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rixxy8173571m3w1p3 · 4 years ago

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A Helping Hand

a/n: It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fic. Ive been working on my health considering how much stress I was under at my old job, but I’m doing much better now. Anyway, I hope you guys will enjoy this.

This fic is set before Zeta 7 and the reader were dating, and when they were still friends. Set during and before the beginning of The Fluffy Adventures With Your Boyfriend Doofus Rick series.

In this fic the reader only wants to help.

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It was almost time for you to eat again. At times it almost seemed to be more of a chore than a necessity to have a meal or to follow the routine of it, but hunger had led you here. And although there were many other things you might've preferred to do, this was what had to be done at the moment. Anticipatory feelings were lacking as you opened up the fridge; had it been conveniently full of delicious food which didn't need to be put together, and could simply be warmed up, that would have been great, but that was wishful thinking. Of course, you hadn't gone food shopping yet, so your old fridge was bare; eating out was an option, but you already did that for lunch and it didn't feel worth getting properly dressed for.

It had been while you were thinking of a creative way to use elbow pasta and ketchup when a song played through the tiny speakers of your phone; it was a phone call and you didn't have to hesitate to answer; it was from your favorite person; from Rick. You tried not to get too excited whenever he would call, but you couldn't help yourself; hearing his voice alone could make you happy. Pressing the green answer button on your touch screen, you smiled despite his inability to see it. “Hello Rick. How are you?”

“He-hello? I'm um - I'm fine. I hope this - is this a-a good time?”

His usual soft, cheerful voice seemed reluctant, almost shy tonight. You always thought he sounded sweeter over the phone, and it just made you want to tease him a little. Leaning against your kitchen counter, you could not help but laugh. “A good time? It is now. So, what’s up? Other than the ceiling. ”

He chuckled at that and you were relieved he couldn't see you at this moment, for the warmth in your cheeks would take a couple of minutes to recover from. “Gosh," he started, "I-I-I-I-I was just wondering if y-you would like to come over. It’s almost time for dinner and I um - I finished cooking, but…”

“You cooked too much again?”

“Y-yeah.”

"You're going to go through all your groceries that way."

"I-I couldn't help it." he confessed. "This recipe called f-for a certain amount of ingredients, but then a-again I guess it's f-for multiple servings."

You heard him sigh, and the thought of his frowning face came to mind. So, this was simply to invite you to dinner: it didn't matter what he might've called you for; the answer was almost always yes. As of late, Rick had been cooking more than one person could eat at a time; you always did think it was odd that he'd cook in abundance, especially since he lived alone, but he'd blame it on old habits. However, it made you wonder if he was looking for reasons not to eat alone; not that you minded. Interrupting the silence, you commented. “Well, I guess I'll have to help you make it disappear then."

"Huh?" he brightened, "Is that a-a yes?"

"What do you think it means? Yes, that's a yes. Goodness," you giggled. "I'll see you soon.”

You hung up and rushed back upstairs to change. What a silly man you thought. Such a silly…but adorable man, who had so much room for kindness and doubt.

——————

It was lovely to see him, and to listen to what he'd call gossip but was only the latest development of the pigeons which had made a nest in one of his fruit trees. "Y-you gotta see how they've made their nest. Boy, it's - it's fascinating how they used s-some old magazine clippings and hair ties."

Touching his hand lightly, you wondered. "Do you have any pics of them that you can show me?"

With raised brow, he started. “Sh-sh-show you?"

"Yeah," You leaned forward a little, and smiled. "I want to see what you've been telling me about."

Without hesitation, he searched his labcoat pockets and retrieved his phone; scrolling through his gallery until he came across said pictures. "I-I-I-I took these a couple of - of days ago."

Your fingers lightly brushed his palm as you grabbed his phone to glance through the pictures; he had a good eye for angles and lighting, and from the looks of it, the pigeons seemed to be relaxed so he might've fed them first; how nice. "They're so cute. I can’t get over how fluffy they look."

Replacing the phone into his palm, he visibly tensed; your fingers had brushed his palm again. Now, the urge to allow your hand to linger there was strong and the thought of lacing your fingers with his had been tempting, but you did neither. You quickly withdrew, with a new sense of embarrassment over such thoughts. He wouldn't understand how you felt, because he didn't see you that way.

