ecstatic, M would heave air into his lungs, jumping up and pointing at the other player and yelling as loudly as he could: “BULLSHIT!!”

He stopped being scolded for it around the fifth time because most of the staff thought it was hilarious. We’d stop playing the game immediately after that, our point achieved, all of us having got what we came there for. We sat in the hall and shared stories about when each of us had lost our virginity, or the first time we’d been punched in the face. He giggled at Jared as he mimicked grasping at his bleeding nose. The nurses didn’t seem to find it as funny. There was a general, noticeable disconnect between us and them, even the nurses we all likes the most. Not really because of age, or because they were on the job. It was a feeling of disconnecting, not quite meshing with normal people, that all of us already went through life with separately-- and here, where we had community, that only intensified. For many of us this was the first time that our abnormalities had really been accepted and even admired by others. Being with the other kids in my ward was a time i felt freest, even in our restricted and controlled environment. None of them cares if i’d twitch and fidget, none of them minded my shiness or were caught off guard by the things I’d say. While the nurses would squint at me suspiciously if i repeated that they said or spiralled into babbling from our conversations, my new friends had all accepted these things by the third time they came around. I was allowed to express myself and allowed to not be able to, and it felt effortless to return the favor, because who was i to judge. Little outbursts, conversations that trailed off into blank stares, people needing to go walk around or cry or smack their seat five times before they sat on it, these things were all easy to look past. It was hard, however, not to notice the trouble staff still saw with them, and not to turn on them a bit for that. My friends accepted that i spoke weird, while the nurses would roll their eyes if i stammered. G would nod understandingly when I confided in her about the past while staff would react uncomfortably, their only help in offering to make police reports i didn’t want made. If I told the others i felt like hurting myself, they would show sympathy and talk with me about it; the one time I told a nurse i was “having urges,” like we were supposed to, I was put on finger foods. This tension culminated in one particular group session. A thin older woman replaced our usual freud impersonator, loitering outside to chat with the nurses as long as possible before having to deal with us. We whispered to each other; no one had met or before, or seen her around the building. That was probably a bad sign. She told us to call her Olivia, I think. Olivia was the worst therapist I have ever seen in action, and that should be frightening. She commanded direct eye contact between her and the patient speaking, and that no one else speak until directly spoken to (interruptions are one thing, but discussion is just about the entire point of doing therapy in a group.) She gave us all a question she assumed would be simple enough for our tiny broken minds. “What do you think is keeping you here?” I started echoing the hard way she said “What” and clamped my mouth shut as soon as possible. Usually I could keep the parrot in my head around doctors, with some effort; being open with my impulses around the others made it hard to start shutting up again. She took my weird reflex as volunteering to go first, and looked to me expectantly. Its honestly the most stupid and annoying question you will ever be asked in a therapy setting. I never heard it asked in a tone other than condescending, and it's never failed to be ignorant; ‘Why do you think you’re here?’ is therapist code for ‘why are you messing up your life, and can you convince me it isn’t on purpose?’ I had a routine for this question that seemed to be shared with the others; attempt to answer honestly, listing all the things in and out of your control, your life and environment and symptoms, the fact that you are a complex human being with feelings and a past. Then, try not to sigh at your doctor and list some rehearsed line about how you guess you’re just a disrespectful child acting out for attention. I ran through it as quickly as possible, feeling restless and trying not to avert my eyes from hers or change my position too much as she would impatiently observe every movement. Usually I’d have something in my hands to funnel my stress into, but this had to be the one time I forgot to take one of my hoarded stress toys from the pile in my room. Three more kids went after me, in the same routine, with varying degrees of sass. Then Olivia set her eyes on G. The rest of us shared a silent realization and looked to each other with worry, straightening up, thinking up ways to deflect Olivia onto something else. It was too late when G shrunk, laughing nervously and not meeting the womans eyes. G’s home situation was truly heartbreaking to hear retold. I love and respect her too much to retell the details of it here, but Olivia spent what seemed like unending years of punishment pulling this story out of the girl, giving us a demeaning hush if we objected. It was surreal and we didn’t know what to do, stuck in a room with one authority figure under threat and tranquilizers, watching the friend we all openly adored the most be forced to recount such a cruel thing in such complete detail. Obviously she was crying, most of us were too. J sat alone on a couch beside Olivia’s, hands in fists, and I focussed on my fear for him instead of my fear of him. I was sitting beside G, being shushed at every concerned whine that forced its way out, unable to think of an escape plan because I couldn’t turn off my ears. It was when she reached a specific point of the story, G cut herself off and let out a sob and my hand automatically went to her shoulder. Olivia barked out, in the coldest tone I think I have ever heard, “No Touching.” The room exploded, every one of us reacting at the same time with a vicious intensity. The others jumped to their feet, protectively leaning towards G. M pointed and yelled a few choice words hand selected for our doctor, R went for the door to get other staff, someone else just cried out at her hysterically. J lunged at the woman as G slid into my arms, looking away from what was happening and sobbing into my shirt. I put my hand on her hair half to comfort her and half to make sure she didn’t look back. A dozen staff members crowded around the doorway of the room but only three actually entered; I don’t remember how it felt watching my friend try to choke out an old woman and be pulled away by security, but the picture of it in my head is crystal clear. A nurse, Cecily, had her arms out low but wide, making a barrier between us and the gasping doctor. Everyone was yelling, us at staff and staff at us. The intern that helped me with french came to guide Olivia out of the room and M screeched that he was a traitor, throwing a stack on coloring sheets in their general direction. Olivia said something under her breath as she left-- something about how we were terrible demon children, or how ‘never in all her years in the field’ something like this had happened, I think I forgot because her words aren’t worth remembering. We locked eyes for a split second before the slid out of the room, and I muffled “Occupational Hazard” into G’s hair.

