#i have health problems i cant ignore for very long now and im scared

[mental-health-advice]

im sorry that it's so long i dont have anyone to share it with and i dont have money for psychological help but i am desperate

i have this problem that i cant listen to people, it's very rare for me to find other people's lives interesting, even my best friends'. sometimes i have this moment when im curious and ask but I don't ever catch myself as little as having thoughts about other people and i can see that i struggle with empathy

i realized lately that all my attempts to help other people in the past were caused by my feelings of superiority towards them, now i just don't attempt to help them at all. i've never been listened by my family, no one ever listens to one another and none of us seems to be truly interested in each other that much. all my friends through my entire life have never been the types to get into any deep conversations as well. ive been heavily bullied my entire life and my parents never asked about anything, my friends witnessed me getting bullied a hundred times and it was all just ignored and no one ever reacted or talked to me about it. since i was 10 i live in some other world in my head and that's all i think about in life, i feel like i built my entire life around it and it's terrifying because it doesn't seem normal to other people. sometimes i get people telling me that i might be autistic but i feel like it's such a heavy word for what im going through and also ill never probably be able to find out

now that im at university in a completely different environment and city, it scares me that i don't know how to fix it. when someone asks questions about my own life i have no idea what to say. i've never been asked about my opinions, my health, things that i like. i barely think about these things myself and to that i am expected to show interest in other people and ask them the same questions

i want to have friends but i feel like i just deserve to be isolated because im not empathetic and it seems like im also fake. it's complicated i guess i just have to ask if there are any advice to find people around me interesting so i can have friends

Hey there,

I’m so sorry that whilst you were growing up, no one really seemed to listen to you or take an interest in you and your life and also that you grew up being bullied. It actually also helps to paint a picture of why you may find it difficult to make friends and hold conversations with them now.

It’s really important that you know and remind yourself that you definitely do not deserve to be isolated from other people. You did not ask to be treated as you were whilst growing up and nor were you always able to stop it from happening and especially in regards to the being bullied by others. When you feel like you don’t deserve to have friends or to socialise with others, it can be helpful to remind yourself that we as people are social beings and so we all need someone in our life, even if it’s just one or two people! Remember that it’s also not about the quantity of friends that we have in our lives either but rather the quality of the friendship!

In regards to making friends now, sometimes it can he helpful to just casually catch up first and then form a bond with them from there. So for example, do something with them where talking is not the main focus. So, maybe go to the movies with them, to a local attraction like to a zoo or a walk with different sceneries. Try and do something that you can talk about what is going on around you as opposed as just ‘talking in depth’ about things. This can also be a great ice breaker as well! From there when you see them, perhaps speak to them about the experience you both shared, likes and dislikes/ what you most enjoyed and didn’t. Again, this can take the pressure off just talking and will allow you both to have a focus in the conversation with them. It will also allow you to get to know the other a bit better and in time you may find that the conversation may flow a bit more easily and especially if together you do different things that you can then both chat about!

Showing empathy to others is a little harder and especially if you weren’t shown it in your early life. It is something you can definitely learn and do though so don’t be too hard on yourself! Maybe a good starting point may be to look at yourself and how you would like someone to treat you or react to you in different situations. This can really help with the learning process as even though people need different things after going through different things in life, often what we all have in common is wanting a friendly ear, someone we can talk too who we feel like really cares about us!

I really hope that this has helped a bit and please do let us know if we can help to support you in any other way!

I’m thinking of you and hope that you are going well!

Take care,

Lauren

[kizmet-hexes]

I'm so fucking scared

[uranium]

feel free to ignore this if you want but I'd be really interested to hear what it is about radiation that makes it so fascinating to you & why you feel compelled to work with it? as someone with pretty bad health anxiety where any risk of cancer is a trigger I just can't wrap my head around it lol

hi!!! okay sorry i have a cold right now so im kind of out of it but. radiation is SO interesting to me because it is something that has an aspect of danger to it, but also has the potential to do a LOT of good as well. fusion energy is likely to take off at some point, but we haven't even gotten it to truly Work yet, and its going to take years and years and years and years to get it to a commercial scale that can begin to take over the very pressing threat of the coal industry.

nuclear, on the other hand, is something we know how to do. we've known how to do it for a while, and many of the mistakes and accidents that have occurred were because shortcuts were taken to avoid spending more money on critical safety measures and proper employee training. these days we have even safer technologies and i believe workers and government agencies are a lot more cautious now that we know what can go wrong. there's also a HUGE medical sector of nuclear - although it's not my main interest, i'm also working to help create an element in a nuclear reactor (previously only made in particle accelerators) that is extremely rare but has shown amazing results in its ability to straight up fucking cure cancer. unfortunately, a lot of the caution as mentioned above has turned to extreme levels of fear to the point most people freak out as soon as nuclear anything is mentioned.

this becomes a problem because. and im sorry i dont have the source on me rn ill grab it later but literally the coal industry puts out radiation and has a measurable impact on increased cancer levels in the US than the nuclear industry even comes close to. coal and fossil fuels are absolutely decimating our planet at a breakneck speed. ive taken classes on current air pollution and its expectations in the future that left me more panicked than anything ive read on individual nuclear accidents. we HAVE the technology to have nuclear used on a mass scale in the US (many other countries do) and there are thousands of scientists all over the country working to make it even safer and to solve the problem of long term nuclear waste management(which my research group is doing!)

also, working with radiation is usually....pretty safe! people generally do not want to get highly irradiated. i love radiation but that doesn't mean i want to get blasted by it, or risk huge chances of getting blasted by it. i work at a research reactor and i usually have to wear 2-3 dosimeters at all times in there, and get in trouble whenever im not. there are alarms stationed everywhere for the slightest increase in radiation, and we work with extreme amounts of caution. we recently had what we considered a Huge Mistake where a sample we were given to irradiate came out much hotter than we expected and everyone got dosed higher than usual. the highest dose someone got was 25 millirem. you need 10,000 millirem to get a 0.8% increase in cancer. this was our major scare. on an average day of work my dosimeter reads a dose of.....0.0 mrem. maybe 0.01 if it was in a high field. our supervisor has been working with radiation since he was 19 and is now close to 90 and one of the healthiest elderly people i know, and bro has been exposed to multiple curies in one go and came out fine.

pretty much, yes. there is a risk in what i am doing. i cant look anybody in the eyes and say there is an absolute 0% chance of me getting sick or injured with this work but i am far too fascinated by the...."magic" of radiation, as well as the vast amounts of good it can do for humanity, to let that stop me. many jobs have MUCH more dangerous risks, and higher rates of cancer, than a modern radiation worker.

[vanityloves]

Storm and ivy + medic

@septemberlove i have. no excuse for how late these are but uh. thank you for sending these in 💕.

[word count: 1.8k+ with the longest 'authors note' bc im mentally ill]

sfw, mmm comfy cozy, general sick hcs,

storm - what are cozy days in with your f/o like?

Whenever I think of cozy days, my brain immediately goes to rainy/chilly weather where we can cuddle up together and my brain short fuses. I'm gonna assume this is just like a day off or something though!

How I visual them together vs how I write them is odd because they technically don't act or accept they're 'together' until after the comics but I always write them like they're in a Steady Relationship while on base. I'm always writing a slight AU if you will. Or maybe it's after they get their jobs back at Mann co - I should highkey adjust that but No ♥️. No more thinking, just content based off my idealized universe.

There's definitely a point in their relationship where it's like 'I think I have to put in a little more work here'. I'm not saying either party is slacking but they're slacking ♥️. Neither of them really take action. Chef doesn't blame him or really complain about it because that's their nature, plus they don't know how romantic relationships really work or flow, especially with a person like him. Medic doesn't see an issue with anything and continues on with his normal business. 

What I mean by slacking is, there's not a lot of quality time being spent together which would be fine if it wasn't both of their strongest Love Languages, which could help them strengthen their relationship. It's odd because they're 'romantically involved' but they don't spend a lot of time together for either of them to consider it romantic, simply because it's on company time. 

ANYWAYS THATS JUST ME BEING CONVOLUTED. FEEL FREE TO JUST IGNORE ALL OF THIS.

Medic goes to bed pretty late and wakes up at a fairly early hour. Chef is a late sleeper and forced to be an early riser because their Actual Job is to make at least 2 or 3 meals a day (if they want something else, they're on their own but hate when anyone messes up the kitchen and will honestly, stand there and watch said person).

There's minimal time they can spend together if they want to do their own activities - for Medic, it's tinkering around with organs or in Engie's garage, for Chef, they're typically meal prepping or trying to tend to an animal or plant of some sort.

Medic is actually more direct about wanting attention and it's never been a problem because he's cautious about it. Chef is more emotionally inclined and willing to drop hints that they want more attention. 

Chef probably has one day off where it's a complete free for all, for the rest of the team, which would be the perfect time to spend with Medic - If he wanted to stop working, that is. Just don't picture it but, Chef will literally sit in the medbay for hours just to be near the guy, but it isn't bad? The drone of machinery or the scratching of his pen is relaxing, or having his doves nearby is always sweet! Plus, he's prone to talking their ear off when he finds something interesting, so they'll chime in and have some back and forth.

But, yknow - sometimes having someone's undivided attention is nice and Chef is pretty dense when it comes to that and wonders why they feel so upset.

They swallow their pride and ask Medic if they sleep in his room one night and Medic's not as dense as Chef, he understands that they'd never ask for something so out of the blue for no reason and he promises to finish up his work early so they could head to bed together. Chef had nothing planned, they literally just needed that affection and closeness - since it was their day off Medic takes the hint and puts his work aside for the time being.

They'd probably sleep in and stay in bed a while longer before getting ready together - no uniform required. Chef isn't so talkative in the mornings, Medic's noticed, but they were happily fiddling with his buttons and tie, humming in thought before answering his questions. Medic's seen them out of uniform of course, but it's always funny seeing them in just a button up and jeans like … mom on the go vibes. Medic leaves his coat behind before making his way to the kitchen with Chef. 

The kitchen usually has a couple people loitering around, grabbing their coffee or honestly, waiting around for Chef because they always make extra and these bitches are lazy. But the kitchen has now become A Medic Supremacy Zone and he has first dibs - the benefits of being w/ Chef I guess. The two would work as if the others weren't there, keeping their conversation between each other even if that means Medic tilting his head down while Chef leans in closer to reply. There's a high possibility the other have left them to their own devices, seeing as the couple was ignoring them / knows they won't be getting anything. Breakfast isn't extraordinary but it feels special since they actually get to sit across each other and share the morning today.

It's possible that they'd go out and run some errands today, but it's a cover to window shop and walk around. I'll be honest, they probably haven't had proper dates so it's refreshing. You could ask Chef what they liked the most and they're just like :] Yes. 

Other times, they like to curl up and catch up with some reading (well, Medic at least) while Chef rests against him and skim over the words. They're not too invested in what he's reading but likes to have some idea of what he's talking about so they don't ask too many questions. (Very 'these words are big and english/german is not my first language + I can't read as fast as you can so I got lost 7 pages ago). Medic likes to watch Chef garden and tries to help them tend to whatever they're able to grow in the goddamn desert. He overwaters a cactus and looks away if it dies. Chef talks ab how they're growing mint and how it really took off while Medic's standing there like :] Oh, lets make tea with that. Because they're Old People (read: Medic is old)

🕊🐁

ivy - how do you take care of each other when you’re sick?

Chef is easier to take care of when they're sick. They continue working until they're pretty beat but once they feel sick and a break doesn't work, they'll try to finish up what they can before turning in early. They see themselves to bed and inform whoever's near that they won't ne there at dinner and if they really cant figure it out, then come get them - other than that, they're barricading themselves in their room.

When they're sick they're REALLY sick but recovery time is usually a few days (depending on how bad it is). They basically hibernate and don't like being disturbed. They're used to not fending for themselves since they've been on their own for a while but really appreciate all the check ins Medic does w/ them, especially when they're all better. 

Medic, being...their Medic, he definitely gives them a check up when they first begin showing symptoms and he can be a stickler when it comes to drinking fluids and eating properly. Chef usually has a  finicky stomach as it is so Medic really urges them to drink soups and easy foods like bread and crackers. He checks in on them A LOT, even if that's just peeking in to see if they're asleep or not. He backs off when Chef gives him a cold stare from under the covers and minimizes his intrusions/tries to be more sneaky about it. He has colder hands and they let out a sigh when he puts his hand to their cheek or forehead to check their temperature. 

Chef doesn't hesitate to take any medication he has for them, mostly bc they aren't fully coherent but they also don't have energy to care, in fact they have the thought that if he accidentally kills them, maybe respawn will cure them. Unfortunately, Medic debunks this before they can even muster up the energy to ask.

Overall 7.5/10, very good patient. Will refuse to get up and accidently falls asleep in the shower which scares the shit out of him.

Medic on the other hand is very stubborn and doesn't like to stop working unless there's something that physically stops him (ex: vomiting, serious injuries [unlikely bc medigun], etc). If he tricked the Devil, surely the man can beat the common cold or flu! Unfortunately he gets those full body shivers and feels terrible. He can be pretty dramatic when he's sick and everyone's subjected to his bad attitude. 

It's Chefs turn to play doctor - they can tell by looks alone that he's under the weather. His face is flushed and he's a bit sloppily put together, which isn't *too uncommon* but his tie isn't tied and his glasses lamely slide down his nose. They tsk a bit while taking his temperature just to keep track of it before ushering him to his room.

He can be dragged to bed if persistent enough. Chef's firm hold on his arm is enough for him to get off his chair and have them tug him along. He doesn't have any room to argue with them as they look up at him, so he relents, stating that a short break would definitely do him good, but he'll be up and at em by tomorrow. 

Chef is doting and becomes a bit of a helicopter parent when checking on him. This mostly consists of peeking their head in but not really stepping in the room. Every so often they'll wake him up to drink water and either hand him an ice pack or offer a cold towel and move to dab at his forehead and neck.

Medic hasn't been too keen on having others taking care of him bc that's HIS job, and he often tries to shoo Chef away by saying he's more than alright now. Sometimes he's caught sitting up in bed doing work or taking notes on something bc he's a bit restless when he's sick and stationary for too long.

But he's right. He's very good at taking care of himself - when Chef offers him food he'll force himself to eat some of it and he's drinks plenty of fluids without needing reminders. He kinda bosses Chef around, telling them to grab certain medications from the Medbay. They trust his judgment on his own health and bring him what he asks for but Chef keeps a mental note of what he takes and when. Don't need the doctor accidentally taking too many pills today!

Overall 6.5/10. It's hard to get him into bed and becomes restless fairly easily. He is persistent that he's ok after one day of rest only to be found sneezing himself away in the Medbay. 

[wennjunhui]

seventeen hospital au

im back at it again with another random seventeen post bc nurse!jun is ruining me :)))))

disclaimer: the most i know about hospitals and how they work is from chicago med so dont expect this to be accurate 

seungcheol

attending physician in the ed

kinda intimidating but is really a huge softie

but don’t make him angry bc that is not a good idea at all

always seen with a protein shake

tends to hover over the new med students a lot

partially because it’s important to evaluate them and their knowledge

but most because he thinks its funny when they freak out around him

always asks for a psych consult even when he knows its not necessary

bc its totally in the best interest in the patient and not because hes bored and wants to talk with his bff nahhh

has a long term girlfriend that works as a software developer

everyone in the ed tryna get him to propose bc ITS BEEN 9 YEARS DAMMIT WIFE HER ALREADY

jeonghan

psychiatry fellow

usually works night shifts because hes sleeps schedule is fucked 

functions on coffee and coffee alone

is constantly Tired

catch him napping in the break rooms whenever he has time

originally wanted to go into psychology, but he gets too invested and thought it would be better to maintain short term relationships

bffs with seungcheol, but bffls with joshua

by the off chance he’s not tried, he’ll go around the ed and tease the doctors and nurses

hes in the ed a lot tho bc someone keeps calling him even tho “he literally just sprained his ankle seungcheol why am i here”

joshua

plastics fellow

fucking loaded

pulls up to the ed in a fucking gold ferrari and just shrugs when people ask about

‘yeah i got it as a birthday gift, treat yourself ya know?’

born and raised in the us, but went to south korea to further his studies

bffls with jeonghan

by GOD the chance theyre in the same room, its game over for everyone

his surgery playlist is fucking wild 

did a heartbreaking ballad just finish playing? oh thats sad but move over its britney bitch 

always brings a guitar to work parties

‘if you sing sunday morning one more fucking time-’ proceeds to sing sunday morning ‘GODDAMMIT JOSHUA’

is seeing the cute hotel concierge that works a few blocks away 

junhui

the Hot Nurse

literally all the patients fucking swoon 

kinda makes patients nervous bc of how handsome he is

ok i’ll stop now

occasionally scrubs in as a surgical nurse for minghao

he pretends to be all cool and hot shit in front of patients, but when hes around staff he turns into a giant bright ball of excitable fluff 

will always be asked to be assigned to kid patients bc he loves kids

studied abroad in korea and decided he loved it there so he stayed

may or may not have a crush on someone in the hospital but shh no one knows except jeonghan and minghao

has no problem calculating correct dosages but cant do basic math for the life of him

‘no junhui, 7+8 does not equal 17′

soonyoung

senior resident in the ed

HYPEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!!!111

works night shifts bc otherwise the ed would be dead without him

probably drinks too much redbull for his own health

his favorite treatment room is treatment room five because “that’s where a patient peed on me on my first day here”

“ok soonyoung good to kno”

“no problem”

not very tech savvy 

always manages to fuck up the tablets somehow every shift

for the love of GOD dont let him near an xray machine

also never assign him and seungkwan on the same patient they will accomplish nothing 

has taken chan under his wing

wonwoo

neurology resident

blind as fuck

harry potter glasses for days

looks really cold on the outside but is really just a huge fucking dork

like actually he laughs and jokes about anything and everything

neurology can be dark sometimes yo and humor is a great way to cope with it

that and gaming

half the reason why he cant see is bc he spent too much time playing video games growing up

still kinda does but he gets away with it

accompanies soonyoung on the night shift bc he knows soonyoung gets lonely sometimes

plays ballads in the surgery rooms because it helps him keep calm

jihoon

pathology resident

‘forget working with humans hAVE YOU SEEN THIS BLOOD CULTURE ITS COOL AS FUCK’

that being said, he hangs around the break rooms a lot because being cooped up in pathology is just tiring sometimes and he needs actual people to talk to

but mostly its so he can draw on jeonghans sleeping face

shares a flat with soonyoung bc rent is expensive yo

usually has the best tunes down in pathology 

originally wanted to go into music, but school kinda killed his enjoyment of it for a long time

is slowly getting back into and finding his joy in it again

he knows too many stories about the ed that hes forced to listen to

“for the last fucking time soonyoung i dont care about how your patient threw up on seungkwan”

“okokok but`”