“How do y-y-you like them?”

Hiding behind your water glass, you answered. “Way more than I thought I would.”

_________

Rick was still eating, but not with the same vigor from earlier. You wondered if you had insulted him or something; he had been avoiding direct eye contact for a while. You were no reader of minds, so there was no telling of the feelings inside; of those senses which couldn't be touched. "Rick, is something wrong? Have I….. have I overstayed my welcome and you don't know how to tell me? Is...is that why you won't look at me?"

"N-no, that's not it."

"Then, did I hurt your feelings? I hope not."

He sagged a little in his seat, and he didn't answer, but he shook his head no. You thought back to earlier, and how you had looked at the pictures he took and called them cute, but other than that, you didn't say anything problematic. Was it because you asked? Maybe it wasn't.

It was easy to hurt his feelings being as sensitive as he was, and although it might've been against your better judgment, you reached out and touched the back of his hand. "Please talk to me. I don't know what I did, but I'm so sorry. I don't want you to be upset at me."

With widened eyes, he's gazed at your hand, then back towards you. "No, that’s not th-the problem."

"Then why are you so quiet all of a sudden? It isn't like you."

"It's because I…I'm s-s-sorry I talk so much."

"What do you mean? Where is this coming from?"

"It appeared as though y-you were getting tired of all my talking.” He started in an almost accusatory manner but must've realized how it sounded and continued with more calmness. “Gee, I-I didn't want to sour the evening, s-s-so I thought I should just sh-shut up."

"But I don't want you to do that. I love all your talking."

"R-really?"

His surprise at this pained you. How could he think that you'd tire of it and him? Maybe when you were thinking, he mistook it as disinterest. How could you show him you cared? You did what only seemed natural and squeezed his hand but he stiffened.

You realized that when he didn't answer right away, that the napkin he had been using had been dropped and was now on the floor; a faint blush dusting his cheeks and the tops of his ears. You didn't think that it'd be such a big deal to randomly touch him, but you thought it was sweet that he'd get flustered like that; if he wasn't so shy at times, you'd think there was more to it; if only there was. "It's fun hearing you talk.” You confessed. “I feel as though I have so much I can learn from you. So feel free to talk to me."

The relief that washed over him was palpable and he smiled warmly at this. It made your heart swell, and you withdrew your hand although it appeared that he wouldn't have minded. Still, you didn't want to upset him again with misunderstandings. "Y-you're a really nice person. It's - I'm glad t-to know someone like you."

You were glad too.

____________

"Anyway, it's interesting how they can take one man's trash and turn it into a home, but what could they do if given better materials?"

Taking a drink of water, he managed to recover a little. "I-I bet they could make a-a work of art if given the right materials. Wh-why do you ask?"

"I just wanted to know what you were thinking in that brain of yours. Must be interesting, especially with all the things you can come up with."

Yes, you did find the topic of pigeons fascinating but not as much as you found that toothy grin of his inviting. Having finished eating, you listened happily to his delightful little tales and knowings; watching as he'd start eating but then forget his food when he was at the peak of his explanation. He always did seem more cheerful when you were over and had so much to tell you when you were here, but you attributed that to the fact that he didn't have many friends. Though, you didn't mind his need for conversation; rather you enjoyed how random and easy it was to talk with him; his sweetness enriched your soul whenever he was especially happy and attentive in conversation. Handing him a new napkin, you teased. "I'm surprised you haven't made a mini-mansion type birdhouse for them out of whatever spare wood you have in the garage. Unless you already have. I bet it'd be all tricked out with a little warm birdbath and a small mirror so they can check themselves out, fluff their feathers and such."

"Gosh," he sighed, waving his fork a little as he ruminated on his thoughts before the beginnings of a boyish smile appeared on his lips. "did I already tell y-you about that?"

"No," you giggled; happy that your assumptions weren't farfetched. "but I took a wild guess."

He was that kind of guy after all; soft-hearted and fond of the living things around him; it was one of the many qualities that endeared him to you. You wished you could've taken part in its construction. "If you had told me sooner," you mentioned. "I would have helped. I could've helped painting it or something."

"Gosh, I thought y-you had other things to do so I…it wasn't a-a big deal. It was simply an um - an old man's hobby."