For an hour after we were forced to sit and have alcohol poisoning explained to us until Freud Jr. Appeared. We were happy to see him but still furious, all on the same side against Olivia once we were finally asked what had happened. Everyone recounted the same story, agreeing loudly with each other, stopping to comfort and apologize to G and ask if she was okay. We stayed in that room for another hour, giving our testimony and demanding J shouldn’t be punished, or more begging they didn’t send him back to juvenile. Freud nodded solemnly as he listened to us the way only he and Jesus and two of the nurses did, meaning at all. He told us he’d see what he could do. We didn’t see J for the rest of the day and come morning, Jesus was his new shadow. He was on some kind of reverse suicide watch, with all the restrictions, but the league of nameless psychiatrists and hospital directors had agreed or been swayed to agree that J’s only real crime was being physically violent with staff. After dinner that night, I asked if he could have my candy bar, and threw it in the trash when I was refused.

I was discharged after nine days on the ward, feeling no more or less suicidal, no more or less recovered, not more normal but not more different. I remember Rebecca calling me into the hallway to ask if i was afraid to go home. Of course I was, I told her! I was leaving friends I had connected to more in a week than I had with anyone in years. I was returning to a town of people like the staff, strangers that didn’t understand and only pretended to want to. I would be returning to my second month of high school, gone for the last week of September, though I’d barely showed up at all before then. I asked her what I had not to be worried about, but then dropped it, because I knew we were only having this conversation in case my answer alluded that my parents weren’t safe to go home to.

The goodbyes I was given before 8 o’clock lights out were short and sweet and always, turning our attention back and forth between them and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou!” playing on the television. I only slept an hour through that night, feeling about everything I could think to. In the morning, I was given my shoes while the others were lined up, in the middle of Checks. I waved silently at them and heard M call out “Bring a better book next time!” Before Jesus closed the double-doors behind us.

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2traveldads-blog · 7 years

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We’re big on camping. Roughing it doesn’t scare us…because we are car-campers and only go where there are actual bathrooms and running water. Well, we’ve taken our oldest, Oliver, camping many times and he loves it. He’s such a trooper and could play in the dirt for days. We’re prepping to go on a big camping trip to Wyoming and Montana though and we needed to practice a bit before we ventured out. Also, our newest addition, Elliott, hadn’t spent a night in a tent yet, so there was a bit of a fear factor there.We did it. We took the boys out to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State and camped.