“no”

seokmin

ed resident wanting to specialize in pediatrics

SUNSHINE AND HAPPINESS AND SMILES EVERYWHERE

wow literally everyone in the ed is in love with him a teeny tiny bit

because he has such a bright and positive aura around him that its hard not to feel happy 

sings to the smol children if they get scared 

everyone always asks him to sing at work parties and he kills it every time despite being initially shy

“wait wait wait you were in a rock band in high school???”

has a crush on the ed secretary out front

its so fucking cute the rest of the ed ships them so much

sometimes he doubts himself and his skills and that makes his day very sad

but everyone in the ed is in love with him and will constantly be there to remind seokmin about how amazing his is and how much he deserves to be here

and thatll make his day better c:

mingyu

ed resident

the Hot Doctor

wow everyone has a crush on him even if you dont you do

pray for the patients that get assigned to both mingyu and jun your in for a visual attack

tho the facade for mingyu usually breaks after a minute of meeting him

clumsy af yo

once knocked over the patients entire tray of food because his limbs were longer than he remembered

sometimes forgets to put on hand sanitizer and seungcheol always yells at him about

from the other side of the ed “MINGYU, HANDS”

“THANKS HYUNG”

always brings his own lunch bc hospital foods shit and he makes better food at home 

sometimes brings in cookies for the staff in the break room

theyre usually gone within an hour

minghao

trauma and emergency medicine fellow

TALENTED

was personally scouted by hospital officials in china

really young to be such an expert in his field

also his hands are really sensitive to abnormalities in the human body so he feels out the situation and catches the situation really early

is kinda intimidating because of his rbf and takes no shit approach

but is really super soft and fluffy once not in a work environment

relied on jun a lot in terms of adjustment here in korea, and he’s probably closest to him in the ed 

has jun scrub in with him for surgeries sometimes

objectively has the best surgery playlists

from pink floyd, to an obscure japanese indie rock

bickers with mingyu a lot of proper treatment of patients

usually theyre both right tho they just cant communicate effectively

is secretly seeing another chinese surgeon from plastics, but they hide it really well except from jun ofc

seungkwan

nurse

a really loud and mouthy one at that

nags everyone in the ed a lot despite not being the charge nurse

tho hes getting there and everyone knows it 

despite that, hes really sweet and caring towards patients 

is also really weak for kids, but he cant ever be assigned to them because he’ll freak out if something happens to them

always earns high marks on nurse feedback forms because he does his job AND is entertaining 

even tho he nags everyone else, sometimes hes too selfless and forgets to take care of himself

“did you forget your lunch? aiii how could you do that? here take mine”

“seungkwan you need to eat to”

“i said take it, now eat and make your mom proud”

cries and often laments how much he loves his staff when hes had a little too much to drink at work parties

hansol

a new nurse

really chill, vibin through life

is really a much appreciated presence to have around the ed, especially when things can become hectic really quickly

often acts as a translator between english and korean 

will laugh at pretty much anything (which wonwoo appreciates alot because at least someone likes his jokes)

one thing that always gets his blood boiling is the blatant ignorance some patients have

like the offhanded racism against him or his coworkers, or comments about lgbtq+ people 

and there have been times when he hasnt been able to control how he responds because wow he Dislikes ignorant people

so whenever he gets a patient like that, he often asks to switch with another nurse because “if i have to listen to karen say something racist about jun or minghao again im gonna lose my fucking mind”

med students usually hang around him bc of how approachable he is

shower thoughts

“do you ever wonder this would taste like”

“hansol dont-”

chan

med student in his final year

is really eager to learn and get started on things!

ed is his first choice for match day

soonyoung has taken him under his wing so he mainly just shadows him

and its always a fun and great time chan has learned so much from him 

the entire ed staff has adopted him and will riot if he doesnt get accepted on match day

“chan, whos baby are you?”

“for the last time hyung IM TWENTY SEVEN”

if hes not shadowing soonyoung, hes probably studying in the break rooms with hansol throwing popcorn at him

“hyung stop im tryna study”

“ok but catch this in your mouth first”

still has a lot to learn, but hes out there conquering the world of medicine yall better watch out

[thisartofeveryday]

For those of you who thought I should make my life story into a book…here is the outline. For the sake of clarity as you are reading, let me explain who the characters are. The kids from my Dads first marriage: Jim1, Patty, Seana. The kids from my Mom’s (Mary Ellen) first marriage: Mary Jane and Jim2. My brother that I am a full sibling to is Charles (chuck).

I think you might know that 95% of our lives are lived from the unconscious mind. From birth to age 7 a childs mind is in Theta wave (hypnosis) and everything that they learn in those years (mainly through observation and repetition) is the program that their minds run for their entire lives. Knowing this – I look back on the first 7 years of my life.

I think we moved 7 times in those 7 years. I am certain it was because of Dads extreme anger management problems and the fact that he is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. Zero stability or chance to make lasting friendships. My dad was sexually abusing me and unpredictably violent. I was terrified of him. I was being terrorized/bullied by my brother, Chuck, who was every bit the sociopath that my dad is. My mom was overwhelmed by the number of children she was responsible for - none of which she actually wanted- and add to that, her husband was sexualizing all of the kids, so really being the last of her kids I was the last of her problems. Being the youngest (and as traumatized as I was), I was quiet and easy to forget about or push to the side. The older kids were the ones in the spotlight and where all the attention went. They were enrolled in activities and they were more the same age, so they were a unit. I was just an observer of them. I felt so left out and forgotten. Always.

I was a mistake and a burden (dads exact words to me on my 11th birthday). Mom made sure I knew that she thought I was mentally retarded- she would joke about it all the time. (I guess she never made peace with her sister being autistic) She also loved humiliating me even when I made it clear she was hurting me. Remember her sausage fingers joke or how many years I got called Boomer? I absolutely hated both of those things, made it clear, and yet she refused to give up the name calling and humiliation. There was very little respect for my personal boundaries. Dad would assault me in the middle of the night and I would wet the bed out of fear- then he would make me sleep in it to teach me a lesson. Mom would do nothing to help me, though she was awake in the middle of the night when I would work up the courage to go into their room to ask for help. She let him treat me like that. Goddamn…I remember the night terrors and being scared to be in my room at night because the scary man was sitting in the rocking chair, in the dark, next to my bed.

I have a memory of being in the garage in our house in South Windsor. I was playing with our basset hound, General…I was crawling around on the floor and the dog mounted me and was dry humping me. Dad got this sick laugh and let it happen. Mom walked in and got mad at him, but did nothing to help me. My personal boundaries were nonexistent. Nobody was protecting me from him. I remember him eating the food off my plate at dinner…or kissing me on the ear or touching me when I would tell him I hated it and to stop. I remember the baths dad would have me take with him and how he taught me to touch and work his dick. I remember the photos he would take of me after the bath. I remember being 7 years old and trying to lay on his bed and be sexy enough for him. I remember kissing mom passionately the way that dad taught me to and mom getting upset and asking me where I learned that. I remember having a baby doll that I drew all over, angrily, with lipstick. I remember being scared because my ass was bleeding and I told mom while her brother and sisters were visiting and she shushed me and scurried me away. I remember him also beating the shit out of me…sometimes for no reason. I remember being deeply attracted to and absolutely terrified of him. I was 7.  These are the only memories I have of my dad. I don’t remember him being there for me, or interested in me as a person, or engaged in anyway. I just remember him being what I now know is a predator.

7 to 13: I remember some stability in Connecticut because we stayed there for three years… but I also remember having moments of being deeply depressed and hiding in the basement of the house writing notes that I hoped someone would find, asking for help to get me out of there. When I look back, those were my first experiences with disassociation from stress and waves of major depression. While I was being assaulted during those years, those years were all about Mary Jane, Seana, and Jim2. These three had each other. These three were a team. I was just an observer to your lives. I had no voice, no opinion, no importance, never truly included and absolutely my feelings went unheard and did not matter. We can say it was the age difference, sure, that’s part of it…but that’s also just an excuse. Things could have been done to validate my importance too.  I had Charles bullying me….I had my Dad assaulting me. I was so alone.

My internal voice wants to shout: Why did nobody see this? Why did nobody help me? Where were my siblings? I guess everyone was doing the best they could…

Literally anyone looking in knowing the truth could have easily assessed that this was a horribly destructive environment for any child to grow up in. I know dad was doing this to all the kids. I wasn’t the only one. It is absolutely stunning to me that through the years of my life I have consistently been blamed by my Mary Ellen (narcissist/borderline personality disorder) and the people who chose to listen to her twisted opinions that there was something wrong WITH ME.  I mean, logically the mental health issues I have faced my entire life are perfectly normal and healthy reactions to a situation that was deeply flawed. But somehow the blame has always fallen on me.

The very first thing I think when I think of my mom is her asking me “Whats wrong with you Melissa”. Ive lost count of how many times she has asked me that very question.

I now know that its just deflection. Queen Narcissist cant take responsibility for her actions so she puts it on the person who she always denied a voice. That’s nice. Very loving and motherly. Doesn’t fix the 40 some odd years of my life that I believed her and wanted to die.

Right around age 9 or 10, we move again. I remember it being a big scandal – I think the truth came about that my dad is a sociopath, a pedophile and a rapist. (By the way, that’s in my DNA. I get to live my life connected to that. I look just like my dad. I think like a Painter. It’s fucking unsettling.)  I remember all the pressure to say nothing about the move and to constantly behave as though we were the perfect family and nothing was wrong. So incredibly demented.

I remember a HUGE fight about Seana and Jim2 staying behind in Connecticut. (by the way: I also remember Jim1 leaving for the Marines and wondering where my brother went and why he never talked to me. At one point he came back to visit and gave me a beautiful geisha doll in a glass box that mom destroyed in a fit of anger at me…she intentionally violently knocked it off the top of my dresser in one of her vindictive off the handle rages…Im sure at 8 years old I totally did something to deserve it, right.)

And, of course I remember the night Seana was killed. (why did the man that killed her not serve jail time? Why are bad people never held accountable?) Dad wasn’t there. Again, Dad wasn’t there. As I recall he was having an affair with some woman in Arizona? Mom was already distraught to be back in Michigan. That night, I remember being awake before the call came in…watching the clock radio in my bed… it had a short in the wire that would spark. I was listening to the Beatles: My guitar gently weeps…. To this day, I hate the Beatles.The phone rang. Mom screamed to you “Mary Jane, OMG, Seana is Dead”. I didn’t understand what happened. I just knew we were packing up like we did so many times before to take yet another long drive across country. It felt to me like another move. I didn’t understand death or that my sister was gone forever. I didn’t get it.  

(an aside: I struggled in school. When I was in Beginning Algebra One for some reason that class would make me check out and I would always soul travel to the night Seana was killed and it felt like it was happening to me. I took that class 4 times including summer school before I passed.)

(later, when I was maybe 13, my dog got hit by a car in the street and now I knew what death was so I freaked out like Mom did when Seana died and I remember Mom shaming me: You cried more over than damn dog than you did at your sisters funeral. Very nice. Very motherly. Very supportive and kind of her.)

At Seanas funeral, I remember not knowing what was expected of me. I was just so focused on getting it right and who I was supposed to kiss (because that sexualized stuff was already so ingrained).

There were so many goddamn rules for behavior, (rich white republican ex-military country club going family that we were) and I remember getting it wrong and being scowled at all the time. Mom was always angry and stressed out. We had to BE someone and over and over again: “Don’t forget the family name” and how important our clan was (hilarious that she kept the Sterling last name because her current husband is too ethnic and this sounds classier to her than her own actual last name)….

Meanwhile, My developing sense of self was being assaulted and neglected/ignored out of me and I felt wrong all the time for every single action I took.

I think we moved back to North Carolina briefly and then to Florida? Whatever the case….

Then we move again. Again. Again. Now we are in Florida. Im 10. My parents are getting divorced. Mom is deeply goddamn depressed. My family is falling apart. I don’t know where my brothers and sister are. Everything is exploding. Im powerless and hostage to all this. I cannot underline the importance of that sense of being hostage to a situation that I was powerless to escape and having my feelings and my personhood completely ignored and erased. It consumed me. I wanted to die. I am, as always, the least of moms concerns.

In Florida I was so incredibly dissociative. I was experiencing C-PTSD. I remember feeling numb all over. Having no ability to react to this little girl that fell off her bike in front of me….I just stared at her…the adults nearby yelled at me for doing nothing. I went further into my head. I was so checked out. People just thought I was quiet or shy or retarded. I was deeply traumatized and needed help.

I remember Mary Jane and I sitting on the bed watching this music video by The Cars. In the video there is a woman who is laughing and crying. I remember asking MJ what she was doing because I do that too and I think she told me she was having a mental break down.  

I remember getting a Walkman and listening to the Police nonstop. That was my only retreat from how much I hurt. WHY DID NOBODY SEE THIS AND HELP ME?

I remember during that time that I was given another baby doll. I remember MJ and mom watching me play with it to see what I would do. I felt scared of them both and the creepy way they were lurking to watch me. I felt ganged up on. I couldn’t trust anyone. I was so alone. I wanted to die.

In Florida, I remember my birthday and dad cocking his fist back like he was going to punch me in the face…he did that sick laugh and told me he wished I was never born and that I was a mistake. (later when I told this to Patty she explained he punched her in the face on her 11th birthday. Im related to all that. That’s in my dna.)

My body was changing. I was getting my period. I felt crazy. I was in that HUGE school in Jacksonville and I had no friends and I was so scared. Everything was terrifying….and Dad was getting more unhinged thus Mom has Jim and Lynn move in to protect her and had you come back… and then I remember walking in to the living room in the middle of a sunny afternoon and mom on the pull out sofa, trying to make dad jealous, was fucking the guy who was there to buy the house  that we had just moved in to because we were MOVING AGAIN….

Not to mention, I remember MJ and I quickly taking Dads gun to the beach to bury it so he because he wanted to kill us all.

Im not even 13 yet….. Are you exhausted?

Any one of these things would make a fully functioning stable adult fold like a house of cards. “Whats wrong with you Melissa?”…. It took something like 20 years of therapy but now I have some clues to answer that question. Here are some more clues:

We finally make it to Boone. Mom followed her best friend, Mary Jane. After all that… that incredible pressure cooker of my pre teen childhood we arrive in bumfuck nowhere, North Carolina….and everyone is gone except the sociopath brother. The house is basically empty. Everyone abandoned ship. Where did my brothers and sisters go? I remember coming home after school and there would be nobody home. For my entire life I had come home to my family but now there was no one. I would sit on the couch and watch the clock with growing anxiety and cry until mom came home from work. It was beyond torturous. And then she would be pissed off that I needed her because she just got home from work. At this point Mom is just angry and exhausted all the time. She had to get a job outside the home for the first time in her life which she hated, she was sick of being a mom…she wanted it all to be over so she could have HER life. Charles was getting more and more abusive- physically and mentally and had to be sent away for our protection.

And then she starts dating Don Bailey. I think the sex must have been amazing because the guy was an utter low life. He was living off of her/my child support money… and beating the shit out of her. Their fights were never goddamn ending. I would hide in my room after school and not come out. I was so alone. I had no friends and no escape. Mom was friends with Mary Jane, not with me. Mom wanted nothing to do with me. One day we were driving home and I was so attached to her. I needed my mom so goddamn bad… I was struggling to make friends at yet another new school and the PTSD made me feel so distant from everyone but I had no words for what was wrong with me I just thought I was terrible at making friends (I remember this: pathetically I checked out a book at the library: How to be your own best friend)… She pulled the car over and told me “we cant be friends.” Mom has some glorified memory of us driving around looking for our favorite tree in Autumn… the only thing I remember is that conversation…her rejecting me when I needed her the most… after we moved to the town my sister lived in so she could be close to her.

Again, still no help with the major depression, the CPTSD… just a lot of blame “why cant you be happy Melissa…whats wrong with you?” and I cant be clear enough about this: all her spare time at home was spent on Don, not me. I didn’t have clubs and groups and activities that she as sure to enroll me in. I didn’t have my brothers and sisters there with me. It was just me, after all that, trying to figure it out.

I was a burden to her. She couldn’t wait to get rid of me and be done. I felt it always.

An aside: When she was unsure if she wanted to stay in Boone, I remember her asking Charles if we should stay or go back to Florida…after he chimed in with his answer, I gave my opinion which she angrily scoffed at me and told me it didn’t matter what I thought, Id go where they tell me to go.   My voice didn’t matter, I was a burden to her. I had no value as a person. I was powerless. So there I was in my bedroom that was the walkway between the living room and her room… at the mercy of whatever happened with no privacy or power over my life….. whats new.

Another aside: During that time we had gotten a dog that was a total pain in the ass for her to take care of. She gave it away while I was at school. I came home and the dog was gone and I was tearful thinking it ran away. She gave my dog away without telling me.

Then we moved out to Valley Crusis (9 miles outside of town…so isolated. I was so alone. The isolation was killing me. Where were my siblings. I needed help. I needed someone who was just there for me.) and Dons abusive behavior got even more extreme. I remember him picking me up from a concert that I was at….because he had sent Mom to the hospital with a sprained wrist and a busted lip. He was laughing about it when he told me to get in the car. Another time I remember Don looming in my bedroom door when Mom was at work and it was just us in the house… telling me: “Go ahead and call the police, nobody will believe you anyway.” I remember the woman who lived up the hill from us, with the curly hair…I think her name was Susan… coming down to the house while Mom and Don were gone and telling me If it ever gets too bad, you can always run up here. The neighbors knew I needed help. Where were my brothers and sisters? Where was my Mom? FUCK.

I remember Mom having many off the handle rages at me because I looked like a boy and my hair was crazy and I was so fucked up. I remember one morning after she had raged at me so hard that I was in stunned silence… we were sitting at breakfast at St Sinners and MJ kept looking at me, she knew something was wrong, I was clearly checked out and fucked up. I needed my sister. I had no voice or ability to speak up. I was scared of her husband, Glenn. Nobody helped me. Mom was the star of the brunch party!

I remember getting my first job at 15 and working at St Sinners…. Then, when mom bought the restaurant I stopped getting paid. She cut me off from my paycheck and told me it was my “duty to the family”… but she had Jim2 and his first wife Lynn there working and they were getting paid…and also stealing her money to fuel their coke habits. She didn’t value me, or my efforts but her golden son Jim can do no wrong even when he is fucking her out of her business.

I remember Jim2 offering me coke at a house party and John Golden and another friend getting me out of there away from my own brother. I remember Lynn being LIVID that I would stop by their house when I was lonely and wanted my family but instead I got shamed for thinking I could stop by and see them…and mom would tell me that “they had BUSY LIVES and I should leave them alone.”