"It's just….it sounded like fun. I know it might not mean much saying this, but I would've enjoyed spending that time with you. Working side by side and discussing little details about it. I would…. You see, I love spending time with you."

It was only after you had said all that, in which you realized how easy it would've been to misconstrued. Sitting there, you resisted the urge to bury your face in your hands; wondering what was with you these days. Since when was it okay to get bold and be frank like that? Every so often, when you did say such things, you saw, for fractions of moments, confusion and more….as though he ought to say something; there were no tears and there never was, but you thought he seemed hurt; glassy-eyed and lost. Studying you, he opened his mouth to speak but closed it again; preferring to examine his napkin and tableware then to continue that thought.

He did this often, especially when you surprised him; for better or worse. Perhaps he didn't want to appear foolish, but whatever he could've said was interrupted by your sudden movement. You reached over for his empty dish and went over to the sink to begin on the dishes. However, he jumped up and insisted that you needn't help to clean, snapping out of whatever mood which might've overcome him a moment ago. You thought it was the least you could do; if you had been a decent cook you would've offered a meal in return, but it wasn't likely that it was going to happen. "Rick, you cooked so I might as well help you clean."

"Gosh, y-you don't have to do that. I was the one that invited you over. As th-the host, it's my responsibility."

"That may be true," you reasoned, feeling responsible for him in some way. "but you're always doing stuff for me, so I thought I'd stay and help for a bit."

"Huh? Wh-what?"

"Yeah. I mean what good are friends if you can't put them to work every so often? Besides," you quieted a bit as you scrubbed away at the baking pan. "I want to help you."

It's not like you were using this as an excuse to stay a little longer now. Right? Well, just a little. It was still early and you didn't want to go home yet. Grabbing a kitchen towel, he chuckled lightly. "Well, I-I guess I'll help y-you dry."

Standing beside you, his warmth radiated off him, and from this close, you could smell spices, a hint of vanilla, and motor oil? Perhaps it was the scent of his house, but it was comforting. Good thing you had the excuse of concentrating on scrubbing because otherwise, it would've been obvious on how affected you were by him.

_______

After you finished wiping down the counters, you checked the time and thought you'd be better off heading on home. Grabbing your keys you were ready to say goodbye, but he followed you to the door. "Are y-y-you going?"

Without facing him, you nodded. "I am."

"Then I'll walk y-you home."

"Okay."

In the past, you had told him that it wasn't necessary since you lived so close, but you came to enjoy those small moments of kindness; of his sincere care for your well-being that made the world a slightly easier place to live. The walk didn't take long since you only lived a few doors down, but it was lovely nonetheless. "Thank you for the food. It was really good."

Scratching the back of his neck, he answered. "I-I hoped you would. I um - I enjoyed y-your company."

"Me too."

You played with your keys a little, wondering why you should be so nervous. It's not like you two were dating; it's not like he'd even consider the possibility, but it was moments like this that made you hope and contemplate if you should just tell him. It was always on tip of your tongue; the words which begged to be said, but you weren't feeling brave yet. You needed more time; just enough to be ready for a change. There was no rush, but logic and feelings didn't coincide. "Rick," you started, unsure of what you were doing. "can I um….can I ask you something?"

"Y-yes! Of c-course. What's on y-your mind?"

Think of something you thought. "You'd tell me if you needed help, wouldn't you? I'm not talking about what we did this evening, but stuff that….like if you need help with your chores or something. I know you get busy sometimes and I'd hate it if you weren't all caught up on the latest news about your pigeons or if there were dishes that needed washing."

"Gosh, I-I thought I was doing f-fine with all that," he confessed. "but it - I'll be sure t-to let you know."

"Good, that's...that's good because I'm always happy to help you."

Gathering whatever foolishness which laid at the pit of your stomach and daydreams, you rested a hand on his arm and smiled up at him. "Rick, I'd do almost about anything for you….that is…if that's….. that is what friends are for, right? At least that's what I think."

Though, was that what you thought? Wasn't this just a roundabout way of saying you wanted to be around him more? Oh, if only he could understand. You knew it wasn't right to mislead him, but he never reacted the way you thought he should.