Our fear was that Koala wasn’t going to be able to sleep outside. You know, there’s the sound of random birds, other people talking, kids screaming somewhere, pots and pans at a neighboring campsite. The list of what could wake a baby is endless. Despite the cacophony of the night, both kids slept like rocks. And I don’t mean that they slept until 4:30 am and then got up with the sun, but slept until 7:15 and we actually got rest.

Beyond conquering sleep, there were other adventures to try out as a family of four, such as hiking, whale watching, swimming in the ocean, playing in the creek, tide-pooling… Of all of the things we did on the OP, here’s our list of the most enjoyable activities with both an infant and toddler.

Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula

The perfect start to an adventurous weekend on the Olympic Peninsula is with a day in PT. Established in the 1800s as the primary seaport for the Puget Sound (prior to the railroads declaring Seattle as such), the town was built to be beautiful and have all of the features of a keystone city: Victorian downtown, mansions uptown, amazing courthouse complete with looming bell tower…and a castle. Today, it’s got everything that a tourist could want. Local beer (PTBrewing), local wine (Fairwinds Winery) and cider (Alpenfire) are available throughout the town. The NorthwestMaritime Center is right on the water and ready to pull you into wooden boat culture. Fort Worden has beach, woods and WWII bunkers for exploring, as well as the Point Wilson lighthouse and the most amazing field for flying kites. I didn’t get into all of the shops in the downtown, because that’s its own day, but hit up what I just mentioned and kids and adults are set for fun.

Tip: there is a ferry that goes to PT from Whidbey Island. It’s a tiny boat and it gets full very quickly. The best route is to ferry from Seattle or Edmonds and then drive across the Hood Canal Bridge.

The Beach

We live by a beach, but we are really far into the Puget Sound, so there’s not actual ocean waves. Also there’s not a ton of sand. Cue the Olympic Peninsula… Such cool beaches: enormous drift wood at LaPush, the softest sand ever at Salt Creek, tide pools on the Strait of Juan de Fuca (see below). What makes the beaches here so different and fun is that they are playable. The sand isn’t dry and blasting your eyes with from the wind. The shore is gradual, so there’s lots of sandy space. The waves aren’t the size of tsunamis straight from Japan so you can actually play in them when it’s warm.

Also, when you go to the beach with an infant, chances are that there’s going to be a lot of time for one parent and the baby to just sit on the beach and play ON A BLANKET. These beaches are both great for that due to the beautiful views and flat surface.

Tip: bring binoculars year round to watch for passing grey, humpback and orca whales. We’ve been able to see grey and orca whales with the naked eye in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Tip 2: a baby at the beach will be sandy no matter how hard you try. Be okay with it in the moment, but be swift in addressing it when you leave the beach. Sand stuck in tiny baby fat rolls can be painful and wear at their skin. Bathe/shower them immediately for the happiest results.

Tip 3: remember back to when you were little and how tired you were after a day in the sun and sand. Know that kids will be worn out after this. Plan for tired kids and parents directly following exodus of said beach.

Tidepools on the Olympic Peninsula

I’m a bit obsessed with the ocean and not actually being a merman I have to enjoy it in ways other than living underwater. Luckily, our oldest son is the same way. He loves to play in the water and sand, but now he’s been exposed to something even better: tide pools! Tide pools, for those who don’t know, are the low spot in rock outcroppings that are full of water after the tide goes out. This means that there is an environment that can hold life even at low tide. For a child who loves the sea, this is the perfect spot to see all of the tiny friends that normally are out in the water. We saw hermit crabs, anemones, sculpin (fish), chitons, huge barnacles feeding… Also, the rocks are home to many pelagic seabirds, so it’s great for birdwatching. The tide pools on the Strait are really fantastic. They are easy to traverse as an adult, toddler or parent wearing a baby in a pack. Also, the rocks go far enough out that the danger of being caught in a wave is truly minimal.