I remember being so fucked up and alone in Boone….I mean, I now know I was just in shock and experiencing major depression. Mom kept asking me Whats wrong with you Melissa…when I was your age I had to choose between boyfriends… etc. Its incredible to me how Mom normalized my childhood abuse and completely erased my feelings or my personhood then blamed me for somehow being a problem child or wrong in whatever way….more incredible: people believed her.  

During those years in Boone I remember her doing things like openly making fun of me when I thought I might be gay, fixing regular hamburgers and telling me they were tofu when I became vegetarian…starting a burn pile in the back yard full of toxic things after I told her how important recycling was to me and laughing at me as I cried…..every chance she had to make me feel awful about being me and disrespected she took.

Once I visited her at her office and she told me I was “too ugly to look at and she didn’t want anyone to know I was her daughter and to never come to her office again.”

Shes right, we were not friends. She was a jealous mean girl, obsessed with appearances and her shitty boyfriend.

Lets not forget when she, with Mary Janes help, stacked my portfolio with MJs lithographies and coached me how to lie to get me in to Governors school for the summer. She wanted me gone and she got her wish. I remember feeling like a fraud that summer. I wasn’t good enough to be there. I had to lie to be included. I remember she didn’t even drive me there. She had Don do it. He harassed me in the car all the way there, 3 hours…. then dropped me…16… off on the curb in front of the college and drove away. All the other kids had parents excitedly helping them get set up in their rooms…excited about their major accomplishment of getting in to Governors school… I was there with my milk crate of shit, a fraud. alone. Acting like a tough girl who didn’t need anyone. I was a pro at that. Mission accomplished, she was rid of me.

I remember how deep my depression was becoming by the time I was 18. That last year of high school I would bang my head against my bedroom wall in an attempt to knock myself out, in hopes that I would get sent away to a treatment center or something. I couldn’t take all the fighting between her and Don. I fucking hated him and he was in my house and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to throw myself down the back stairwell at school. I barely graduated high school my depression was eating me alive.

Amazing that nobody IN MY FAMILY SAW THAT I NEEDED HELP. I was invisible. Mary Ellen cast her proclamation that all was well, she was amazing and I was a problem child and that was that.

I have a million stories about Mom demoralizing me during those years…. Whats weird is that I have no memory of my Mary Jane there. I think she was so involved with Glenn and way up the mountain, I had no way to reach her. And I was scared of her husband Glenn. And, we were never close. And, she was Team Mary Ellen…. So I was just alone and wanted to die. Sincerely. Goddamn. Let it end.

I remember Don telling me that Mom was using my child support payment to make her car payment. So I asked her about where my child support was going and she told me she used it for my Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance…. So I called the insurance company to see if I had coverage…. They had no record of me. She was, again, a liar….

When I graduated high school she couldn’t get me out of the house fast enough. She pawned me off on my boyfriend Gebeaux and expected him to simply take care of me. We broke up. He didn’t sign up for that. I was basically kicked out of the house in valley crusis. I wasn’t prepared for life on my own. I wasn’t ready. She just wanted to be done being a mom so Hey..I came back to the house one day and all my stuff was packed and that was that. I had to figure it out. Fuck me.  

At one point during that time I was living in a trailer with my friend Stacy. Mom was horrified about this. I was getting food stamps and she was so ashamed of me for being so low class. She came to the trailer and was completely off the handle. She said there was “no air” in there and grabbed a 2x4 and smashed out all the windows. Mind you from her perspective it was just another example of what a loser I am, living in a trailer on food stamps how did I end up such a piece of shit when she is such a wonderful mother… it must be because there is something inherently wrong about me.

She has seen me as trash who is incapable of being anything great my entire life.

Somewhere in there she stopped dating Don and started dating lawyer Rand Sterling…who broke her ribs multiple times and literally pushed her out of a moving car and then she walked 5 miles back to his house to be with him.  That relationship took her to Texas. She followed the money. The insanity of that relationship is all I heard about from her. She needed Jim2 to come protect her from her husband multiple times. I absorbed all of this through her very rare but insane emails to me. She has always used me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground.

I had my first total mental break right around 19 years old. I was fetal position on the floor at my girlfriends house… Jenn… I couldn’t stop crying for multiple days and I felt my mind split in two. I literally went into a black hole and was begging for death. Jenn and the next door neighbor scooped me up off the floor and drove me to the Watauga County Mental Health and got me some help… but at this point I was having a total mental collapse… the part of me that was traumatized was a child denied her voice or any recognition of her Self, so I had no way to articulate what was wrong and Mom had denied and normalized the abuse and denied me voice and my personhood for so long that I had ZERO chance of articulating what was wrong… it was buried so deep inside of me and I was so scared to trust anyone…. I was experiencing schizophrenia and Major depression.

Jenn helped me with my depression. Jenn made sure I was housed and fed. Jenn took care of me. I owe her my life.

I mean, that is an extreme mental health episode. Where was my family? How could none of the people who were supposed to love me the most see any of this? Why did none of them help me? Why did all of them think I was to blame? (my guess: Team Mary Ellen)  

Somewhere in that year my friends were moving to Chapel Hill so I packed up the car that my child support paid for and I went down the mountain. She threatened to call the police on me for stealing the car.  She told me I needed discipline and needed to go into the Army. She just didn’t know what to do with me…such a problem child. If I remember correctly, you echoed her sentiments. Everyone was always so angry at me for being so wrong and so bad. None of my family (meaning MJ and mom because my brothers had long bailed on me and my extended family has never made a single attempt to reach out to me or know me at all.)  were my friend, or loving, kind or compassionate.

I got away….I went to Chapel Hill and lived with my best friends Kerry, Lesley, Julie, and two other guys in Kerry’s Moms rental house. I was working at the Columbia Street Bakery and dating this boy, Richard…. Who happened to be a really abusive drug dealer… who held me down one night and violently orally raped me and when I called mom for help she told me with the exasperation of a mother who had supposedly tried so hard to do the right thing and raise her child with love and support but that child was just tragic and terminally fucked :

“I don’t know whats wrong with you Melissa, I guess you just like the bad boys.”  

Again, no self reflection on her behalf…she did nothing to help me.

I didn’t know how to get away from Richard who was playing mind fuck with me and I was getting high with him (LSD) …which was basically, me being drugged and him using me for sex but not being loving or kind in any way (felt like home)  Eventually, Richard got busted for selling a page of lsd to an undercover cop and threatened to kill me because he thought it was my fault… so I had to get out of there and I went to New York to chill out and work for the summer at the Omega Institute of Holistic Learning… to just be around hippies and eat good food. I hung out with Baba Ram Dass and Ben & Jerry…and took a class on the whirling dervish… These moments when I wasn’t in the pressure cooker of my life were both brilliant because I needed healing but also the worst because all this trauma would start to surface and I didn’t know what it was or how to speak about it. I would start to shatter again.

I believed it was my fault and there was something inherently wrong with me.

I was so lost. I needed help. I needed a parent or loving compassionate family or someone trusted to guide me through that time in my life. I had no one but my friends from North Carolina who were just as fucked up as me. I needed help. I needed help. Oh my god, I needed help.

Omega ended…I had no money to get out of there, nobody to turn to for help, no clue what to do next, I certainly couldn’t go back to Mom who hated me and was living with Rand so fuck that… I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were and no relationship with them so that wasn’t on my mind as an option…..so I caught whatever ride I could get and ended up in Boulder. One of my friends from Omega hooked me up with her cousin for a month and I tried to make it work… it was basically winter in Colorado at this point and I was out there door canvassing for Green Peace making no money and freezing to death. Just walking door to door for Greenpeace… looking in on other families and their loving lives together. I was so fucking sad. I was hungry and scared and completely out of options. I had to get out of there.

I called Mom for help. She said: “You got yourself into this, get yourself out”…. And hung up on me. The bitch hung up on me. I was stranded and so scared and I needed my mom. She hung up on me. She blamed me. She wanted to punish me for being such a problem. She was done being a mom. She hung up.

I remember having gone to the Planned Parenthood to get some medical help because I was sick. I explained my situation and the nurse looked at me incredulously and said “where are you parents?” I explained to her that Mom hung up on me.  I was devastated, living in a constant state of shock. Scared out of my sense of self or ability to connect to the present moment.

I was a fractured soul in every possible meaning.

My month at my friends place was over and I had to find an apartment or live on the streets. It took me another month of begging whatever guy I could find to give me a place to stay and then I contacted the boy I was dating at Omega, Scott, and asked him for money to get a bus back to North Carolina. He helped me. Bless him. He got me out of there.

I got on the Greyhound and ended up going to Idaho to visit with my friend Stacy (who I lived in the trailer with) and stay with her for a couple weeks to get grounded and feel safe with a friend for a minute. My mental break was coming back full force. I was inconsolable.  I remember laying on her bed fully having an out of body experience from the stress and being so disoriented. She is so patient and kind. She took care of me. When my time with Stacy was up, the next layer of insanity: I got on the Greyhound and took a 5 day no sleep, no food journey across country. I got chased down, carrying all my bags of things and looking like a little hippie… on a layover, by a group of drunk men in Wyoming…they almost got me but I found a laundromat that was open and full of people so I ran inside and hid until my bus was leaving again. I was terrified. By the time I made it back to Lesley and Kerrys house in Chapel Hill it was New Year night…I got some hours back at the Columbia Street bakery I was working at and got some money rolling in.

I want to mention that Poverty, which I have lived most my life in, is no joke and more damaging than anyone outside of the experience can understand. It is cyclical, like bi polar…. Living paycheck to paycheck or however you get just enough to maybe hold on for a moment longer but never knowing if more will be coming is a terror. Always feeling like the bottom is going to drop out…and never knowing when youre going to eat…and what that does to your hormones and your mental health…. Poverty is proven to damage people on a cellular level and have lasting effects that lead to chronic illness.

After making it back to NC, few weeks later the boy from Omega came to Chapel Hill and told me he wanted to marry me and wanted me to move to Boston with him. So we took a little road trip and eventually ended up in Boston. As a surprise to no one sane, that was not a lasting relationship. So after a year of misery in Boston, (more poverty, more loneliness, more no family) Scott drove me back to Chapel Hill and that’s when the girls and I all moved up to Asheville. All the while, checking in with Mom who was yelling and shaming me for being such a fuck up.

I can’t underline enough: I was disassociating the entire time. I was having episodes of schizophrenia. I was experiencing major depression and bi polar disorder. The stress of my entire life was more than I could handle and I had no support and no compassion and nobody validating my experience or me as a person. People just thought that was who I was. I was just fucked in every way possible and believed she was right and all that was normal and I was a terrible piece of shit. She had everyone believing that.  

Mary Jane believed her. She echoed her sentiments to me. Go Team Mary Ellen.

I moved up to Asheville and got somewhat stabilized. I was again living with my friends and I got a decent job at the Laughing Seed Cafe. I met Mark and I had decided to go to college because I thought that would make Mom happy and I needed to DO something with myself.  

Mark and I were together maybe 8 weeks before we moved across country and started a life together. Eight weeks.

I was so adept at being a high functioning  dissociative major depressive and I had no way to articulate what was wrong with me (all that stuff that had been normalized and ignored…all the ways my feelings and personhood was erased)… I just knew something evil bad was in me and it took me out from time to time. I thought it was my fault and I was ashamed of myself.  I was living in a constant state of shock. CPTSD.

So, I get myself into college and thanks to Mark and his truck we move across country.

When I hear my friends now talking about saving money for their kids college and really setting them up for success by helping them choose a school and get settled in or making sure they don’t have to work so they can focus on their studies and have a healthy social life with friends and do activities Im so confused. I didn’t know parents and families helped their kids with such things. I didn’t understand that in other families they help, protect and support. I made it through without any of these blessings.

Mark and I get a shitty apartment (the ceiling caved in out of rot and the place was full of roaches. The property managers stole my drum set and we would catch them on the roof at night peeping through the skylight to watch us), I get a full time job managing a restaurant…in addition to schooling full time...Im overwhelmed by the workload, scared to be across country, freaked out by college and the expectations… it was too much. I was away from the source of my abuse and things started to surface… I NEEDED HELP.

I needed my family except, honestly, I have none. Additional mindfuck: when I tried to talk to people about this I get the old trope about how everyone has tough relationships in their families and I need to love my mom and work it out with her.SO I KEPT GOING BACK FOR MORE WITH MOM BECAUSE I NEEDED HER LOVE SO BAD AND I THOUGHT THE PROBLEM WAS ME. Further, because I was so regressed I just sounded like a petulant child when I tried to talk about the abuse I had no accurate words for so nobody outside the experience really got it or could conceive how bad things really were for me… why would they? My family is extraordinarily fucked up, like nobody I have ever known.

In college, nobody comes to check on me and make sure Im ok. Nobody was calling. Id get rare emails or letters. When I would tell mom how hard it was, mom would mock me and tell me to suck it up when I would reach out to her and “complain” about how things were going for me… See, because its always my fault and Im never measuring up.

An aside: To this day, 40 years later, Jim2 has yet to even send me a single email to check and make sure Im ok or get to know me at all. He has never responded to the multiple emails I have sent him, so I stopped reaching out. I used to cry to mom about it and she would tell me that he “has a busy life” and I had to understand that’s why I wasn’t a priority to him. Personally, I cant imagine anything being more important than making a connection with your little sister, but I guess Im biased and not like him: busy getting high and drunk and being a cool party guy.  

During my college is when he married Lori. I worked over time and got a plane ticket to be at his wedding. I was sick to my stomach at the idea of having to be around my family but I love my brother and I wanted to be there. He ignored me the entire time I was there. I was a HUGE FUCKING DEAL that I could afford the ticket and made the effort to be there for him. I showed up for him….He ignored me. I was devastated and felt invisible and so worthless.

Another aside: I was 24 and that very first Christmas on the west coast Mom calls me, driving herself to the ER to get her stomach pumped from a suicide attempt. She was dramatically telling me her goodbye in case she didn’t make it. I was stressed and powerless beyond the telling of it. I cried all the way through that Christmas. Again: Mom always uses me as her emotional manipulation dumping ground. Out of all her children, Im the one with heart and she gets the sympathy she is working me over for.

During my college years, I would ask Mom for help she would mock me “Im sending baby Sava (MJs daughter) a care package…are you a baby? Do you need one too?”

Mean girl jealousy that I went to college and her life was taken from her by her children….

In college I had no friends, just Mark. No time for activities and my mental health was so fragile I had no ability to form friendships. I was barely hanging on. I would be catatonic in my time at home. We had this geometry screensaver on the computer and I would be frozen staring at it for hours while my brain felt like it was going to shatter. I was an absolute wreck and a shell of a person…but I was determined to prove I could graduate college and I wasn’t a fuck up. I wanted Mom to be proud of me.

I guess it should come as no surprise that after 4 years of no time off, working and schooling 80 hours a week, getting zero support emotionally or financially from my family …. that absolutely NOBODY FROM MY FAMILY CAME TO CELEBRATE ME AT MY GRADUATION.

Nobody came. Nobody celebrated me. Nobody saw the value in me or my hard work.

I remember being on the phone with Jim2 the day of my graduation. I had called him to ask why he wasn’t there for me. I was in tears. He told me that if that was the worst thing that ever happened to me, congratulations on your nice life. He thought it was bullshit that I was so upset. He thought I was being a baby. This loser dropped out of college which he had a scholarship for and did nothing with his life but drugs and alcohol and saw no value in me or what I did on my own. He didn’t show up for me.

Me going to college and graduating on time with full credits was a major fucking accomplishment on so many levels.

Not one of my family was there for me and I will never forgive or forget that.

We moved to the same fucking town Mary Jane was in when she was in college and never ONCE did anyone come to check on me and be interested in what I was doing or validate how amazing it was that I was in school and making it happen on my own.  

When I talk about how alone I feel in life, its in my bones.

I had worked over time to get Mom a plane ticket so she would be there for my graduation and she called me a couple days before to tell me pathetically “She couldn’t get the day off work.”  (Lie: I think she has some legal issue and couldn’t leave the state or something like that.)

After she called to bail on my graduation… at 27 years old… I had a heart attack on my walk home. I collapsed in my living room. Mark found me on the floor when he got home from work. She literally broke my heart. I was devastated. I was in shock. I was dissociating. I was so fucked up. I needed help. Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was wrong and neither did I.

Shortly after my graduation, MJ graduated and she drove to see her and was sure to tell me about it. I mean, they are BFFs so, no surprises there. GO TEAM MARY ELLEN, right?  

Whats wrong with you Melissa? My family. My family is whats wrong with me.

During college I was stressed to the point of being catatonic when I wasn’t at work or school. My mental health was tanking in every possible way… but the pressure cooker of school and work kept me hemmed in and my desire to prove that I was someone worth loving (because god knows I wasn’t going to be loved just for being me…No one was simply going to show up for me or simply be there. I had to earn it.)

…. then we moved to Seattle and I had three years at Amazon in that pressure cooker of a job… (10 to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week) working as a Lead running a team of 200 people to keep me too busy to feel my feelings or connect to emerging myself.  

At some point after I graduated and it no longer mattered, I remember MJ came to visit me one time. That was nice of her. Thank you for trying, MJ.

But heres the fun part: Mark. Mark loved me.

Mark is the very first and to this day ONLY person who has been intimately involved in my life who loves and respected me just as I am.

It was Mark loving me that allowed me to start developing a voice and for that very young very traumatized person inside of me to start coming to the surface. Mark was the very best thing that has ever happened to me….and, ironically, it was because he loved me that all that evil finally came to the surface…and was our demise.

All the things dad did to me, all the never ending abuse from mom that sought to vilify and demoralize me… all of the hurt from the abandonment from my brothers and sisters… all that evil came up because he Loved me enough to make me feel safe and supported…I just didn’t know that then and couldn’t see or feel that he was the most tremendous gift this life has ever given me ….

and I started sexually assaulting myself in my sleep (woke up one time with an entire box of tampons inside of me and had to go to the doctor to get them all out). I would throw punches in my sleep. I was having an utter mental breakdown/ breakthrough… and then I started acting out sexually with other men that I met online. I felt like I was being puppet mastered from some evil unknown source. I was manic and acting out sexually. That default programing from my childhood was calling the shots. I didn’t have a sense of self so I was acting from what I knew and what Dad taught me about myself and the self-worth that mom made sure I didn’t have.

I say acting out sexually. What I should say is reenacting the trauma…which there was so very much of. I was on auto pilot and at that time if you asked me if that’s what I wanted to be doing I would have said yes out of programming but the core truth of who I am knew it was not at all right or who I am or what I wanted…that core didn’t have a voice yet.

2001, Amazon had laid us all off. I got hired working at a treatment center for abused youth.  I was major depressive and would be fetal position on the floor and cry for a month at a time but I didn’t know why or what was wrong… I was just deeply goddamn depressed and wanted to die. All the time. Goddamn. Let it end.