Glancing down at where your hand still laid, a wistful, almost sad quality passed across his stormy eyes before continuing. "Boy, th-that's thoughtful," he began, though as easily as a summer sky could change so did his words. "but I-I wouldn't want t-to bother you or take up your time with anything like that."

"That's the thing, it wouldn't be a bother at all."

This is where you thought you'd messed up, but you couldn't seem to keep quiet when he was involved. It felt as though you were trying to monopolize your way into spending more time with him; as though you were desperate to get him to be around you. "I mean, as a writer, I can just do my job whenever. So, you don't have to hesitate."

That familiar flit of sadness passed over his eyes again and you thought that maybe he pitied you because all you had in the world was yourself and a house you simply inherited. You didn't want to tell him you were lonely, because if you did, you didn't want him to think that it was the only reason you spent time with him; it'd break your heart if you hurt this sensitive creature, but you couldn't help yourself; it was your selfishness talking. True, you were making this more complicated than it had to be, but you didn't know how to fix that yet. "I just…I don't mind being around you more and hanging out. That's all."

Although, it might've not been as complicated after all for it didn't take much for him to lift up your moods. All he had to do was smile, and to pull you into his arms for a big hug. Did he know?

"Rick?"

Squeezing you a fraction tighter, he confessed. "Gee, it's - I-I appreciate your worrying a-about me," he started, his soft, warm voice brushing past your ear and giving you goosebumps. "but I can't - can't help but wonder why y-you look as though you could use a friend right now. Are you al-alright? Did y-you want t-t-to talk about it?"

Your fingers dug into the worn fabric of his sweater and you wanted to cry because he was so devastatingly kind, and you knew in that one moment it didn't matter how long you held on to him; he'd let you hold him for as long as you needed because he was great at empathizing. Little did he know it unraveled your heart every time. "You're right Rick, I do need a friend. I…I need...."

You; the word which refused to leave your mouth. His assumption filled in the blank. "You probably miss your dad on nights like this huh? It's hard t-to go home to an empty house."

That was partly true. "Mhm."

Rubbing your back, he sighed. "Th-there there. Everything is going t-t-to be alright."

Is it? Would it be alright? No, he didn't know or if he did, he ignored it. Though, like this, you could almost believe there was more to this relationship than… then being good friends.

With your face hidden in the softness of his sweater, held so sure and firm, with such strength that seemed unnatural for one his age, he was as you thought of him; as a man you held in the highest regard, beyond reason or doubt that you could love if…if it was appropriate. Why couldn't he stay that friend that you needed and why did you wish for more than this? Was this to be your punishment? To adore someone who made you happy but couldn't be more than society should allow?

"Will I be alright?" you confessed more to yourself than to him.

Squeezing you a fraction tighter, you felt him nod. "Y-you're young, so y-you will be."

That's right, you were young; too young for him. While you had been ready to beat yourself up for it, he continued in a voice that was above a whisper. "I'd like t-t-to help you if I can but only if y-you want me to. Is that o-okay? Do you want me t-to?"

You wanted so much, but more than anything you wanted what he was willing to give. Rubbing his back in a similar, soothing motion, you softened. "Please do."

Another sigh escaped him, but he continued to rub your back; the warmth of his hands and sounds of his breathing making you a little sleepy. You hadn't been checking the time, but you were sure that it had been a while. What you hadn't been sure of was what the neighbors were going to think if they saw you two in such a warm embrace at this time of the evening or anytime for that matter; you didn't care because this felt right. It was as though you could melt into him with how comforting it was. Who knows how long you must've held onto him, but eventually you heard him say softly, albeit oddly disappointed. "It's getting late and I-I should let you go. It's…and you…but y-you can always call me if you - if you can't sleep."

Glancing up at him, you wondered why it ever had to end. However, with reluctance, you pulled away, but only enough so that you could hold him a little longer. "You're right. I…I should go to bed. Thank you for the lovely evening, my wonderful… my friend."

And with that, you released your hold on him. However, if you hadn't known any better, the look he gave you was softer than his usual ones. Was…no…it must've been nothing. A trick of the dim porch light. Half hidden by the dark, he confessed. "Thank you f-for being my - for being my friend. It makes me happy t-to have you around. I'll um - I'll be sure t-to make myself more available to you if you need me."