Tip: the best shoes for tide pooling are sandal-type shoes with a little traction. They’ll provide good footing on the rocks and then dry fast.

Tip 2: if the Olympic Peninsula isn’t close enough when you’re visiting Seattle or Portland, check out Whidbey Island’s tide pools, or if you’re south, the Oregon Coast has a plethora of opportunities for them.

RULE: do not take anything from a tide pool. Example: an empty snail shell might actually be a hermit crab’s home. Would you want somebody to take yours?

Hiking on the OP

The Olympic Peninsula is where the mountains literally meet the sea. What this means is that you can either hike hike or walk hike. For hardcore folks they can traverse the Olympic Mountains from all sides, climbing Mt. Rose or heading up out of Staircase by Lake Cushman. For those of us with kids, we’ve got some other options. The Hoh Rainforest is one of my favorite places because it makes me feel like I’m walking with gnomes. I know, silly, but when you’ve got a 3 year old to entertain along the way, it’s nice to be able to look for gnomes.

The Hoh is so dense with moss and fallen trees that it’s almost like another planet. The streams are so fully of algae and other plants, the look like alien rivers. Other easy hiking includes heading to the beach areas for walks in the sand or if you’ve got the time and energy, trekking all of the way out to the Dungeness Spit lighthouse. There’s such a variety and with something different to see at each stop, you can’t go wrong. Hurricane Ridge is also a great day hiking spot, with views going all the way to Victoria, BC and Seattle. **beware of mountain goats at Hurricane Ridge. They’re not indigenous and are still angry about it, so they’re not friendly.

Tip: despite being called a temperate rainforest, the Hoh can actually be rather hot and dry. Be prepared with lots of water and the energy to carry little people, as the mugginess can be draining.

Tip 2: for younger kids, having an actual hiking pack is very helpful and will make you all feel much better about your adventure when you realize how much more comfortable it is than just a standard baby pack.

Whale Watching on the Salish Sea

There are a few approaches to whale watching. 1.) Set up a chair on a bluff or beach and wait for the whales to swim by, hoping to catch a glimpse. 2.) Hire a random guide in a marina in Sequim or Port Angeles to take you out on a small boat and hope that they are whale-wise and responsible. 3.) Spend the extra money to go on a whale watching expedition with a company that guarantees sightings.

It sounds weird that they can guarantee sightings, but here’s why: the reputable companies all work together to share whale locations, thus making for quicker sighting and more positive guest experiences, thus building their businesses and awareness of whales and their plight. It’s all a rather good set up. Since the tour companies are regulated and the Fish and Wildlife chaps are out in their boats monitoring, the whales are treated well and given wide berth for going their own way. The experience is great and there’s nothing like seeing the wonder in your child’s eyes when an orca jumps out of the water in front of them.

Tip: you can book whale watching either from the Olympic Peninsula or the mainland (Seattle/Everett). Excursions are typically 4-5 hours, but it’s worth the time to be on the water and see such beauty.

Tip 2: there’s no shame in being prepared with a little entertainment for younger kids, as boat travel isn’t always the most exciting part of the day.

There is, of course, far more to do and see on the Olympic Peninsula. Native American culture thrives in several areas, so watch for totem poles. The Twilight Saga was filmed on the OP and going out of Port Angeles and Forks, you can go on Twilight themed tours. There are some beautiful National Park lodges to visit or stay at, Lake Quinault, Kalaloch or Lake Crescent. Seriously, you could do a two week vacation here easily, and everybody in the family will have an amazing time.

To see more photos of Olympic National Park, the Salt Creek area, or other spots on the Olympic Peninsula, peek at other posts we’ve done! And to check out another great town, Port Ludlow, read our Behind the Picture post about this wonderful port town.

Here’s a quick sunset on the Strait of Juan de Fuca to leave you with:

The Olympic Peninsula: almost paradise in the PNW We’re big on camping. Roughing it doesn’t scare us…because we are car-campers and only go where there are actual bathrooms and running water.