Poor Mark. He didn’t know what was happening. He was the perfect boyfriend. He tried so hard to help me. I honestly could not have asked for a more perfect man to come in to my life…and he was stuck with me. Mentally fucked Melissa with no clue what was wrong… and worst of all, I thought I had to get out of my relationship with Mark.

Crazy,right?….I asked Mom for help. She had no relationship with me and no clue what was going on in my life…She is a complete train wreck of a human and so deep in her own denial and so wrapped up in her latest abusive relationship with a rich man that she could honestly give a fuck about me and thought the worst of me anyway… so yeah, break up with him and oh my god Melissa I don’t know what to do with you.

I kept cheating on him over and over again. I was off the rails with my manic depression. Spending, fucking, driving my car too fast…. Through a chat room, I got mixed up with a man that felt like Dad to me and I was entranced and captive to him. Mark asked me to marry him and I broke up with him, moved out.. I was off the rails with the sexual acting out/re traumatizing myself.

(Mark immediately met the woman he has since married and has been with for the past 18 years. I would give anything to have that man back in my life…Throughout these years, my memory of how he treated me has been the standard by which I have held all other men and nobody measures up….Beyond his character and integrity, the art, music and intelligence that lives within this handsome and kind man is incomparable. I blew it. Fuck. I pushed away the most incredible man I ever knew and he loved me. I still love him to this day.)

At that same time I heard a rumor at work that one of the counselors (reggie, 24) had slept with a client(raya,16). I knew reggie was capable of it (I had slept with him) so I reported it to the Unit manager, Big Mike. ……What I didn’t know is that Reggie, Mike and the guy I was so into, Cash were all friends who grew up together and in the same gang……

and so it was that month that I moved out from Mark that the man that I was so “in love with”, Cash, drugged me at a house party and raped me with 4 of his friends to teach me a lesson for reporting Reggie.

I remember sharing a beer with Cash and then feeling tired and dizzy and asking to lay down and then multiple hours of being barely coherent and having no control over my body and being passed around for everyone to fuck over and over again.

Cash was a sex trafficker and grooming me all along. No wonder he felt like home. My need for family and my daddy issues in full effect, I couldn’t break the spell. I was terrified of him and wanted him to think I was so sexy…..He was masterful with the mindfuck and kept me under his thumb at all times which felt like attention and love to me and was intense enough that I could feel it.

At that time, in Washington, you had a statue of limitations of 8 years to report a rape.

Mind you, I was so dissociative and still had no idea I was a person or had any rights to my thoughts or my body… I was really goddamn checked out at that point in my life….I was in shock. The childhood assault trauma was just surfacing and I had no words for it because it had been normalized and my feelings negated by my parents So, I didn’t know if I had been raped or not….it took me years to figure out that its wrong to drug someone and have all your friends fuck them…

I didn’t know I should or could ask for help. I didn’t believe I could be helped. I didn’t think anyone would help me. I didn’t know I was a person. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t know I could escape or how.

ANYONE CONFUSED ABOUT WHY I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO GET HELP OR THAT I DESERVED IT???????

Whats wrong with you, Melissa?

In the meanwhile, Cash was making sure I wouldn’t report it.

He knew I was away from Mark, had a history of sexual assault and no family, and that I lived in absolute poverty so there was zero chance I could escape him.

I was in so much trouble. I needed help. I called Mom. I explained that it all to her. I explained that they were a gang. That it was sex trafficking… that I needed help…. To which she said “Let them play godfather. Whats the worst they can do?”….. (nice way to minimize the extreme danger I was in and negate me as a person, don’t you think?)

that bitch loves to see me suffer and struggle, doesn’t she. Doesn’t it make her look amazing when I look like shit? So she didn’t help me. She shit talked me to the rest of the family like I wanted to be in that situation because I was trash. Nobody helped me.

I remember talking to Mary Jane around that time explaining that I was getting counseling and she, like mom, shamed me and told me I didn’t have bipolar or something like that… She was Team Mary Ellen all the way and me getting counseling was just attention seeking or something like that.

See, this is why MJ and I have never been friends or close. I cant trust her. Shes not someone I think of as an ally. Sorry about that, MJ. Im not trying to be mean but… look at why I think that.

I really do look up to her though. She is so smart and capable. But I cant trust her and this is why.

By the way, here’s just a few of examples of the worst they can do while “playing Godfather”: They were so invested in making sure I never spoke about the rape they made sure I was living in such constant fear for my life (mental domination) that I was too scared to talk to anyone about it:

*They had voyeur cameras in my house…that they were making money off of.

*They had software on my laptop to collect all my personal data (social security, passwords, answers to security questions) so I am owned by them to this day.

*They had GPS on my car to track me everywhere I went and would leave notes on my car to let me know I was constantly being watched.

*They flipped my therapists office and stole all her files to make sure there was no record

*They poisoned my dog every day for a month while I was at work…I would come home to Milo cowering in the corner like he had been abused all day long and diarrhea all over the floor until one day I yelled out in my home with nobody there that I would find Cashs son and do the same to him…and I went online and found his childs home address…yelled that out to my empty apartment…and after that day Milo was never sick again….

*Then there are the 2 times they broke into my apartment in the middle of the night, drugged me in my sleep and did whatever and dumped me at the park. One of those time I woke up with half my face slack and paralyzed as though I had a stroke. By the grace of god I got the feeling back but to this day its still a little droopy.

*They sent their equally psycho boy Alex into my life to keep watch on me. He was horribly mentally abusive. I was so broken and demoralized. I needed to get away. Instead, I got pregnant. Alex also gave me syphilis ..and so I had an abortion. I had to get two Orders of Protection to get Alex away from me. When I called mom for help with the pregnancy, she was off the rails hysterical and I was yet even more scared and alone. Mom blamed me for all of it. Further evidence Im trash. I got pregnant by a mistake by a black man.

There is more, I mean it was 8 years of daily torture… but I think you get the idea. Complete mental domination was the name of their game.

I had no friends. None. I was so fucked up. I was terrified to speak to anyone because everything felt like danger. Just these men showing up when they felt like to to fuck me and terrorize me. Eight years. My 30s. I was miserable beyond the telling of it.

Whats wrong with you Melissa. I needed help. I was so scared. I needed my family. I got yelled at and shamed. I was so alone. I wanted to die. I was so depressed and fucked up. Goddamn. Let it end. And the worst of it all is that I really didn’t even have myself. I never had a chance to be safe enough to develop a self. I was a shell of a human. I was out of my head. I was so checked out with the PTSD and the trauma of it all. I was scared to be alive. Soul fracturing is real.

This was how I spent my 30s. Somehow pulling myself together to go to work during the day because I didn’t want to be homeless, coming home and having a total mental collapse at night and all the while being mentally tortured by a gang of sex traffickers and when I reached to my family for help I got blamed for being a fucked up piece of shit.

I had no one. When I talk about my isolation and how alone I am, its cumulative.  Its all this and more.

I don’t need to volunteer at a shelter on Christmas to be with someone for the holidays. I don’t need to get a dog. I need family. I need to be validated on a daily basis that I matter and am loveable just as I am. I need someone safe who is simply there. I need people in my life who celebrate me without me asking. I need people who are there for those simple mundane acts of living that define us…I need to come home to love.

The miracle: I kept myself employed and was successful in my corporate career path, I kept myself housed, and drug and alcohol free the entire time. I had the where with all to get counselling and try to work through my shit. I never gave up on myself even though I didn’t yet know who I am and my family had absolutely written me off from day one.

Then the Recession happened. I, of course, had never learned money management skills so there really wasn’t any savings to rely on. I was comfort eating like a motherfucker, I had student loans, a car payment and insurance and a foolishly large and expensive apartment, I had these lecherous men that were taking advantage of me financially too… I was manic depressive… I was paying for counselling (which if I am not mistaken over the years has totaled $100k) But to be honest, I don’t know where my money went… so when the Recession hit it took about 2 months before I was selling off everything I own and living in my car….where I stayed for the next year with my dog.

Nobody help me stay safe or in my integrity. I had no friends in Seattle to turn to. Mom told me to put my things in garbage bags and throw it all away…take the dog to the pound… and work with my counselor (she was angry about me getting help because she perceived it as being me trying to vilify her and this was her chance to punish me for getting help) and find a shelter to check in to because I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

Let me say that again: My mom knew I was losing everything, told me to throw my life away, dump my kid at the pound and told me to check into a shelter, I wasn’t welcomed at her home.

MY MOM.

Shes sees me as trash. She threw me away. Doesn’t she look amazing when Im failing?

Work in Seattle was impossible to find. I literally had 700 resumes out. Understand, I have held a job consistently since I was 15 years old and somehow mom thought this moment was me being a lazy piece of shit and just trying to manipulate her for money when I asked for help.

Sure. Ok.

I spent the next year in my car with no money coming in other than whatever odd jobs I could grab on craigslist to make my car payment. I drove back to North Carolina to seek help from my friends and my brother. My friends back home were not in a position to help me in any long lasting way but bless them all for what they did…

but Jim 2, who lives in Raliegh, was. He just declined. He made me a sandwich…told me there was nothing he could do for me (he has three houses)…and I spent the night in my car outside my brother’s house.

I had an ex acquaintance from Seattle who lived in Raleigh. He was part of the abuser sex trafficking gang. He let me sleep on the floor but would beat the shit out of me if I tried to sleep on the couch. I was so demoralized and out of my head, I needed literally anyone to be there for me….so, I stayed there, on the floor, for a month.

My brother was 15 minutes away, could have kept me safe but my brother chose to do nothing to help me.  

Whats wrong with you Melissa. My family. Definitely gonna say my family.  

When it was clear that North Carolina wasn’t going to be any better for work than Seattle I decided to drive back to the west coast. I had to drive through Texas and I didn’t stop at Moms house. I didn’t even try. Why would I?  I was so hopeless and out of my head with depression and PTSD. I was screaming into the great black nothing. I was cutting myself all over to get the evil out. I would punch my own face black and blue from self loathing… again, thinking it was all my fault and that I was defective. I mean… my own family didn’t want me. Nobody did. It was me. I was a horrible piece of shit and deserved to die. Nobody loved or wanted me. Nobody kept me safe. I was deeply lost in the void. I wanted to die. Goddamn. Let it end.

That year in the car was by far worse than the 8 years of being tortured by sex traffickers or the 13 years of living with my sex predator father or the 7 years of being stuck in bumfuck North Carolina with my moms abuser boyfriend stealing the show.

Without question having nobody and knowing that nobody cares if you are safe, in your integrity, have a door to lock, privacy of any kind, if you are fed or showered… knowing for a demonstrated fact that there is not a single person on earth who cares enough to validate your humanity is the absolute worst feeling I have ever known.  Being completely dehumanized, demoralized, erased. I begged for death.

Whats wrong with you Melissa?

Fun fact: during that time, instead of helping me or offering me a job at her business doing the exact job I did so well at Amazon (I asked for one and told her I would sleep in the attic at the office and she told me No), to mock me and show me what a failure I am and that I was just trying to manipulate her for money because Im a lazy loser

Mom went to her local Costco and applied for a job to show me how easy it was for her to get hired.

I mean, if youre going to be void of a soul, you should really go for it. Kudos, Mom.  

I drove through California on the way back home to Seattle and met my sister Patty for the first time. We look like two peas in a pod. We think exactly the same. She is undeniably my sister. It was the most incredible feeling.

For the first time in my entire life I actually felt and thought the same as someone else.

She casually declined to introduce me to her family. They kept looking at me incredulously because we look just the same… but she would shoo them away when they would come over to talk. I met her at her restaurant and then she took me to her palatial home. She has a huge family. She had tons of photo albums… and then she started talking about Dad…like she was in a trance and talking about a favorite lover… it was clear that Dad had sexualized her and maintained that relationship with her well into her adult life and that was the reason she had no contact with us and didn’t want a deeper relationship with me. One conversation was all I got with her. I slept in my car outside her home. My sister didn’t help me. Whats wrong with you Melissa???

In one shot from LA I drove back to Seattle. I figured out that the Queen Anne neighborhood had the lowest crime rate so I parked there. I was so sick to death of all the nights that year that I would wake up with someone trying to break in to the car. Thank god I had Milo with me. He saved me multiple times from intruders that year. My body was a wreck from car living and shit food. My mental health beyond destroyed. I was really just done. Run through. All the way run through.

I did a brief stint staying in Silverdale with my friend from NC that I managed to re connect with on my drive back… but the hour drive into Seattle from Silverdale was too much so I lumped it and just slept in my car in Queen Anne once I secured my job…..

I went in to Top Pot Doughnuts every day for a month and demanded a job until they gave me one. I was 8 weeks into that job, still sleeping in the car but I had forward momentum when I totaled the car. I had the very last car payment in the seat next to me I had worked so fucking hard to maintain my payments in good faith despite it all and come out of that situation with my car but nope…fuck me. I was on my way to the gym and I was giving myself a pep talk telling myself everything was going to be ok….and I ate it…40 miles an hour into a stopped truck on the West Seattle Bridge. Entirely my fault. Milo went to the pound. All my earthly belongings went to the impound yard. I went to the ER…. And I called every single person I knew and who I thought could help me.

Just when you think you have nothing left, turns out you can go lower. Nobody returned my call.  

Me, the unwanted, loveable piece of shit. I could die and nobody cared. Whats wrong with you Melissa?

I got out of the hospital, I had made contact with my online friend Rishad and he let me stay for a couple days… BLESS HIM… In those two days I got on the bus. I took the bus that goes through Capitol Hill and up to Queen Anne where my job was. I wrote down every apartment for rent phone number I could see and I started making calls. In the first true lucky break I had in years, this apartment manager woman at a really sweet little apartment on the hill heard me out…heard my story… it was the 15th of the month. I had my car payment check and I cashed it and gave her the money… She gave me the keys and a wink and told me I could move in “on the first”, that’s what the money I gave her would pay for…. and that she definitely didn’t know anything about a dog so no pet fee was needed.

I went right upstairs, LOCKED MY OWN DOOR and laid on the floor with literally nothing left to my name and cried so fucking hard.  

I had whiplash from the accident. I fractured 4 molars on my steering wheel and over the years as my dentist promised they have slowly one by one fallen out of my face. I had broken both my feet and wracked my knees…. But I had a place that was my own and a job and that’s all that mattered.

I went right to the pound the next day and got Milo. I went to the impound lot and got what was left of my life. I missed a sum total of two days of work…. I was so thankful to have a job again I blocked out the pain from my broken body and I just kept going.

(Mind you the only thing Mom has ever been proud of me for in my lifetime is losing weight. That’s what got her attention…that’s what she was impressed by. I went on a diet.)

That next year, I lost 70 pounds at the gym. I perceived my training team as the family I never had and I was good at lifting weights. They weren’t honestly my friends or family but it was something consistent and I needed that stability and I needed them so fucking bad. It took 5 years to start to return to a somewhat functioning human... Lifting helped me get back into my body and stop checking out so much. My nutrition plan made me focus on myself every moment of every day…and nothing beats depression like clean food and working out. Structure and consistency.

My PTSD was off the rails though. I was worse than a soldier coming back from war…I never signed up for that shit and it started when I was a child. I was suffering. I wanted to die. Every moment of every day. I was miserable to be around. Nobody wanted to be my friend. So, trust me…just work and the gym with my illusion that people were there for me and me inappropriately and overly attached to them.

The irony is that I looked amazing and strong and I was, yes. The reality is that I wanted to die. I begged for death. I had two suicide attempts in those years….I surprised myself and cut my wrist with my house keys on the way to work one day and another time I walked into traffic but the car swerved.

Coming out of all that happened and processing all that trauma took more will power and resolve than anything I have ever done. It was so dark. I felt demon possessed. I was out of my head. I would find myself walking out of my place into public with no skirt on just my tights or other crazy shit like that. I was talking to myself, having heated arguments with nobody there all the fucking time. I was punching myself in the face. I was cutting and other such self harm.

It was really bad. I was hurting so fucking much.

And, I had another sociopath boyfriend taking full advantage of my disadvantage…keeping me fucked up because it kept me there for him. Thomas was in my life for 7 years. Absolute Scum. But he was the only person who would show up in person for me. I needed to be held. I was so out of my head and I still had no friends in my life…just people on the internet.… So again, this familiar situation: I just let him use me so I could have literally anyone there. The social and emotional isolation was killing me and I was convinced I was in love. He felt like home. He kept telling me we would be together if I waited. That he loved me. That I was the Key! I was the only time he was happy. The reality was he wouldn’t speak to me during the week. He would just show up on a Friday or Saturday night when he felt like it, from 1am to 3am…literally show up with his dick out to fuck me…very often wouldn’t speak to me when he was there…then he would leave and that was what I considered my relationship and love. It was about 2 years into our “relationship” that the truth slowly started to surface that he was in a long term relationship and he lived with her….

The details of how twisted he is and how he manipulated my daddy issues is disgusting. How he used neglect to keep me working so hard for him to be there and begging for his attention….really sick.

He felt like home which is the worst part. He was exactly like home.

It took me three years at the doughnut shop to get emotionally stabilized enough to make a plan for next steps. I was too emotionally fragile to go back to corporate work or be in an office environment. I knew I wanted to go to massage school and I really thought it could be an answer for me even though Mary Jane and mom had previously shamed and mocked me when I said I wanted to go. Mom didn’t think I could be anything better than a waitress. She told me to stop complaining that I hated my work and just go do it.

It was around this time that I had to move out of the apartment because they raised the rent by double on my sweet apartment and I found my way into squatting in my Art studio, where I have been for the past 7 years.

This studio has been so needed and healed me in so many ways. It is private enough to have a complete mental collapse and since it was a former isolation tank/jail… Nobody can get in here….bars over the windows and a steel door…so, I could sleep at night for the first time in years. The rent is crazy affordable which allowed me to go to school and later afford activities to try to learn social skills and be a real person in the world…. This place is my everything.

When I had my first art show… consisting of the photos that I took when I was living in my car. One of the ways I survived and changed my paradigm to get out of the car alive was that I would walk around and task myself with Looking through the eyes of Love. I would try to find one thing each day that I could see beauty in so I could continue to see good in the world…thus my collection of flower photos that I maintain to this day as my gratitude practice.

Mom picked up the phone and called me the night of my show.