Your heart ached with half affection, half guilt. You really were asking for so much you didn't deserve. "Oh Rick, I'd appreciate that."

For a quick second, you saw him stretch out his hand but just as quickly let it fall back to his side. Then, he stepped back and reminded you. "Don't forget t-to lock the door."

"I won't."

You opened your front door, and smiled up at him from your doorway, trying to channel all that you felt in a single word; knowing that was all you could do for now. "Goodnight."

Softening, he turned away quickly, mostly hidden in the darkness, and waved. "D-don't let th-the bed bugs bite."

Closing the door behind you, you barely made it to the couch before you began to cry. What were you thinking? Playing around with a lonely man's feelings and possibly confusing him. Could you ever get over him? Would your heart let you?

Wrapping your arms around yourself, you thought back to only minutes ago when you were secure in his arms, and you felt as though you belonged to him. And how your blouse smelled like him now or that his care for you was almost enough. Though, were his actions like that of a parent? You could only wonder. Though, if you couldn't get over him, couldn't you help change his mind?

When you had calmed a little and had time to change and get a drink of water, you found that you still weren't sleepy. It was late but before you could give it much forethought, you dialed his number and he picked up right away. "C-can't sleep?"

"Yeah."

"Me either. I um - I was thinking a-about what you said about th-the birdhouse. While it is built, and I'd painted it, I would be happy t-t-to have you over when you're available and help me make it pretty. Gosh, it's - it's only if you want to."

"That would be lovely. Too bad it's late because I would've come over now if you'd asked."

"Y-you see, that wouldn't um - tomorrow would be better."

"What's the matter? A little sleepover never hurt anybody." You teased.

Right away you heard a clatter and then a crack. Did he drop his phone?

"Rick? Are you okay?"

"Yes, I-I-I-I just - my phone had fallen."

"I see. Sorry for the bad joke."

“It's o-okay. Just surprised me is -is all.”

A chair scraped the floor, and you heard the click of either a pen or a small appliance. "I-I don't think I'll be able to sleep t-tonight but I won't keep you up with m-my thoughts. It'd get kind of boring for you."

"I mean, I am tired, but I don't mind listening to you for a while. Could you just talk? It can be about anything."

He sighed into the phone, and you heard paper. Perhaps he was flipping through a book. “I-I was thinking of reading, but my eyes are a-a bit tired.”

“When you do read, do you only read nonfiction?”

“I-I like to read a little bit of everything.”

“You do? Well, how convenient. I happen to have a bunch of books and if you'd ever like to borrow any of them, you're free to do so.”

“Boy, I'll have to take a-a look the next time I’m over. Hey, um - I do have a-a story you might enjoy. It has t-t-to do with how I came to have jasmine in my backyard. Would you like t-to hear it?”

Grabbing a pillow, you nodded. “Yes, I really would. Though, tell it slowly so that I don't miss a thing.”

With a chuckle, he began to explain, and you placed the phone beside you; careful as to not drop it as his sing-song voice twisted and curled about you in your lonely room.

Fin

#doofus rick #doofus rick x reader #rick sanchez x reader #j19z7 #j-19-zeta-7 #rnm #rick x reader #rick and morty #rick j19zeta7 #j19zeta7 #rick and Marty fanfic #rick j19z7 #ram fanfic #my fanfic #my works #my writing #rnm fanfiction

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ariyadaivaris · 3 years ago

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i am putting this one under the cut. it’s a little too much to have out in the open, haha

i've been kind of expecting to have to write something like this for awhile. i mean, Nothing Lasts Forever, obviously, and this being primarily about 205, we've always been on the edge of it ending just because it's 205. so, i've always had the idea of what the end of this thing that holds a disproportionate amount of meaning to me would look like in the back of my mind. and it's been fizzling out for a bit. there's been some time to prepare. not that i HAVE prepared, but there's been some time to.