#camping #day trips #family travel #gay dad #gay family #gay travel #glbt #hiking #national park #olympic peninsula #orcas #pnw travel #port townsend #tourism #victorian #washington state ferries #whale watching

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survivor-switzerland · 7 years

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EPISODE 9: MY LITTLE GREMLINS AND I ARE FLIPPING THE SCRIPT - DOM

Logan went home and I AM SHOOK. I AM SHOOK TO THE CORE!! I thought he could've used his connections with Luke to save himself but looks like the 4 OG Matterhorn are tight as a rope. Right now Tyler could be in danger because I feel like this challenge is in Max's wheelhouse.

Now my tribe is in a dilemma because we all like each other and we have to vote each other out. Thank the sadistic hosts for that. Now hopefully I win this immunity because I need to be absolutely sure I'm going to merge because ain't no way am I gonna be a pre-merge boot!

Well, the plan worked out and Logan left. It sucks and kinda felt like how I'd imagine kicking a puppy would feel like but I think it's for the best that he's gone, although it does suck that he went through all of this to get the same placement a second time.

From here on out, the only person I put my trust is 100% is Zack, then Tyler and then Luke, which is kind of surprising. But Luke seemed kinda sketchy this round with his connection with Logan so I'll be keeping my eye on him.

I'm nervous about this round since both tribes are going to tribal, but hopefully I'll be good no matter what as Matterhorn still has the advantage on the tribe, and Tyler and Max are the minority. The ideal situation is that someone other than Max wins immunity and then we can take them out because I think it's about time that we end the feud between Zack and Max, and that isn't gonna be done by taking out Zack, at least not on my watch!

UGHHH I am so upset. So Logan was voted out and that is a huge blow for not only my game but for Nick and Ashley Sarah's games as well. Now that he's gone, we have to get a majority some other way. The only way we can do that is if we make sure that Ian is on our side so we can blindside Luke, Tyler, Zack, and Abel. My tribe has to stick together and I'm assuming that Max will be voted out of that tribe bc of the friend group. That is kinda good for me though. HOLY CRAP I JSUT CAME UP WITH SOMETHIGN WHILE TYPING THIS. WHAT IF WE BLINDSIDE BEN? COULD YOU IMAGINE THE CHAOS? THIS WOULD BREAK THE ABEL/BEN FRIENDSHIP F2 AND WOULD GIVE US NUMBERS IN CASE BEN FLIPPED ON US AT THE MERGE. y'all this is my story arch or my elimination episode. i'm hoping it's not the latter of the two. anyways. I came into this game wanting to work with Luke. After tonight? I love you luke but you can fucking choke for what you did to logan. logan deserves so much better and now I'm coming for you. I will not stop until you and your alliance is taken out by none other than THE dom from original Monte Rosa. You can kiss my Puerto Rican ass luke. love you as a person tho you're actually super sweet but you pissed me off. anyways good night america and stay shook canada.

Voting Logan out last tribal was so tough because he's one of my best friends and it sucks so bad but like I said in my voting confessional, it was going to happen at some point. Coming into the double tribal, we really need to do our best to make sure that Max doesn't win individual immunity because he's next on the list to go. If he does win immunity? I have no idea what might happen. I called with Tyler and we talked it through and said that we could probably vote for Abel or Zack but to prevent a tie, I might have to use my vote negator to ensure that rocks aren't pulled and one of us goes home. Tyler and I made a pact to go to the end and we plan on doing that but it's gonna be tough. Looking at a potential merge after these two tribal councils, I predict that the two people that leave in the double will because jury members 1 and 2 but I'm not sure. Merge is going to be difficult with there only being 4 original Matterhorn members (3 if Max wins immunity) so Tyler said he'd protect me as best he can but Tyler doesn't know that I'm actually close with some people over there so I should be okay.

Double tribal and someone will be immune from each tribe!!!! I'm so nervous!!! It would be nice to actually win something for a change. These challenges seem to be either not my greatest or I just don't have time like people here seem to.