(Mind you, she has never been there for me. Over the years since she kicked me out I think we have talked on the phone maybe 10 times. There have been years where she refused to give me her phone number…she made a game of it for years…I would email and ask for it she would say she was going to give it to me in her reply but never would. Then she finally did and a week later she changed it again. Psycho. Another time I can remember a time we talked on the phone and I ended by saying I love you and she was silent and struggled to say it back. Whats incredible is that she has always pretended to be someone who knows me and knows whats going on in my life and talks about it with such authority. This is a narcissistic abuser in action. What she was doing was scanning my social media and whatever scraps of information she could get and twisting it into whatever story she needed to support her storyline about me being a problem child and a fuck up and what a wonderful mother she is so she could continue to live in denial. She cant face the past and she has never done any work to own her part or apologize. So, now Ive cut her off. She does things now like call the place where I get my mail and had the people who run the PO box office tell me my mother called and she is worried about me and she asked them for whatever information they had on me -so I had to get a new PO Box place where the owners have English as a distant 2nd language-  or she will go through my friends list on social media and contact people to see if they will keep tabs on me for her and share her story about what a problem I am and how she is just a loving mother who I have scorned and of course people believe her. She said the magic word: Mother. Nobody would suspect what kind of Mother she actually is and they see me all angry, regressed emotionally like a child and so fucked up and struggling in the world so she must me right about me, yeah? Text book actions when you try to break away from a Narcissist)

So…I get into the studio and Im all set up for my show and she called me to say this: “So, youre having an art show huh? You think youre so great. Youre still alone though aren’t you? (the mean girl was jealous that I somehow retained a sense of self and did something neat to be proud and again, she wanted to punish me…the woman is demented.) You know, the longest relationship you’ve ever had is with that damn dog.” And then she laughed at me. Made some shit comment about my basement studio “not having air” and some other bullshit and we ended the call. My party guests were arriving. My self-confidence was missing in action for the rest of my night.   Nice, right? That’s my mom.

Shortly after I get in to the Studio Milo got sick. Really really sick. As I promised him from day one, I would never let him suffer for my own selfish reasons…. So, I rented a car, took him to the vet and had him put down. The love of my life and my great protector. This sweet soul that was my constant source of love and hope for 14 years. When I posted on my facebook thread about his passing, mom commented that she was devastated at her loss. Because, you know… Milos death, this dog that she wanted me to throw away, was about how it impacted HER.  …yeah….ok.

I want to mention out of the context of a clear timeline that somewhere in here I trained for and ran two Tough Mudders. They are 12 mile courses with 20 really fucking hard obstacles. They are designed to be run with a team. I ran them both solo because nobody wanted to join me. On the days that I went to the events, neither my Trainer or the man I was so in love with, Thomas, sent me as much as a good luck text to wish me well or acknowledge my accomplishment. My previously 215 pound ass had shrunk to 140 pounds and, at 40 years old ran a team event solo and made it through in TWO AND A HALF HOURS completing every single obstacle, no excuses…. And nobody who should have been excited and invested in my success said a word.

I was still invisible. I still did not matter. I was still not celebrated by the people who should have been there for me.

I want to point this out: Even I did not think I mattered or what I was doing was noteworthy. I was still so checked out and erased to myself that it didn’t click in my head that my life and all that I was doing and surviving was me doing the impossible.

My friend Luke (who I met online dating but I knew we were meant to be solid friends for life) made a point to come with me to the first Tough Mudder. He spent the entire day out there and he took photos of me… He is the reason that I can now reflect on what I did and actually SEE MYSELF. That gift is immeasurable. Luke evidenced me. Im here today as a whole person in part because of him.  Also of note, the transition time between the apartment and the studio: Luke let me stay with him. He kept me safe and he was my sounding board and my true friend. I have nothing but the deepest most heartfelt love and respect for him. His story is equally harrowing and he is a miracle in action. Thank you Luke. I love you. Youre in my inner circle for life.

Now that Milo was gone and I was feeling somewhat more stabilized as a human, I knew it was time to make my career plan and try to get into massage school. Here is the next great stroke of luck in my lifetime: I went to Discovery Point and I talked to the women that run the school I explained my situation and that I was completely broke. They let me go to school for free in those 9 months with the understanding that I would clean the school on the weekends, make what payments I could as I went along and work out a payment plan immediately after graduation and that they would hold my diploma until that was complete.  OH SWEET MERCY.

My days during those 9 months were 17 hours long. I would manage the café in the morning 5am to 1pm, go to the gym to lift and run from 2 to 4, then to school from 5 to 10pm…all the while walking to get to each place. I was getting something like 12 miles a day. I did it. I made my 9 months of cleaning the school and keeping my life on track ( no cheering section, nobody doing laundry, cooking, keeping bills paid or there to comfort me but me: Whats new?) , I passed my exam and I was on track to move my life forward.

I feel like there should have been a celebration when I graduated because that’s fucking astounding…. but, hey… nothing happened, nobody in my life said a word of congratulations about it. Surprise.

I live alone. I have no friends beyond those that exist on the computer, acquaintances from community, and a few co workers that I have hung out with from time to time and I always make a big deal about that on social media which gives the illusion that I have people, but I really dont. My only contact with others is at work. I go home to an empty room and there is no support or comfort. Its really impossible to describe to people who have people what it is like to live with this constant isolation and utter lack of emotional intimacy and how it eats you alive…but this has been my life.

People who don’t understand tell me to get a dog or volunteer or pay for therapy for companionship. That’s a cruel tone deaf response. People need people and it is reasonable to want to be loved, intimately, from the outside in. What I want is to simply matter, and be loved and valued, and have someone who is there without having to do something to receive that…..

Because I have yet to be understood when I talk about it, I have for the most part stopped talking about my isolation that is to this day very real for me.

Im so lonely I just want to die. Whats new.

In the next year, I was waiting tables still and somehow managed to pay off $10k for my license… on a year where I only made $24k. again, no celebration when I told my co workers about it…. I thought it was a big deal.

During that year I went to the doctor and discovered that I was literally malnourished. I was pushing it too hard with working out and keeping everything on track and my personal trainer wasn’t actually reading the food journal I sent him each night… so I got pneumonia as well….but just kept going.

I also got my Personal Training Cert and my Nutrition Counseling cert that year and started working as a Personal Trainer while I looked for a Massage job. Things were lightening up for me. The tremendous crushing weight of my entire life was lightening up.

But the reality of who my Trainer was and what a fraud he was came to the light. He was sleeping with some of his clients and I have a laundry list of unethical things he, and his business partner, were doing. When I held him accountable that was the last straw for him. He was sick to death of weathering my PTSD and how fucked up and sick I was and how fucked up I was over Thomas all the goddamn time… and additionally I was calling out all the ways he was unethical: I was bad for business. I was bad for him in the fitness community.

He kept gaslighting me to try to get me to leave but that was my community for 5 years and I didn’t know what to do…….So, Matt did whats guys do: Shes crazy… and shit talked me throughout the fitness community.  He kicked me out of his gym and I now have no gym to work out at and no trainers willing to work with me. Thanks Matt! Super appreciate you!

I maintained my own lifting program for another year but honestly, I was in it for the community and sense of belonging that I never had before in my life. Without that and with Matt shit talking me in the background so I had no support elsewhere my program started to slip…. Add to that, I had begun  working full time in massage and my shoulder got burnt out. I have a repetitive stress injury from my Amazon days that was made worse at Tough Mudder when I got my arm yanked nearly out of its socket in an obstacle… so, Lifting started to fade… and honestly, I was burnt out on the regiment of it all. I needed a break. I deserved a huge break.

I think it was right around 2014 when Mom had me come to Houston for Thanksgiving as though we are friends or she was a Mom. The highlights of that visit include her telling me the reason I wasn’t welcome in Houston during the Recession was because her husband Rumi forbade it.

(I forgot to mention that all through the years of her being with Rumi she has painted this picture of him being physically and emotionally abusive. That she was hiding money to escape him and what a horror he is. She had some secret email account that she sent me emails from at one point and told me that she was trying to hack his email to see who he was having affairs with or some other drama….. but you know if you ask Jim2 who his best friend is, its Rumi…apparently they text all the time…so, you know…she loves to lie and paint these horrific pictures of who people are to support whatever her manipulation is to get sympathy or whatever pay off)

Anyway, While I was in Houston visiting her she was acting like everything was normal and fine and that I had just made up whatever it was that I went through during the Recession. She reminded me that since I “left home” at 18 she has had to give me something like $20k in support and implied what a burden I am and how I always have my hand out. She has kept track of the financial support she gave me as a parent and wanted me to feel like shit for needing her. Cool….

Another example of how mentally deranged she is: While I was there we went out to lunch. Mind you, I have maybe $100 to my name at that time. I offered to pay for lunch at this fast food place and after we ordered she commanded me to go pick a table. So I got a booth with a chair. I sat on the booth side so I was facing the café and could see her when she came out of the restroom… I waved her over and she sat in the chair. Unbeknownst to me, the booth side made me taller than the chair side…. She got this twisted angry look and became livid that I thought I was better than her. Paying for lunch and sitting above her like that….. The next day Mom and Rumi started playing a really fun game where they forgot my name and kept calling me “Savannah” (my niece) for the remainder of the time I was there …. You know… because at 44, they saw me as a child. Nothing like a little game of erasing your daughter’s person hood and replacing it with infantilism to let your daughter know you really see her and respect her.

I really hope this is making clear why I have a strict no contact in place with her that I will never change.

Now its 2017 and I get hired at my dream job. The Spa that I am at is beautiful. My co workers are the best. I make really fine money. My mental health is slowly coming together. I got Thomas out of my life and have enough mental clarity now to really see him for who he is.  I had spent yet another holiday season alone and the isolation was killing me, as per usual…so I decided that the best thing for me to do to help pull me out of my PTSD and stop being so scared to be seen or heard would be to go to music school…. Learn how to make friends for the first time in my adult life and be with people who were not my co workers. Try to trust people again. Try to trust that I could be liked for who I am….though rejection has been a very prevalent theme in my life… Try to learn some social skills that I missed out on basically my entire life.

How to simply hang out and play….was brand fucking new to me. Music school was really really really hard… not to mention I have no musical ability and I get triggered by stress pretty quickly and freeze… but I knew it was the right thing to do to reparent the kid inside me who never learned to make friends or be in activities with others and who wanted to play drums…. So hell yeah. I did it.

Thank you to Katy,Tracy,Melissa,and Kiyan for coming out to see a couple of those shows and being there to support me. You have no idea how much that meant to me.

I thought if I could make friends there I would have people to go out with and maybe could have a chance to meet a man and have a relationship… but all the women there were married with children and had little interest in going out at night, and I still wasn’t fully integrated as a Self yet… so that was a bust.

Music school was really me making up for my 20s and 30s when I should have been out at shows and hanging with friends and making art and and dating but instead I was being mentally tortured by my entire life. I gave it a good shot, but Im a mixed media artist not a musician and that’s really that. I have to take it in stride: Bless my heart for trying. Thank you to all my bandmates for being so kind and supportive of me and for being stellar humans

I was in my first year of Music school when I met the most amazing man, Joe. He was magical. He honestly loved me for me and I loved him right back. It was fast and deep and I felt so completely seen and wanted by him and OH MY GOD I NEEDED THAT FOR SO LONG. He made incredible things happen and took me on dates that made me feel like a Queen…. But Joe was terminally ill and two months later took his own life. I was in shock again….but kept going as I do.

Also out of context of timeline: When I got into that sweet little apartment I would go down to Edge of the Circle which was just a couple blocks away and get Tarot readings from Raven and Kiyan. I didn’t know how to simply ask for friendship so I would buy Tarot readings to have someone to talk to. These two helped me so much in so many ways…through their compassion and through helping me develop my Self and my skills. Over and over again these two have shown up as real people who have treated me with integrity. People who genuinely care about me and support me in my developing personhood. Ive made it through because of them and so many others along the way.

The shitty thing about being knocked out of your self is that even though you have people around you who care, you often cant see it or feel it and like a dick minimize what people are doing for you because the all-consuming feeling that nobody is there is so much larger than the gentle loving efforts of those around you…. And what happens: you push away the people who are there for you because they have self-respect and youre unwittingly being a dick. I want to say Im really sorry about this because I know for sure Ive done this.

Also out of context of timeline: Somewhere in here I started working in Tarot and caught a lucky break and got hired at Percys to be their Reader. Huge shout out to Krista who made that so possible for me. That Tarot night did more for my sense of Self and well being than I can explain and I was a success there largely because Krista made it so beautiful and kept that night going for me.

I also want to say Thank you to Tracy, Katy, and of course Brian who were my friends and co workers at the RowHouse Café… through those early massage school years. Endless support and encouragement from these guys, even when I was too fucked up to really receive it or reflect it back. Im really lucky to have met you and have had you in my life.

It was right around the solar eclipse and the night before that hurricane hit and flooded Houston and moms house got flooded that I emailed her a long list of things she had done that hurt me and explained that I would be taking time away from her and Id let her know when we could speak again. The next morning after I sent that email I again felt puppet mastered…. But this time by the little kid inside me… I literally woke up, jumped out of bed and started to dance. I was filled with glee. I was amazed by myself. I don’t know where that came from except to say that the kid inside me was OVERJOYED to be free of her.

In the coming years I kept proving to myself that I wont let her back in and that Im safe now… and as I have been staying true to this practice of not letting her, or anyone like her, back in my life… I have become happier and more whole as a human being…. More capable of making good choices in friends and finances….

She made an attempt to contact me around the holidays this year. I saw her call but let it go to voice mail. The message she left was something to the tune of her wanting to know if I had forgiven her yet and gotten over it. …See, because its about me and what I need to do because its my damage that is the problem here…. Nothing had changed with her. It was still my fault. No apology. No self reflection. Had I forgiven her yet. For fucks sake: I will never forgive her.  

I have learned to celebrate myself, take my self on vacations and to my great delight I had friends who spent time with me and took care of me!!!!!! Incredible!!!!!, give myself the compassion and nurturing that I always wished I had and reasonably should have had from my family. I have been working on being able to see the love that is there for me from the people that I have in my life, though I still struggle with that.  I have been working so hard on Self Love, Self Respect, Healthy boundaries, creating safety and stability in my life in all way and I know that Im doing great work because my inner me, those little kids inside of me that needed a parent are really responding to the parenting Im giving them…. Check this out:

A month or so after I declined her call I was out at the café in my neighborhood, having a treat and a coffee and doing some writing. I was sitting at the table and this incredible feeling came over me as though a golden light was shining on me and I could see it glittering down on me. I started laughing and crying like when you cum really hard and youre filled with ecstasy and bliss. And then I had a vision of being in a hospital room that was in the forest… it was just two walls of the room and then the woods…I could see deer and birds. In the hospital bed there was a person in a full body cast. The cast had moss growing on it and tiny sprouts of pine trees. The Doctor walked in to the room to check on the patient. I was both the Doctor and the Patient. I told myself: Hey, its time to get you out of there. And I grabbed my circle saw and started to cut my cast from end to end and crack to open like a sarcophagus. I told myself Welcome Back! We are so glad you are here!!! Go slow, take your time getting up. No rush.

I was so elated. I walked home immediately. Upon arriving at my studio I had another vision of all the ages of myself, down to the youngest and up to the oldest and wisest all linking hands. I recognized these women as my Sisters/MySelf… all of us agreed that the next would watch out for the next and that nobody would ever hurt us again. SOUL RECLAMATION.

For the first time in my life I am here, in this body, in this present moment. The first time in my life I am ME. Im currently 6 months in to my actual LIFE. THIS IS ME. I AM HERE. OH MY GOD. I MADE IT.

Yes now, of course, the world is ending and my career in massage is tenuous at best and I might be fucked again…. But so not worried because honestly, Ive survived worse with less. So I will figure this out and keep myself alive, housed and fed.

Over the years my attempts to talk it out with Mom were pointless… she would erase my feelings and angrily tell me that it was hard on all of us. She would hold no space for me and just be my mom and have some compassion for her baby girl. Nope: It was hard on all of us so stop complaining… but see, I was a child and they were my parents and that was my family and I had no choice…. So really, at this point, Im done. Im better off on my own.

I don’t know what else to say other than those yearly years were tremendously bad for everyone in my family, yes. I can now at this time in my life see and understand why everyone did what they did…. That my parents were also victims of abuse from their parents and all that and yeah, I have compassion and Im really sorry they had to go through that….But it doesn’t make it ok or make mom someone I will let back in my life. I mean, I went through it and Ive dedicated my lifes work to helping others heal and I try to be so good to everyone around me so…. No excuses. And, I still have questions like: Fuck, why did dad never go to jail? Im guessing it was about the money…..and really, how did nobody in my family see that I needed help?

Anyway… Ive done epic amount of self work to be here today as a whole person and really change my reality to one where I have value and can share love. Im still working on it… My social anxiety is still the worst. I can barely form words into sentences when Im out in public and I dont have a job to do as my role to play....but you know, I keep trying and its easier and keeps getting easier… and I have amazing friends like Brad to have mini adventures with… and I have my Studio to do my art in and now that Im feeling so much more whole as a person I think I might actually see some work through to completion that I can be proud of… and I have a job that I love and Im getting training for some other skills to expand my skillset and I feel that things can only get better from here so

I feel so lucky to be alive and so fucking grateful to be me and I really like myself. It’s a miracle. All things are possible if you just remember: LOVE IS THE KEY and keep moving in that direction.

That’s my experience and now you know.

[tigerheart101]

Back from a break

Sorry to my friends and fellows for my silence. i took a major mental health break.

 because i learned that the majority of this world is made up of liars. Even people who claim the best intentions, when they find a weaker soul they will manipulate their ways into a win. 

The day when a slightly troubled but generally obsesssively careful and good person is prosecuted when they helped someone who was legit a bad person with bad habits and they helped this person be good and happy and just generally well behaved but still be themselves. then just one day the good person is so emotionally and mentally drained because they have overloaded themselves with work because everyone keeps saying they can handle it that their smart enough their strong enough except that bad person who all though they never out right said anything they constantly reminded them they were nothing but what others wanted them to be then eventually this good person snaps.. stops talking, stops function and ultimately STOPPED HELPING.  my best friend who i have learned is 1 of the only people i have ever been able to trust more then my own family finally said to me.  “it does no good to be a good person if everyone sees you threw a bad filter. and it does no good to give more of yourself to help others when you have nothing left to help yourself. cant fill someone elses glass to the top with water when you only had a half cup of water left in your own. “ 

Id love it if i was such a hard core edgy person that i can say these experiences have taught me to say fuck you to the world and help myself. but it hasnt, i just today gave a stranger 5 dollars to buy herself a bus ticket home to her kids. i still watch 5 kids for a friend for free because their going threw alot and really just needed a bit more help. i still take care of everyone while cried in my uber ride today cause we passed a pilot station. this is just who i am ok.  these experiences, ruined my education. but i wont let it stop me, i got my ged last month and i will be going to school for my associates and later my degree soon as i can securely.  i just got hired for a great job, and i start work in a week and im excited to do it.  i have a girlfriend who is going threw her own struggles and yea we fight sometimes but i love her and i refuse to give up on us because i dont give up on people.  i have my own family, not one i was born to, not one out of obligation or just so they can say they tried to help the troubled girl. but one that loves me up and down. who has watched me grow up in hell threw when i was generally bad (which my bad was having additude, crippling stress and a short temper) and my good which is not now and not then.. my good is a day when i wake up after a good night sleep. which is rare.  i have stopped taking all my antidepressants and anti anxiety even my migraine meds...and you know what..i am so much happier...yea i am traumatized and scarred after this last year of hell.. but being honest without the meds that supposedly are suppose to help me. i have more happy days.. my meds had caused me to gain weight rapidly on top of the far from healthy way i ate. my meds made it so yea i didn't cry as much but when i should have been crying i was sad as hell but i didn't cry, i didn't scream i did nothing but sleep, go to school, and sleep some more, eat whenever i was forced out of the house or someone else put it in front of me.... i dont need it. i hate drugs, before it was just illegal ones. right now its all of them.. because i was a good girl, i did everything my doctor told me to. and all it did was ruin my life. it killed my motivation to function, it made me into a zombie who could barely function and my doses where never even that high. i was so careful i started on tiny doses to try and prevent this very issue and i still had it.. it made me process my heart ache and stress as anger. it made me scared of leaving my room and it made me just want to sleep all day.it made what was never a very healthy body to begin with a much more unhealthy body and nearly made me diabetic because my metabolism was so slow i could no longer handle all the sugar and food and carbs i ingested. 

right now, i should be angry, before i would have been, i would have felt it all as anger and frustration thats all i felt when on my meds.. but right now i dont have it in me to be angry anymore. those who hurt me when i did nothing then be the best i could. i dont care anymore. to those who hurt me out of anger because i stopped making myself sick to keep them happy. To those who gave up on me because of others lies, or things that are just honest to god normal. or things i had no control of. i hope you feel better.  im sorry i pushed you all to the point of giving up, or hating me. im not angry with any of you. i forgive you for your part in it all. and im sorry for mine. im sorry i didnt have it in me to beg for help, or say something when i was stressed, or ask for help when my whole body begged for me to cry or scream but all i did was go to bed. im sorry to my therapist for the fact i couldnt tell you what was wrong with me and every time you gave me homework i never ever did it because i didnt want to acknowledge my feelings and validate them long enough to deal with them and i wanted to just ignore them. im sorry to my family that i wasnt loud enough, funny you always said im loud as hell tis annoying, but for once the problem was i wasnt talking enough and you forgot who i was, you forgot everything about me, dont to the fundamentals of who i am.  im not angry, im not resentful, im honest to god heart broken. i have dated alot i know it. im young thats normal its part of finding yourself for some girl. what i learned, is no heart break is the same as having your own family reject you. no pain is as bad as legit being told that your not wanted, that your a wasted time or that they wish they had never meant you when they are your own blood. 

but im not angry. i was bitter at first with everyone. i didnt understand who people who claimed to protect and love me. could have forgotten who i am at the very core of me. so quickly. but i get it now.  thank you, you taught me alot.  you taught me my voice is valid. im loud as hell, but at least someone hears me.  you taught me that its okay to not be okay because fuck being okay.  you taught me who really loves me. you taught me i have fucking amazing friends, and which ones they where.  you taught me that my biggest fear, was gonna be my greatest strength. 

my girlfriends who family disowned her cause shes trans. She says everyday that only people she trusts is me and her grandmother who is only family she has left. we get in fights built on the foundations of these exact trust issues. 

i understand and respect her pain. but i dont get it. she knows that and loves me for it. because i went threw hell this last year. and lost alot of people to lies. but i still trust everyone. i still offer my neighburs baked goods and a smile every time i see them. i still give homeless people a dollar cause they asked. i still love my family even those who never wanna talk to me. and thats ok.. i dont get the distrust. because to me.. being happy is about being yourself. and you know what. im naive, im volnerable, im ditzy, and oblivious, i trust to much, i give to much of myself, and i love people who dont always deserve it. and im ok with that.  my kindness might be undeserved but ill give it.  i have been nearly killed, betrayed, abused, and assaulted. but each of those people could come to me right now for help. and ill still give it to them. because i was taught if i have it to offer it to someone who needs it.  im okay with that. my girlfriend can be distrusting and angry thats okay to. because i need someone to protect my volnerable ass cause i wont risk hurting someone else to protect myself. 

[wildfangz]

@liliithvatore tagged me in that simself thing thats been goin around DAYS ago but here it finally is! also thank you for the tag this was fun :-]

I tag @slythersim @thelurgoyf @seoulchii @weicyn @solitasims @daisydezem @raha-plays-the-sims if they want to do it & anyone that just wants to do it in general! message me and I’ll even @ u directly if u want. 

anyway lets DO THIS shitload of questions under the cut u’ve been warned!!!

1. what is your name?

julian

2. what is your nickname?

jewel, jules

3. birthday?

oct 26th

4. what is your favorite book series?

percy jackson and the olympians will probably always own my heart & soul

5. do you believe in aliens or ghosts?

yes & yes. tho i do think a lot of alien sightings and conspiracy theories and what not are bullshit

6. who is your favorite author?

maggie stiefvater probably? also cornelia funke but its been years since ive read anything by her so i cant be sure BUT i loved inkheart & the thief lord so much

7. what is your favorite radio station?

ummm when i listen to the radio at all i kinda just switch between two rock stations and our popular music station.

8. what is your favorite flavor of anything?

blue raspberry !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tasty and i love a blue tongue

9. what word would you use often to describe something great or wonderful?

cool. or bitchin’.  i play it simple

10. what is your current favorite song?

hands like houses - revive

11. what is your favorite word?

roulette and inhibition which i never get to use either as much as i want !

12. what was the last song you listened to?

emarosa - givin’ up ! its a bop!

13. what tv show would you recommend for everybody to watch?

the new she-ra on netflix its so good. and gay

14. what is your favorite movie to watch when you’re feeling down?

moana. its also like the only movie i dont have trouble getting thru despite how many times ive already seen it

15. do you play video games?

16. what is your biggest fear?

idk... being inherently unlovable i guess n ending up alone? also spiders !

17. what is your best quality, in your opinion?

im fairly open-minded and laid back. Unless someones being like, purposely nasty or something I generally don’t get defensive or aggressive. also a lot of little quirks that piss others off dont bother me im very u do u as long as its not actually harming anyone and ive had people tell me this makes it easier to open up to me so thats probably my best quality....

18. what is your worst quality, in your opinion?

....at the same time though i do get very sensitive when faced w/ criticism even if its of the fair variety when its not phrased really gently for various reasons and i dont like that. especially since I have a tendency to not even talk to people about it. I’ll just immediately start distancing myself. also other than that i think overall I have a really high tolerance lvl but if you cross that line I hold a grudge like a motherfucker

9. do you like cats or dogs better?

cats! dogs are good too but cats are a lot easier for me to handle...and quieter generally but even when they’re loud cat sounds dont get to me quite as much as barks do

20. what is your favorite season?

autumn but im starting to really like summer for some reason? wack :/

21. are you in a relationship?

nope

22. what is something you miss from your childhood?

the lack of responsibility, probably. that sounds real bad lmao but for me its like...I know I’ve grown in various ways over the years but I also feel like so many of my experiences, my trauma, my mental health has held me back and I don’t think I’m mentally where I should be for my age. so all the responsibility of adulthood is just..really overwhelming for me sometimes, even though ive been given a pass from certain aspects of it and the rest is pretty simple its the idea!!!!

23. who is your best friend?

my ex

24. what is your eye color?

25. what is your hair color?

26. who is someone you love?

my mom

27. who is someone you trust?

not really anyone rn unfortunately...would like 2 work on that

28. who is someone you think about often?

are my OCs a fair answer because i am always thinking about my babies.....

29. are you currently excited about/for something?

my favorite webcomic (that also has two of my all time favorite characters in it) just came back!! the artist disappeared back in 2015 like the day after I binge-read the whole fucking thing & i was so disappointed but its BACK and 2018 has been redeemed

30. what is your biggest obsession?

sims probably! i could talk about anything relating to it for hours

31. what was your favorite tv show as a child?

there were so damn many its hard to even think and figure out the most notable ones...i really, really liked teen titans though?

32. who of the opposite gender can you tell anything to, if anyone?

my ex, again

33. are you superstitious?

not terribly so but somewhat. I take certain things as signs and I mean I do believe in astrology & such to a degree

34. do you have any unusual phobias?

i used to be afraid of mirrors but thats all i can think of and its not even a thing anymore...the only other thing is tornadoes but i dont think its unusual. but it definitely sucks for me ‘cause i live in tornado alley!

35. do you prefer to be in front of the camera or behind it?

behind it....like taking pretty pictures and dont like ppl capturing my image 2 film

36. what is your favorite hobby?

sims.....also singing!!! and drawing!!!! video editing!!!!!!!!! the works

37. what was the last book you read?

The Dream Thieves....havent finished it though because last time i went to read it a spider was lying in wait and im traumatized

38. what was the last movie you watched?

coco i think???

39. what musical instruments do you play, if any?

drums, various other percussion instruments, and violin mainly

40. what is your favorite animal?

ferrets!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

41. what are your top 5 favorite tumblr blogs that you follow?

uhhhhh @bratsims @liliithvatore @cabsim @wildlyminiaturesandwich @keysims pls dont feel bad if i didnt include u these were just the first to pop into my head and ive been following some of them since I first made my blog!! and have kept up with their stories completely and enjoy them etc check them OUT !

42. what superpower do you wish you had?

shapeshifting!!! dysphoria? gone. ugliness? gone. want to morph into a fucked up clown and scare people when they realize all the classic clown features are a real actual part of my face? possible!

43. when and where do you feel most at peace?

chillin’ at the pool in summer during the part of the day when no ones there.... swimming is always relaxing 2 me then i love just resting under the sun and drying off afterwards especially since we have a little pond nearby and i can hear the water! its nice

44. what makes you smile?

always and without fail? interacting with anyone i have a crush on. i’ll look like a dope the whole time

45. what sports do you play, if any?

i used 2 play basketball a lot. Like not seriously but it was a thing

46. what is your favorite drink?

dr pepper and monster energy (original flavor) pumps through my veins at this point. we love a carbonated beverage

47. when was the last time you wrote a hand-written letter or note to somebody?

two years ago for my ex and I’s first year anniversary... I never got it mailed but I did at least take a picture of it (with included caption because my handwriting is atrocious). i was very up front about being a romantic and see heres the PROOF

48. are you afraid of heights?

nope! very excited by them actually

49. what is your biggest pet peeve?

i cant stand passive aggressive behavior. my stance is either get over it or quit acting like a bitch because otherwise im just going to ignore you thats the scorpio way (in all seriousness I really, really do recommend not putting up with it and ignoring it until they decide to be up front with you. it can be exhausting constantly reading into conversations and its not healthy for you or them. if they have something to say they need to learn to talk about it properly, and that lack of social skills is not ever on you)

50. have you ever been to a concert?

yep! i think about....six or so? i love them...which is really funny im autistic and EVERYTHING about them should freak me out and they do in other circumstances but at a show i just live for it

51. are you vegan/vegetarian?

nope! ive thought before id like to go vegetarian...but i couldnt do it with my health problems. also i love shrimp too much

52. when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

ive always wanted to do something creative! when i was rlly young I thought a lot about singing and acting and writing in particular...all things im still interested in.... also i wanted to be a dictator ages 4-7 because i told my mom i wanted to be president of the world and make people do what i say and she said “honey thats a dictator not a president”. i then made that known at school and that turned into a situation!

53. what fictional world would you like to live in?

pokemon universe or bust. 

54. what is something you worry about?

never being able to do things i want to do or catching up with others because of my disabilities

55. are you scared of the dark?

yes but a reasonable amount i think

56. do you like to sing?

yes :]

57. have you ever skipped school?

yes i used to play sick a LOT and as my parents caught onto it id even go all out to convince them. i was good at school but i hated it so much

58. what is your favorite place on the planet?

dunno! malls maybe i love shopping and looking at material objects i wish to own

59. where would you like to live?

oregon! portland in particular thats been my dream for a few years now

60. do you have any pets?

a cat! he lives with my dad & grandma though...hes grown up there and likes going outside so I felt bad about taking him with me when i moved out but anyway this is him hes fat and stupid and i love him his name is coffee

61. are you more of an early bird or a night owl?

night owl because my rhythm is all fucked up but in my heart....an early bird...if i get a good nights sleep i’ll be up early yacking your ear off and so excited for the day

62. do you like sunrises or sunsets better?

sunsets are prettier...but sunrises feel more refreshing

63. do you know how to drive?

nope ! im gay !

64. do you prefer earbuds or headphones?

headphones. better sound quality also discourages people from talking to me slightly more

65. have you ever had braces?

nope! but i need them

66. what is your favorite genre of music?

post-hardcore maybe?

67. who is your hero?

every trans person living their truth and being open and loud about who they are past present & future. the worlds not particularly kind to us and our existence alone is considered a radical act, so its always given me hope to see others refusing to pretend to be someone they’re not in this environment and I’ll always have mad respect for that

68. do you read comic books?

i read manga and webcomics...ive always wanted to get into superhero comics but the amount of issues and different versions is ridiculous and makes it inaccessible 2 me 

69. what makes you the most angry?

i mean its hard to pinpoint what makes me angry the MOST...but a contender is definitely how some people feel free to treat others with cruelty and think its their god given right to deny or attack someones existence in some way, & how acts of kindness, even the most basic are branded as liberal bullshit or whatever....it goes against everything i was taught growing up

70. do you prefer to read on an electronic device or with a real book?

real book! electronic device can be easier but....rough on the eyes after a while and nothing beats the real thing for me

71. what was your favorite subject in school?

language arts...at least when we did creative writing stuff

72. do you have any siblings?

two older sisters & an older brother that passed away years ago but. still my brother u kno

73. what was the last thing you bought?

mocha frappe baby!!!!!

74. how tall are you?

5′4″

75. can you cook?

a little bit....not as much as id like to though but im learning

76. what are three things that you love?

storms, cheesy breadsticks, and cat purrs

77. what are three things that you hate?

unnecessary rudeness, being talked down to or generally treated like im stupid, grapefruit which is the worst thing on this list

78. do you have more female friends or more male friends?

female i think?

79. what is your sexual orientation?

im the big bad promiscuous bisexual your parents warned you about

80. where do you currently live?

oklahoma. gofundme campaign to get me out

81. who was the last person you texted?

my friend jojo! just Now!

82. when was the last time you cried?

yesterday afternoon but im a changed man now thats behind me. i will cry about different things soon

83. who is your favorite youtuber?

the mcelroy brothers. also super best friends play. matt, pat & woolie are all great tbh

84. do you like to take selfies?

depends on whether i feel ugly or terribly dysphoric that day or not

85. what is your favorite app?

ummmm....love live school idol festival ive been playin for years its an addiction

86. what is your relationship with your parent(s) like?

dad = bad mom = okay. theres some issues that strain it but its not too bad

87. what is your favorite foreign accent?

i have no idea what the fuck australians are talking about half the time but i dig it anyway 

88. what is a place that you’ve never been to, but you want to visit?

Italy, Greece, Germany, Japan, Mexico, various other states (ive only been out of state three times. twice to texas and then once to kansas. for five minutes)

89. what is your favorite number?

6!! 26 also

90. can you juggle?

ive always wanted to but alas.... :-[

91. are you religious?

i suppose...but im rlly not into organized religion

92. do you find outer space of the deep ocean to be more interesting?

space probably theres so fucking much of it man!

93. do you consider yourself to be a daredevil?

not to brag but sometimes i eat my mcdonalds hamburgers cold from the fridge so you can figure that one out yourself B)

94. are you allergic to anything?

pecans. not deathly allergic though so catch me eating turtle pie anyway! 

95. can you curl your tongue?

nope :[

96. can you wiggle your ears?

nope :[

97. how often do you admit that you were wrong about something?

usually as soon as i realize....unless someones being real smug and annoying then i might be stubborn about it

98. do you prefer the forest or the beach?

ive never been to the beach but i love her!!!

99. what is your favorite piece of advice that anyone has ever given you?

probably that you have to look at your accomplishments differently when you’re disabled or just struggling, to not be so down on yourself because its a fact that what might be a mole hill to someone else is a mountain to you and you have to judge yourself accordingly. Like maybe you weren’t able to clean the whole house, but washing the dishes and tidying your desk doesn’t usually get done but you did it. That that should be celebrated because while it would also feel good if you did more, you still did something and thats great all things considered.

100. are you a good liar?

sometimes, really depends what im lying about and if im like....into it at all. If my guts against it for whatever reason I’ll have trouble

101. what is your hogwarts house?

i always get slytherin or hufflepuff! usually with like 1 point difference

102. do you talk to yourself?

i am talking to myself right now as i fill this out

103. are you an introvert or an extrovert?

extrovert mainly! i used to think i was more introverted but now i think a lot of exhaustion when theres any comes from me just going the extra mile and actively trying to read people and pick up on social ques.... if I just chill im fine

104. do you keep a journal/diary?

nope...ive tried but i just cant keep up with it so i do the next best thing. shouting into the void on the internet to a bunch of strangers

105. do you believe in second chances?

depends on what you did the first time. Some people just don’t deserve taking that risk imo...but i can be a little guarded so maybe thats a bit too harsh

106. if you found a wallet full of money on the ground, what would you do?

turn it in, unless there was no identifying things in it & it was found somewhere kinda random. Then I’d maybe hold onto it unless my gut challenged that

107. do you believe that people are capable of change?

absolutely. i mean thats all we do throughout our lives is change and evolve...that being said I think extremely drastic changes are maybe not entirely impossible, but extremely rare, and the residue of the former self usually sticks around in some form

108. are you ticklish?

yes, dangerously so

109. have you ever been on a plane?

nope

110. do you have any piercings?

one day hopefully!

111. what fictional character do you wish was real?

asra from the arcana.....even if he wasn’t my boyfriend thats just a dude u could chill and eat some pomegranates with u know. Before I downloaded the app my friends kept telling me he was made for me and he really was he ticks like everything on my Favorite Characters Feature List except villain but he has that particular allure & attitude i like so much in villains so thats not a single point off hes perfect

112. do you have any tattoos?

nope...one day! hopefully!

113. what is the best decision that you’ve made in your life so far?

accepting my genderqueerness and bisexuality definitely. Self Love hasn’t been perfected just yet but that was such a huge step in the right direction

114. do you believe in karma?

yes! she doesn’t get shit done as much as id like however

115. do you wear glasses or contacts?

glasses. not contacts yet because my eye doctor is a bitch

116. do you want children?

I do....just not sure if id be a good parent. Its really important to me if I had a child itd be for the right reason and I could raise them well in a healthy environment & be able to take care of all their needs yknow

117. who is the smartest person you know?

probably my friend jojo

118. what is your most embarrassing memory?

one time i looked outside and the sunset was really pretty and i wanted to get a photo of it so i walked out.....and stood like right by the street so there weren’t trees in my way...and then i realized mid-pic 1) i am not wearing pants & my shirt is full of holes 2) id been depressed for days so my hair was a tangled mess. I tailed it back inside so i didnt even get a nice pic it was blurry!