EPISODE 9

We were all ready for a merge and to be up 8-4, but SURPRISE! It was a double muthafuckin' tribal. Yikes. The good news was that if I were to survive the double-elimination, I would make it to the top 10 and officially surpass my Tumblr Survivor: Myanmar placement.

Logan was bounced from the other tribe and that came as a MAJOR shock because Tyler and Max were (seemingly) brand new to the OG Matterhorn 4 and furthermore, they had a history of working with Logan on the Trent, Daisy, and Lily votes as far as I knew. And Max is lacking in the possessing a personality department, so I really thought they'd all just be bored do death by them and vote them off. Fortunately, Tyler stuck around and I hope that Tyler manages to survive this double tribal as well.

I discussed Logan's elimination with Nick. Tyler warned me how close the two of them (and Dom as well), so I figured I could get some loyalty points from Nick by eulogizing Logan and bemoaning his tragic loss and how detrimental it is to my game and blah blah blah--we had a good talk, Nick's a really cool dude, and I'm going to need him on my side going forward.

This double tribal does not bode well for me. I'm safe. No one is coming after me. But that's because I'm aligned with everyone (without even trying). It's 100% Parvati's "I'm in such a hot pickle!" situation. Ashley and Ian think that I'm with them (and I am). Dom, Nick, and Benjamin think I'm with them (I'm really with just Dom as far as I'm concerned, but that could change). My ultimate goal is to find a way to get rid of either Benjamin or perhaps Ian this round, preferably the former so as not to sketch out Tyler if he survives this round.

I chatted up Dom first and he took the words right out of my mouth--Ian is sketchy, but Benjamin is a major flight risk going forward. Ben resolved to talk to Nick. I offered to talk to Ashley and she could potentially talk to Ian. We both want the same thing. We both want this vote to be unanimous so that there are no apparent cracks going into a merge at 10 with 4 OG Matterhorns still kicking. That's dangerous territory. When one is in the majority, they need that family as happy and carefree as possible. A 4-2 or 3-3 could ruin lives here. No, thank you. Upon talking with Ashley and Ian, they agreed.

The immunity challenge was finding cows. Really, this was going to come down to who had the most free time available to them and who was the most willing to give up that free time. The answer in this case was Ian (but the real story is--Jesus Christ, Zack! Several thousand cows! I feel like you were safe no matter what and you just put that time in to show...how big of a threat you are? I found that strange) and Ian's safety is a best case scenario for me. The two names swirling around the tribe were Ben for potential connections to the other side and Ian for being a wet blanket in terms of strategy.

Let me take this opportunity while discussing Ian to say that he's been a MAJOR disappointment. Early in the game, he was really sweet and genuine and I loved the guy, but the second we had our first tribal council looming, he became this enigma. He suddenly has no opinions. Talking strategy to him has been very difficult because he brings nothing to the table. Part of me figures that this is because Ian doesn't want any information to come back around and bite him in the ass, but I feel like he's going about it wrong. He's coming across to several people on our tribe as very noncommittal and shifty. When I ask him how he feels about the vote or what he thinks our best move is, he talks in riddles and blah statements and not only is it boring, it's not helpful at all. It's like I'm talking to a dog. I feel like I'm addressing him with clarity and all he hears "Blah Blah Blah, Ginger." Honestly, if Ian hadn't won immunity, I'd have been very tempted to get rid of him this round.

Ian's immunity put Dom and I in a clear driver's seat with Ben's elimination in our sights. We were fine. Ashley was fine. Ian was Ian (but will go along with Ashley and me). Ben thinks everything's hunky dory and Ashley is our only option and such--cool, cool, cool. Then there was Nick. And Dom was telling me Nick is on board because I'm on board, but Nick seemed VERY apprehensive when I spoke to him. Nick clearly wants to vote off Ashley, but is having difficulty with pulling the trigger because he knows voting off Benjamin is best for his game. The whole exchange between Nick and I was so weird because he and Dom were both telling me different things about Nick's perspective at the same time. It was terrifyingly unsettling.