119. have you ever pulled an all-nighter?

120. what colour are most of you clothes?

black i didnt even have to think about that one

121. do you like adventures?

they are pretty swell

122. have you ever been on tv?

a few times when i was little. always photobombing the news reporters 4 what i thought would eventually lead 2 fame & fortune

123. how old are you?

21

124. what is your favorite movie quote?

this is technically lyrics to that lil song in moana at the end but

“ They have stolen the heart from inside you. But this does not define you.”

hits me hard every time! emotional impact? i know her

125. sweet or savory?

sweet!!!!!!!! gotta balance out my bitter somehow

[swayinghummingbirds]

i feel like i need to blog more stuff out of me to research my own thoughts ignore me or help me either is welcomed. 

so like i was diagnosed with mdd , panic/anxiety disorder so i know how it goes and how it feels and all that jazz. used to be on medication and not for almost two years. i can usually cope well since while i was on medication ifound many ways to do so. but now ive come across season affective disorder and i gotta say i am not a fucking fan. i cant bring myself to do the coping mechanisms because im fucking cold and there is no sun ever.  

this time last year i felt the exact same way and almost moved back to fl but didnt want to give up on tn yet. but im wondering is it maybe time to give up on it? i have no family here. and my family is expanding and growing without me. which makes it worse. 

ive been where i am for almost a year now and its been good. but there are no sidewalks like anywhere? im so tired of sharing walls. sure, its a townhouse and its pretty big and two floors and fire place but my neighbors are so annoying and for some reason in tennessee so many people think its absolutely okay to let their dogs out with leashes? 

knoxville is a really cool city and ive loved living here but idk if i can stand the winter. and its just a mild winter, idk how yall in the north handle it. i see now why when i moved abck to pa for 8 months my mom had it by the time march came around and we moved back to fl. 

a part of me feels like i might even just get bored with where i am after a certain amount of time considering how i was brought up. i have moved 17 times, which is wild for a child. probably why i have a hard time making friends too. 

tried leaving work yesterday after i got my list done (usually isnt a problem for my manager but the ass. manager always fights me with it). i told him three times i already had 2 1/2 hours of overtime and ill be leaving when im finished but bitch never listens to me and acts like he didnt hear me say it to his damn face.Usually i ask just to be polite and make sure but this time im telling him. kind of snapped on him because the day before i just cried all fucking day and had that feeling in my stomach and felt the same way when i woke up. old me would have called out, one because the position i was in was easily fillable but now im actually needed so i go to do my job and if i get done early that means im working my ass off and sweating like a pig to get done three hours early. (and the girl who does the work on the two days im off never gets the shit down or sets the room or anything up in order to have a good morning because the whole thing is very time sensitive and its very frustrating. also she called out like three times this week and made my week shittier than it needed to be.) like bitch no that doesnt mean i want to stay and help with other things after exerting so much energy that i dont even have in myself to begin with. so anyways i cried and then the manager came and talked to me and was understanding because he is aware of my mental health issues and i forgot steve- the ass manager (assistant manager , but also ass because he can be an ass) was not aware. so all in all i talked to my manager and told him and he was very supportive and then i went to apologize to steve and he reassured me i was valued and adored here which was nice. and i had to basically tell him if im trying to leave early it usually means because im feeling like a crazy bitch whos on the break of a mental breakdown so. quit fighting me. 

so anyways. 

even if i did move back fl ive finally gotten myself where i wanted to be in my job but i guess if it was meant to be the universe will take care of it just like it did when we moved here. 

a week before almost moving back to fl my grandparents came to visit and we were in crossville, which is the half way point from here to where we were living at the time and i was like hey lets try knoxville and the next day we went to look at apartments and as we were looking this place went up for rent almost as if the universe here, ask and you shall receive. because i was only looking at places that was in between the three stores that we could have possibly transferred to because i had no idea which one it was going to be i just new it was going to happen. and then when trying to transfer we my fiancees assistant manager knew the manager at this store here and said that he would take both of us and needed help in the area i wanted to be in and i was like wow amazing its all working out. and it did and it was great and then it got cold. and then holidays came. and birthdays came. and i ive learned so much about myself and i feel like yes i needed this part of my life. and now im not sure if istill need it. 

we have a vision of owning a little home a nice big plot of land near the mountains with a spring and creek on site with woods around. if we kept it up and really searched when the time came yeah im feel like we could find it. but what if i still feel this way when were there? then weve bought a home and it would be harder to get rid of. i have a vision of my own business with yoga. i find myself in capable of moving between the months of decemeber and march. then what. even when i get on to the mat i cant get into the flow. 

and what if we move back to fl. would he resent me for giving up on our dreams? will i be tired of people demanding my time and energy? will i bitch about the heat all the time and the fact that neighbros are every where? probably, yes, yes, and yes. 

but will i resent him for not moving back to spend our lives with our families? will i resent myself for not listening to the feeling in my stomach? or would i resent myself if i did listen to that feeling and gave up on the mountainous dreams. 

i know we would welcomed back with opened arms and i know not many would miss us here. 

the mountains are beautiful and so mystical when there. i wonder how it would be to live there. i always end up feeling so creeped out at some point of hikes because i feel like something is watching us, and i know there is, there is always is whether its and animal or a spirit. but sometimes those spirits, or beings, are just so strong of a force. what if we bought a property with one of those that wouldnt be able to make peace with us? i always imagined if we ended up with a property with strong entities then we would make peace and ring singing bowls and plant luscious plants for them. but what if they hate it all. and what if our neighbors down the street end up being cannabilistic cult people? what if some animal tried to maul my dog (which already happens frequently, shes a chihuahua everything is out to get her). what if something happens at oak ridge? i had no idea i was living next to a giant nuclear power plant thing. 

but then its like okay what if theres a giant hurricane that tears my house down (i had a tree fall on my house during matthew which is one reason why we left) or the storm sturge sweeps my house away. trey is scared of tsunamis, not that one has happened there probably ever, idk but it is a weird fear of his. surprisingly tornados do happen in tn too. 

and a day like today, where trey is working all day and i have the day off. there isnt much to do. its cold out so i cant sit on my patio for a few hours like i would in the summer. i dont like to go shopping. i dont have a friend to hang out with, which is my own fault people im really not a big people person. i have hung out with a couple a few tiems, and idk ij ust would rather not. but if i were in fl i could go hang out with my brother, or treys sister, or the few friends i have there. or go to the beach and sit on my own, because its not fucking weird to sit alone there and usually you dont have to worry about getting mugged. i cant go to the parks here on my own. i cant take my dog for walks around here because there are no side walks and people just look shady af everywhere. 

when i went to visit for my brothers wedding in october i realized how i did not appriciate the plant life naturally around all year round when i lived there for 11 years. i guess mostly because it wasnt until two years ago that i really got in to plants but omg i cant stop imagining what our yard would look like if we were in aplace where things could just be outside all year round. i would take cuttings of my plants andjust put them every where have my own little tropical paradise in my front and back yard. 

i know this all is really sounding one sided atm but this time last year i was having the exact same visions and the exact same thoughts. and i thought about how what if my brother has kids and im up here well hello here we are now and thats happening. i feel like i need to be there. theres even a house for sale on the same street as him and all i could was fantasize what i would do to the house and how i would baby sit for them and be able to see my dog that i left with him because ultimately she was is but we co owned her together and just to be there. and be with my mom. shes living in orland with her boyfriend and i feel like the fact shes goingt o be a grandmother might sway him into moving closer, she hates the city and i imagine shes just as depressed as i am to be away and to be in a city where you dont feel safe to go outside alone. we are creatures of nature and both pisces and very sensitive to everything. 

and what if trey and i have a baby at some point? we have no one here to help us. i was thinkg about how our wedding date is a year and like two months away and i have no one here to help me plan. and for a long itme i always imagined myself getting married at this place called sugar mill gardens, a botanical garden that i had always loved in my home town there. when trey and i got together we would pokemon go there and take clippings, and i still have those plants today. but then this new vision came where we would get married on our future property. i feel like we are still a long way away from buying a house here though. idk if we would be there in time. and since we went back in october all i can think about is getting married in sugar mill. he reproposed to me when we were there and that was so sweet and just made me want to be there instead for it. 

this is very long but these are my constant thoughts that all happen at once and it feels nice to get them out to piece them together and not feel so overwhelmed with all them at one time in layers upon layers of thoughts. sometimes my vision even goes out and i dissociate and just work blurred vision cross eyed for ten minutes, who knows maybe its an hour. im back there by myself for eight hours a day idk. 

[helianthusrex]

so this year has not been a good one for me, im sure my silence for like 6 fucking months probably showed that some

theres a lot i could say esp ab how bad my health tanked this last month to the point i almost died (but hey i didnt so thats cool)

but the thought of doing it is kind of exhausting so i mean but maybe later

idk what to tag this as but under the cut is talk ab meds & disassociating & dying/illness & surgery & the like 

got a diagnosis after 15 fucking yrs which is sad & crazy & more sad bc it took me literally being on the verge of kicking the bucket to get it

according to all my paperwork, i have a reoccuring/relapse problem w/EBV which has been ongoing for at LEAST since i was 16 but is very likely to have been w/me since i was little given my history

i have CFS (or.. i guess SEID? supposedly the name got changed a few yrs back but its still more commonly known as CFS & thats what my doc is still calling it so im going w/that)

ive learned a lot ab my body this past month especially, & i cant decide if i find it amusing or dumb that a lot of my constant food cravings & need to eat constantly isnt actually entirely my fault at all hello so many deficiencies, even SALT for fucks sake lmfao

its all on paper they cant take any of it from me now & they cant deny me anymore

i need a diagnosis cake that i can slam in the face of every fucking doc ive seen & give them time to see “i was right” bf hand

i have a dead gallbladder which is morbidly interesting to me bc ive been coping w/o it for... way too long (judging by every hospital visit where everyone fixated on my gallbladder & ignored me telling them that wasnt the problem)

which means eventual surgery that i am very scared ab & am not sure how to deal w/yet & am trying to tell myself that id be getting surgeries down the road anyway for transition shit so this should be less of a big scary deal but thats not rly working hah

trying out some weird ass meds that make me disassociate & sleep forever & im not rly sure are working but i gotta give it the 3 wks bf passing judgement

got a pain doc that listens to me (im trying not to be super optimistic bc its only been 1 appt so far; another in 2 wks) but like

hes rly promising compared to the shitshow of the last doc who told me to my face that i was just fat & needed to lose weight but otherwise i was perfectly healthy (id JUST gotten released from the hospital after a 2 wk stay & nearly dying, id lost 15 lbs by this point & was literally sagging skin & bones from not being able to eat or drink for 3 wks, & barely surviving on iv fluids, but sure im perfectly healthy; i almost lost it at that point)

not to mention the docs in the hospital that almost killed me & the docs in the past that led up to this point bc they insisted on giving me a history of “gallbladder is the problem��� when it wasnt

ive never felt so vindicated & frustrated & relieved & sad all at once as i have this past month

god i rly rly rly need this to work out so bad

p.s. apparently tumblr has become even more of a shitshow so im not even sure this post will show up?

[ikkanrana]

So I'm confused, I thought you adopted the cat who hid under your bed a lot, or were you just fostering him for a while?

we were set on adopting him and took him in as planned.

everything was shady from the start as they more or less just dumped the poor cat here and left didnt even come up to the apartment they literally waited by the car and just asked us to return the travel cage before they left… and i was like im not gonna pull him out of there never in my life (my thought was that theyd borrow us the cage to begin with and that we would return it next time we saw the contact person like some vet clinic lets you do but noooppee they wanted it back before they left and it wasnt even the contact person who left him :)) )

so no one did any background check on us or checked out how we lived or nothing i mean we could have been living in a landfill as far as they know but they just dumped him on us and we never got any veterinary journals or ID documents from the shelter who literally ignored our calls for a month begging to get his papers so we could see what his health problems were and what kind of vaccines he’s gotten etc etc

like i was scared of feeding him the acana dry food at first because the add stated that he had bad teeth that were still under treatment (which we kept asking about and CLEARLY stating that we can not sign an insurance with any company yet since dental issues arent covered by all and is EXPENSIVE as shit so we need to know exactly what is up with him to be able to sign anything obviously… but they literally ignored us for a month even tho theyve said that ~if theres everything dont hesitate to call whenever we’re here for u~ like lmao professional etc etc and it went so far i contacted them on the official site and asked for the contact person and the cats papers because we were worried obviously that he was in any sort of pain because of the “oh he’s still under treatment” they left us with

so we were scared to death because obviously we need to know so we dont make anything worse for the cat??? because he’s the one paying for it the the end and we were apparently his second home because the other family couldnt keep him either and i dont trust anything the shelter has told us about the previous fam tbh i think they did the same thing there and just dumped him on them

anyhow as time went by more and more strange things regarding his health popped up while the contact person avoided talking to us and only sent us a passive aggressive text when we asked if he even was castrated and why he was tattooed in the ear and not chipped (which is standard nowadays) and also that he had begin to scratch himself A LOT and pee indoors and that we STILL DIDNT KNOW what was going on with his teeth which is… you know…. sorta super important (i fed him ground beef now and then both for his stomach and for his mouths sake but he did eat the dry feed normally without any spills or half chewed pieces so he didnt seem to be unable to eat but thats just MY observations still have no vet documents or nothing)

and she just texted that she hadnt got the papers from the previous home yet and blah blah blah and he was indeed castrated and vaccinated and blah blah blah she basically got angry cause we doubted her (mind you this is over a month after he arrived and they havent checked up on him or even attempted to contact us back)then she told us some of his teeth had been pulled because he had been ran over (which were news to us) and that the treatment he had been under was for a potential skin disease and we were like??????????????????????? what the fuck do you mean skin disease he’s been here for a month and since day one i was worried because he was scratching himself a lot and very intensely and was losing a lotof fur and now you might have dropped a mange ridden cat on us without saying anything and then she stopped answering for another two weeks and the itching stopped as he got to clean himself more and he looked a lot healthier after starting on the good feed we got him but he was still peeing A LOT and he kept peeing everywhere in the apartment…. we kept asking for papers but nothing showed up still and i was worried something was off with his kidneys or urinary track but we got no answers so here we were with a potentially mange carrying cat with five teeth peeing indoors.

when they finally texted us back (because she told us that she “couldnt answer and prefered texts” because she had been “sick” etc etc and she literally told marina she wouldnt answer if i called cause i had been pestering her for a month asking questions she didnt wanna answer so she was like ~uhm sweaty i wont answer if its a number i dont have in my contacts~) it turned out that it wasnt the cat but the son in the previous family who got some sort of skin disease that was potentially able to spread to cats (???????) and the only two i could find was mange and ringworm which is like????????? what the fuck you just DUMPED him here and didnt say a word and also it turned out he had been peeing everywhere in the last home too and thats one of the reasons they couldnt keep him because they had kids and apparently he was stress-peeing everywhere

so basically nothing in the add or what the contact person had told us beforehand was true and they more or less just abandoned him here without any form of vet documentations or ID and without any research on us or our situation and whent afk and ignored us for almost two months just basically hoping we’d stop calling them and just let them leave the cat here without any repercussions

last week i got home and there was blood everywhere and he had been pooping nothing but water more or less and i immediately called marina who contacted this lina girl from the shelter… long (very long passive aggressive) story short she basically told me i was rude for saying that i didnt feel alright at all sitting at home without any means to travel with a sick cat peeing pools of blood and without anything to do to help him because she insisted he would come back after the vet check-up (which had to wait until HOURS later even tho i explained that he was literally peeing fucking clean blood and he needed immediate help) and that they then would start looking for a new place for him because they didnt have any places over or anyone standing in line to take him in and we were sooo rudeee for assuming and, quote: “no one is really standing in line for a sick cat that pees indoors” and i went NO, WE DIDNT DO THAT EITHER BUT HERE WE ARE and she just switched subject and told me i’d get this “emergency number” to call during the night if something were to happen and someone would come pick him up and i was like lmAoooo as if as fucking if no one will do that shes just trying to make her part of this easier again

and i was like i dont think he even should come back anyhow i think he should stay under vet care at least over night if not more because this is really serious and also if this is stress related we would do him no favour at all coming BACK here then getting put in a car AGAIN and travel back and forth and back and forth but she didnt seem to care tbh she just called us inconsiderate basically and that we couldnt just dump him on them like this in an hour and just expect them to deal with housing him etc…. so basically we were heartless abusers with no consideration for the animals wellbeing 👌👌👌

she didnt even believe that he was peeing blood she was like “oh well as i said you’ll get an emergency number to call if theres anything… which you use if hes SICK and not just, you know, peeing on the floor.” and it just made me angry and i told her that yeah no i think i get that without and explanation thank you im the one cleaning up the blood and she just laughed nervously and told me when they would come get him (which then turned out to be an hour later anyhow :))) )

and he was beyond scared when they arrived to pick him up and for the first time i saw this lina girl in person and she was just…. weird…. i ended up aiding a terrified cat in to the travel cage myself because all they did was scare him to a point where he completely soiled himself all over and peed more blood because they couldnt seem to bribe him in to the cage. and afterwards she just laughed and was like “well that was fast! last time it took 45 mins!!”……. im like????………. whats wrong with you.

and she promised to call me the next day since i was the one at home and my roomie was away at the moment but of course she didnt and LUCKILY for the poor cat the vet hadnt wanted him to go either and kept him over night. and the next day i told my roomie that we just can not take him back again we just cant it would do the cat a disservice and it would start all over again and they would block us or something and just leave him to his destiny here it wouldnt be good for anyone involved except lina who didnt wanna do her part of the work… she tried to guilt trip my roomie in to taking him back in so i took over and just straight up told her that no, we can not so it and it wouldnt serve the cat in a positive way at all to be tossed back and forth over and over ESPECIALLY not since he was diagnosed with stress related FIC and this happened despite living in a calm silent apartment where he got so comfortable he could sleep and relax on the kitchen chair and eat veterinary recommended food and live in a clean nice environment as an only cat…. like he had a really good life here the months he stayed.. and she kept insisting that it was OUR FAULT that he had gotten these symptoms and yet she just wanted him to go back here because she didnt know where else to put him sorta…..

i would never in my fucking life let an animal back in to a home i suspect would abuse or treat it bad like…?????? but yeah she then tried to pitch me and marina against each other (like we didnt talk to each other??? what the fuck did she think) and tried to guilt us in to taking him and despite me seeing screenshots of what marina had written she tried to lie about what had been said and what not so i just told her nope we’re not at home we can not agree to take him back again mostly for the cats best interest it wont do him any good the end and then she started threatening us sorta and i didnt answer anymore and now theyve shared his post four times on fb and still no one wants to take him in (despite them lying and embellishing in the add :)))))) )

So Super Long Story Short kattjouren can suck my ass and being a no-kill shelter doesnt mean you can keep the animals alive at all cost, if you have an old street cat with two teeth left and stress and anxiety related FIC that pees blood and scratches himself raw maybe its not a worthy life for him and maybe its better to let him move on.

but apparently we have no consideration for the animals health and wellbeing and are just terrible animal abusers who asks her to do her job 👌

[buggerjagger646]

nobody is going to like this and i just dont care at all.

alright.

im gonna rant

because my head hurts and maybe this will make it a little less terrible. 

How very not buddhist of me, but fuck you “fat acceptance” or “mental health acceptance”. fuck. you.

allow me to introduce myself in a way that makes me cringe at my very core, for this is the way that so many talk about themselves these days and i find it fucking deplorable to define yourself not by the content of your character or the achievements which you have brought to yourself, but instead these fucking bullshit words which hold little to no meaning of who YOU are. fuck that. but for the sake of the argument of this rant, ive been seeing a therapist for several months after what i can only think of as a fairly serious break and im being monitored for some variation of depression and suicidal whatever, and also for anorexia, apparently.

to the “accept my mental illness” bullshit - screw off. just screw off. it was suggested at my most recent session that i might need to enter a hospital facility for the apparent severity of my thoughts. i have to go to a long, pain in the ass diagnostic session in a couple of weeks to see if theyre going to medicate me, and that session was very difficult to get because hey apparently very few prescribing mental doctors who take my insurance deal with people who have eating issues. so fuck that first of all. 

“accept my mental illness, i dont need to see a therapist.” go to hell, quite frankly. i force myself to be honest with my therapist. i keep a stupid log of my “emotion states” because she asks me to even though i think is ridiculous. i read and listen to many psychological figures and ideas and force my own self to do everything i can to try to figure out some way to get around all of this. fuck you and your “accept me as i am because i dont want to/am too scared to do any real work for my own wellbeing”. fuck you. get fucking help, do some fucking work, get the hell over yourself for the love of everything. stop moaning and telling ME, ME who is working herself raw to figure out what the hell to do, that you dont have to do the same damn work as me. get off it. get yourself together, damnit. do some damn work. 

moving along, 

“fat acceptance” can fuck. the hell. off. right off. so far off that i never have to see that bullshit again in my life. they weigh me once per month at my doctor. the doctor who i had to sit in front of like a little kid and admit that i was barely eating and watch THAT look. you dont know THAT look unless you know THAT look. the doctor who i was given the (appropriate) ultimatum of ‘go to the doctor to be sure youre not dying or we cannot continue’ by the therapist i already mentioned. i just happened to find and like the one who had a specialization in eating disorders. lucky me. i keep a food journal on and off where i have to describe my feelings around what im eating. and when i hand them off i get to watch her get that little look of repressed concern, going ‘this cant be all that there is’. they primarily consist of the feeling “i hate this” and “im forcing this down my throat and i feel terrible”.

so fuck your fat acceptance. dont give me bullshit about “glandular” this and “hereditary” that. the overwhelming majority of you who are fat are so because your food intake is complete and total shit and entirely more than it should be, and you dont fucking care. or, frankly, youre lazy. and dont sass me, ive had a number of fat people admit to me directly that they are too fucking lazy to learn to cook or to cook for themselves or to eat within healthful bounds.

fuck. you. 

you know what? if you want to destroy your body and your general well being and youre somehow content there, fucking go for it. but dont fucking demand that i accept the fact that youre too stubborn or lazy to do well for yourself. fuck you. if i have to shove food into my mouth and i have to be fucking uncomfortable and i have to fucking deal with this, fuck you, you can fix your diet and stop being an ass. and for the record, anyone who is pushing this shit for children is absolutely, sickeningly, deplorable. children should not be fat. they have every metabolic and physical reason to not be fat unless their jackass parents are too ignorant or arrogant to do something. and yes, thats fucking child abuse. if your kid is fat, its almost certain that you are doing something wrong and you need to either seek assistance or have some kind of repercussion. fuck up your life if you must but dont try to bring kids into this. 

fuck you. if i have to force myself to eat, if i have to make myself be honest with what not eating does to me, then you assholes should be held to the same accountability. you know that the food you eat is shit and/or too plentiful. you KNOW it. dont give me this shit about “fat acceptance”. get your shit together and learn how to accept yourself and you might find that in most cases, youre well aware that youre fucking killing your body and you really dont actually like it. if anorexia is an eating disorder, then most of the overeating is so as well. your relationship with food is just as unhealthy as mine is, stop fucking lying to yourself because youre too lazy to be honest and to find the better solutions. 

fuck your acceptance bullshit. 

almost no one knows whats broken in me right now and im damn well going to fucking keep it that way. because i will be fucking damned if i am going to be defined by this shit as opposed to the things that i have done or will do or the person who i am or my long thought and pondered ideas. and even better, ive been completely betrayed by one person i trusted with this information of me who was so enamored with these labels. and ill tell you, it certainly hasnt helped my view of these label lovers. 

get over yourselves. figure yourselves out, give therapists something to do. if youve got problems, fucking address them. if you want something, fucking go and do the work for it. you dont get things just because you think that you somehow deserve them. work for it. and be someone worthy of what you want. dont be a weak little cowering barely person who demands things from people to try to fulfill something youre not willing to work for. and jesus fucking christ, dont just sit there being broken and insist that we have to take you as you are broken or accept your delusions.

i force myself to eat. i work my mind in circles trying to figure out how to be in a better mind. you “accept me” people are so full of shit i can barely stand it.  

[ildivine]

between watching a lot of youtubers, losing a lot of sleep, and playing a lot of the off-peak games, i feel my creativity blossoming in the abstract way that i strive for.

i at least have come to understand how my creativity is dulled, and what i need to get it going again. its difficult, getting older, and becoming more jaded, and depression in the back of my mind is a noisy buzzing that can only be quelled with alcohol or weed. ive been learning how to deal without the prior, but, mm.

i dreamt about gavin and i think about a lot of people in ways that i don’t get to often talk about. its not like i talk to my therapist about this kind of thing. i havent mentioned the system to any since the last one i trusted treated it like DID, and thats fine for systems that need it, but we don’t work that way, and we never have.

alternatively i do think about myself ... and my past lives, often. i feel my limbs more often and it blends with the dysphoria; its strange to think i get so envious of just being spiritually Aware. ingesting mushrooms is the most helpful thing to me, and i know i mute my own sixth sense with doubt.

ive isolated myself from others quite a bit, as ive been mean again. im learning to appreciate the time i spend with dean and connor, even if it is every day. i miss connor every time i wake up without zem next to me, especially after weekends when i really get used to it.

our one year is coming up in july and ze thought aloud to me about marriage and we gently brushed over it. ze said something along the lines of “well, i wanted to wait for a better opportunity...” which, understandable.

one day ill be able to afford nice things like real rings and wedding ceremonies, but the last week of cleaning up my room, and throwing a lot of things out, made me realize what focusing on survival really means. i told myself that in 2021 i would focus on letting go, and its still hard. letting go of friends, and loved ones, and things, old stuff, its all the same, i have such an emotional attachment that it gets tangled in my head and my emotions. connors told me constantly to buy necessities and i brushed em off ... so im glad a friend helped us make up for it.

its embarrassing and its frustrating to rely on my money for things that others dont see as necessary. alcohol quells my twitching but i do have an addiction to it cuz i simply like to drink til i cant anymore, n im still learning that boundary. weed, i cant really explain what it does for me, cuz it is unusual. simple things like helping my appetite and sleep, two major things i struggle with a lot, as well as giving me inspiration to get up in the mornings, or do anything at all. right now it is medical in new mexico and i have a PTSD diagnosis, and when i smoke, it quiets the voices in my head screaming at me about wanting to die. i dont know how common this is, but its one of the things i struggle with financially. to survive. even with all of my antidepressants and anxiety medications, mental illness still lingers, and i think the more i delve into new media as well as reflect on past lives and old memories, my brain is in a very strange place. but ive come to appreciate that it is strange, i am strange, and i have mental illness, and i probably wont ever be able to silence it. i can take out my desire to cut my own skin open by watching dissection videos, and then im also learning and absorbing new information along the way.

when im not absolutely drunk on a tank of heavy alcohol, i can focus. i appreciate that i lost the years of 2018-2020 mostly due to how much i was drinking, on top of a medication that was already terrible for my memory. but the other day i went through my mood charts over those years, where i wrote down how i was, and although i drank daily and felt guilty about it, my mood was generally stable.

unfortunately its very expensive and unhealthy, and the inevitable withdrawals make me worse off than i started with. my therapist considers me drinking as playing with fire, but ive learned how to consume responsibly; dean and i can stop after a six pack and itll put us to sleep, but ill always want another beer, even in the back of my mind. That slight buzz from the mimosa that Connor drank and melted into was likely most of the reason ze could actually start dozing off, and we were half craving another for fun and relaxation, but i thought “i probably wont be able to sleep tonight without another drink”.

and i was right, and i acknowledge that its a problem. so ive tried to find that sensation from other things like hops tea and carbonated water (ew, its still not good, honestly dsjfsdj) or kombuchas, because it triggers the same response in my brain without.. melting my organs. did u kno ur liver is FUCKING HUGE n its also the only organ that can heal itself?? the cells reconstruct differently than scar tissue usually binds together n i just think thats Neat.meme

jokes aside, i think its also why my liver is Fine despite the fact ive drank since i was 13 years old, minus the year of rehab sobriety. That was also my Only year of sobriety. Digging into my alcoholism ive done a lot of questioning as to why i rely on it, and i think it is a lot to do with being addicted to being drunk, and i think its also a lot to do with ‘wow, i can finally turn my brain off! the thing thats yelling at me all the time, feeling scared and sad,” but drinking is also essentially a boost of stress hormones, so when the endorphins wear off, u get sad or anxious all over again. ive come to learn that i only withdrawal or get hangovers if i drink more than, i guess the recommended amount by doctors. 3 glasses of wine will now do me in, dean can power thru anything regardless of what hes drinking, but it does affect the health in ways i cant ignore.

i enjoy drugs, i think is the bottom line. i look up how to get a hold of psychedelic mushrooms cuz u can just get em in the mail if ur in a country where its decriminalized (hint: we’re not) n immediately the results are between getting help for addiction or how magic mushrooms help depression in low doses.

i really have a theme here. im still mad that my parents induced my reliance on all these substances and i know i would be a lot better off if i didnt drink til i was 21 or never smoked cigarettes, and i accept im always gonna crave these things regardless, but i only feel creative when i drink or smoke, and thats another problem with addicts because u fry ur neurons hard enough it all dies down. ive appreciated watching videos and playing games when i am in the comatose, apathetic stage of depression like i have been in recently, where i cant force myself to do anything and even fronting someone else to do it takes energy that quickly dies down.

my energy has died quickly since i went vegan, as my nails have chipped since, so im experimenting with my diet. my taste pallet cant handle dairy anymore, and connor was only here to try it, and i think we all discovered we just... dont wanna do that. but eating fish again helped my energy and brought a glow back to my skin. too much, however, still gives me the greasy meat sweats, so... a lil bit of everything seems to be whats right.

i still crash a lot, but i think thats just a side effect of being 28 in this generation and feeling 68 instead.

anyway, now that my room is FINALLY clean and looking nice, i want to try to do art again. i miss art. i miss thinking in images, i miss my imagination, i miss roleplaying and writing and drawing and arting. conny wanted to paint too but was absolutely too tired on sunday lol n i respect that so maybe tonight we can get something together.

but its been nice to feel something in my brain stirring again that isnt just the gross black buzz of mental illness constantly telling me to die. i get used to it, i guess. i forget its not supposed to happen because i have survived it for so long. im on the max dose of antidepressants and medicine i can take and i still feel really bad sometimes, but i didnt realize it until other people brought it up. stress definitely kicks me into my big bipolar mood swings, but i havent shaken off the depression in months. im not sure what to do so im trying to expand my horizons.

[lostandbrokenshell]

Darkest Before Dawn Part 10

Farcry 5 fanfic. Rated M for Mature language and sexual reference. No pairing or plans for smutt.

“So, i know its been said. I just need to hear it again.” You say from the back seat.

Sharky laughed hard and turned to face you from the passenger seat. “Yup, a cougar, named peaches. I shit you not that crazy old lady trained it to attack peggies.”

“A cougar? Fucking damn. And its trained?”

“Sure is, she has the prettiest eyes to! Ones blue the other is brown. And if you think thats cool, the fang center has a grizzly bear named Cheese Burger that will eat from your hand. He likes cheese burgers, but hes got diabetes now.” Hurk added in from the drivers seat. He pulled over and you got out.

“Sure about this dep, we can help you still.” Sharky said.

“Im good, I need to draw Faith out, find Burk. She apparently doesn’t hurt people, so im not in physical danger.” You say.

“Faith, is a different kind of scary! Just before this all happened i ran into her at the gas station. I just looked at her and then gave her twenty dollars. I don’t even know why, i just gave it to her. That bliss messes with your mind dep, it can get really bad.”

“I get that, but thats why we need to find Burk. Less time in crazy bliss land, then i need to get Hudson.”

“How you planning on finding her?” Hurk asked.

“Well i heard she talks to you when you come into contact with bliss, the more the high the more she talks to you sooo.... I was think I should go roll around in a bliss field and have a good time.” Sharky and Hurk both looked unconvinced of your plan. “Look i know its a stupid plan, but i need to know myself what im dealing with. Its not the best fall back that shes ‘adopted’ family, still not sure how that works for me? Or that she hasn’t really hurt anyone herself yet? But im going to give it a try, because i think the sooner we can stop this, the better.” They looked even less convinced.

“What if giving faith the slip is harder than giving your brothers the slip?” Hurk asked.

“Keep shaking peggie trees until another deputy falls out.” You say with a shrug.

“Ok. Same deal as last time one week. Then its peggie pain day.”

“Sounds like a plan! Im going to roll in bliss field over yonder.” You say as you nod towards the bliss flowers. They still looked unconvinced but nodded and started to pull drive away. They reminded you of two gay dads dropping their daughter off on a date. They knew it was a bad idea, but had they had to let you make that mistake by yourself. You head over to the flowers, they where very pretty, if they where not so druggy they would be garden worthy.

Grabbing a handful of flowers you kneel down and take a big breath in. Instantly you feel it hit, the world starting to flicker and move and you felt so light and happy. Like all your worries washed away and warm fuzzy feeling covered you like like liquid sunshine.

You hear a soft giggle “Thanks for coming to the bliss.” Faith said warmly as she took your hands and gave you a small kiss. “Ive been waiting for so long to meet you!” She helped you up and spun around in circles with you.

Everything was so beautiful. So many butterflies and jackalopes all around you it was so peaceful. “You seem so nice.” You say softly. “I don’t understand why you do this.”

She stopped and smiled warmly at you. “Im only trying to help people, im only trying to help you, Joanne.” She spread her arms out and wings sprouted from her back she flew up twirling. “We can all walk through Edens Gate together!” She said as she stopped a burst of butterflies butst out from around her and surrounded you.

“Call me JoJo.” You say while loosing your self with the butterflys they where so pretty you felt as though you where floating with them. Light and fluttery.

Faith came back and grabbed your hands. “Come with me!” She said warmly as she flew away with you. “I heard John started calling you JoJo when you where both little.” She her voice made you feel so happy, you wanted to listen to her talk it was so smooth and silky.

“He had problems saying ‘Joanne’ so he called me JoJo instead. For the longest time he was the only one to use it, then my adopted parents started to call me JoJo. I liked it, i like it more than Joanne. Mark use to joke around and call me Mojo Jojo” You say, it felt so good to think of them. “I like you Faith, maybe its the bliss maybe not. But i cant allow you to harm people with my brothers, i will work as hard to stop you to.”

Faith lost her smile for a second. “Im not harming anyone, im savings them. When the collapse comes they will be safe with me, to walk through Edens gate.” Her demeanor shifted down slightly. “Its ok to be scared, but we’re here for you!” She said gently. “Walk with us through Edens Gate.”

“I’ve never let my fear stop me from doing what I believe is right, I certainly don’t let it drive me either. Im not going to be a part of Edens Gate. But Faith, i can be here for you to. This doesn’t have to be your path either, we can on still be on the same path still. I just cant be on the one you’re on right now, innocent people are dying.” You say, Faith pulled back slightly letting you go. You hear another voice softly talking and look around and see Burk. He was shuffling around talking to himself there was so many butterflies around him. “Burk?”

He looked over to you. “I can see it now, we where wrong, so wrong.”

You start going over to him and Faith tried pulling you back. “Hes happy here, you can be to, join us.” She pleaded.

You moved so slow, you felt like you had cement shoes. Your whole body was fighting you as you tried to get to Burk, he was heading to white iron gates. Everything in your head screamed at you to get to him first.

“Stop it! Leave him alone, hes happy here.”

You ignored her and pushed your self harder you had to get to him, you had to stop him before the gate. “Burk, please.” You say as you get closer.

“Its coming, its coming. They are right, its coming.” He mumbled.

You pushed your self harder and reached out grabbing him just before the gates, you hear Faith scream at you. There was a green mist that exploded from around you both and the world went black.

When you came to you could hear lots of yelling and shuffling slowly you sit up, you where back at the jail. You could see a bunch of people around Burk, he had a gun. “You don’t understand” he pleaded. “Its coming, we shouldn’t of started it.” Hes eyes where searching everyone’s, he was trying to make a connection.

Shit, you think. Your head hurt, you felt nauseous and your body felt like a giant sand bag. You where in no condition to handle this, and you had seen that look, behaviour to many gimes before. “Burk.” You say softly. His eyes snapped to you. “I understand what you mean a bit. I mean, that stuff is great feels great, i want to live in it to. But its not good for us, its bad for our health.”

“Thats not what i mean.” He yelled as he pointed the gun at you. A few people had to move out of the way so it wasn’t pointed at them. “Its real, the collapse. They’re trying to save us. Im not safe here, none of us are.”

You put your hands up and slowly, a little bit slower than you wanted, bliss come down was painful. “Ok, talk to me about it.” You say softly, slowly getting up.

Burk shook his head, it looked like he started crying. “No.” He whispered. “You won’t understand.” Before anyone could react he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

You felt like you where kicked in the chest and everyone was frozen in place. “Dammit.” Whitehorse whispered. “Alright, we did the best we could. Lets.... Lets clean this up and move on with it.” He said. Slowly everyone started moving again and he looked over to you. “You did good, you brought him back. That bliss, Faith. It got to him, theres a point where its to much, i need you to be careful out there.”

“I will be, i only went into the bliss to find him. I wont again, I promise.” You say as you close your eyes and slowly lay back down. “I think i need to sleep more of this off.” You say quietly.

“Take all the time you need rook.”