And then I fuck up. Dom & Ben are similar names to me insofar as they're one syllable and three letters and in conversations with both Nick and Dom, I said "Yeah we're all set to vote for Dom" or something like that when I definitely meant "Ben." Oh my God! Such a terrible lapse in language. This is why one shouldn't drink and scheme. The names all start to get loose. Fortunately, I think Nick and Dom believed me (it's the truth, I swear), but holy shit if I were to get voted off just because I did the whole "I Ross take thee Rachel--Emily!" thing. I'm the worst.

New future plan--find some way to eliminate both Ian and Nick while keeping the sane ones, Ashley and Dom happy. Let's make that happen, okay?

So Zack wins individual immunity... *inserts Katya rolling her eyes losing to Alaska in a lip sync for the second time.gif*

Wow! I won immunity so I'm guaranteed F10 wohoo! Honestly if I stayed home yesterday instead of going to the mall I may have even reached the 2k mark alongside Zack. But nah I wasn't gonna waste my last few days of summer vacation finding some damn cow. As Bart Simpson said "Don't have a cow man."

Damn Tyler came in second now I'm so worried for him. This double tribal council guarantees 2 OG Monte Rosa going because over here on Matterhorn we're all OG Monte Rosa and on Monte Rosa the 4 OG Matterhorn will obviously stick together.

Now hosts, you know I love all you and all but for this round I hate you all because we all like each other on our tribe and we have to vote someone out. :( Ugh, can we just all eat some nightlock berries and rebel against these evil hosts.

So far according to Nick, Ben and Ashley's name has been thrown and I'm not gonna let Ashley go, not on my watch! The H4rmony alliance must survive this tribal and my tribe needs to have a united vote so no one is alienated and flips on us.

hiiii!!!! long time no talk!! idek where to begin tbh. so i had like 2 tribals off bc my tribe won immunity?? i was shook bc that was a new feeling in this game to like.. have off and just relax and not worry! but last night, we had a tribal! and logan? went home. that's exactly what i wanted. lemme explain.

i told logan i want max out. (i mean.. i do but i'm not dumb enough to let logan get further then he has already.) so i told logan i'd vote with him, which i did. but i made sure i still had the votes to get logan out. i can't have logan, nick & dom make merge together. i jusy can't, they would be untouchable. but i want logan to think i had nothing to do with his blindside because come merge, i don't want nick & dom coming after me for plotting logan's demise. and it worked. logan believes that i had nothing to do woth his blindside and that it was all luke. so sorry luke, but dom & nick can come after you while i sit back and enjoy my motherfuckin sprite.

SO! this week both tribes are going to tribal. i won immunity so i'm good. (btw my score... i really fucking found over 2,000 cows...) but i want and need max gone now. son of a bitch voted against me last tribal and it openly plotting against me and i don't need someone like that in the merge. so, if i get what i want like usual, max will go. todaloo hoe!

Okay so I hope this vote goes smoothly. Ben thinks that the vote is for Ashley tonight. Little does he know, my little gremlins and I are flipping the script. or so i thought until brett fucked up by saying my name instead of ben's. im still kinda confused as to why that happened but oh well. i love ben so much but like he's going to win the game if no one takes him out lmao. voting ben out is going to screw us all over when we merge though. the other tribe's friend group is like so close with ben (unless abel is voted out tonight idk i could be reading the other tribe completely wrong) I'm hoping that either Luke, Zack, Jev, or Abel go home tonight because we need numbers going into the merge. Ben is too scary to keep around because of the fact that he'd flip to Abel's side. We need to get Abel out as soon as possible because he literally has a winner's edit. He's gone to 7 tribals and has gotten votes at most of them. He needs to go as soon as possible so someone else has a shot at winning.

Lmao Zack found like 2000 cows fucking loser

I'm so nervous, we've all put votes on Max but now I'm scared in case he pulls out an idol and he's the sole vote for me and I leave. He can't vote Zack, so I'm probably next best.

I either beat my previous placement tonight or I do worse than I did last time around, so there's a lot at stake for me personally.

#ihopeiseeyounever #confessionals

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