i don't really need to say 205 is important to me. it is! it's important to me in a way that is incredibly pathetic and strange. even after withdrawing somewhat, after losing enthusiasm and becoming a bit too paranoid to settle into enjoyment, after deciding to not say every thought that crosses my mind about the cruiserweights (which is still like, 90% of my brain activity, unfortunately), 205 has a hold on me like very few things have had. 205 is where i kind of sharpened my eye for characters and storytelling (and where i learned to see those things where they do not exist, lol), 205 is where i've met a lot of people who i consider sincerely very important to me, it is like... okay. listen. it's hard to say! because i feel like, this blog itself is kind of evidence of all i could say. i don't need to tell you that i like 205. you can see it, every week, in chunky paragraphs, whether you want to or not. it is something i hold dear. it is something that gave me friends when i was coming out of a nightmarish part of my life that damaged my ability to have friends at all. (a damage that persists.) it has given me something to hold on to when things are rough! it has given me a way to experience the range of human emotion in ways that are both painfully awfully real and shows in the theatre of fiction. it's...it's hard to state this. i'm very embarrassed to be sincere on the internet, and to express the full extent of my feelings on something, but 205 is like. a sort of bedrock in my life. it's. LISTEN it's important to me is what i'm saying here

i've spent the last five years thinking about 205 a LOT. specifically i've spent the last five years mostly trying to get back the feeling of the first two. which is sad, but that's wrestling, babey! it's a story like nothing i've ever experienced before, in good and shit ways. it's given me more of an appreciation for stories that drag things out to degrees you can't imagine, for stories that fuck up and disappear and falter. it has given me a lot of appreciation for wrestling as a whole, for what it can be when it's at its best, and for what it means to put your entire being into something when you know you're gonna lose, or fail, or go unseen entirely. for...for the work. the effort of things. it's really shaped my taste in things, i guess. always, always, always chasing that feeling i got seeing titus worldwide's story play out. or that feeling of tony preparing for that tournament match with drew and realizing that that story was never laid to rest. that feeling of cedric winning the title at mania and burying his face in mustafa's shoulder as soon as the bell rung. there's been a lot of disappointment, but it is hard for me to believe that it wasn't worth it, because there is nothing else like 205 when it's good. wrestling, generally, sure. but...205 is where i was first planted. it's where i've stayed. and i'm okay with that.

this isn't really anything, is it. i don't...think in coherent ways as much as i used to. my ability to hold a thread of thought has deteriorated. but. um. 205 is kind of over. it isn't LITERALLY over (though, without tony and ariya, i think maybe it's not that long until it will be), but the hope i've had of chasing the feeling of 2017 205 is officially dead. and it's a really weird place to be in. this has been, more or less, my life for the last five years. and it'll never be the same again. i've known for awhile that it was probably never going to be what i wanted again, and i've been trying to wrap my head around it for a bit. i think i'm kind of stubborn in this way! where, if you keep going and going and going, if you just hang on a little bit longer, then it'll be worth it. hope or sunk cost fallacy. who knows. but this is the door closing on all of that.

i can't say i'm upset that tony and ariya are leaving dubya! i think it's objectively a bad company and no amount of 205, good or not, is worth its continued existence. it sucks to lose a job, yeah, and with an employer that communicates as poorly as dubya, there's no way to get through the process unscathed. that sucks for the real people behind it, and regardless of my feelings about these two human dudes i know relatively little about besides playing some of my favorite characters that exist, i do hope they land on their feet. i am kind of relieved they're out of dubya, though. you know how it is. we've been through this before.

um. i'm probably not gonna watch 205 anymore. i've played with the idea before! but this is it. i have no reason to keep watching. i'll keep an eye on jiro, but i'm indifferent towards everything else it's doing, and i don't watch nxt on principle, so this is...kind of it for my engagement with the cruiserweight division as it exists canonically. christ that feels weird. if tony and ariya go somewhere else, i'll keep an eye out. my options for keeping up with wrestling are unfortunately pretty limited. i don't have the money to do it, usually, i don't know where the streams are, and i've mostly withdrawn from the Community so i don't know where i'd ask about other promotions, or if i'd be welcome. not anyone's fault! just how it is. i've met a lot of people i care about here, and i consider you all part of my life, but i mostly keep to myself. it's very lonely, but it's no one's fault but mine. i'm very bad at reaching out or keeping in touch. i want to. but i try to...maintain as little connection to the world around me as possible. just in case. there are a lot of friends i've made here that have stopped using this site, or that i've just lost touch with, or that i could have become closer with if i ever tried but i never had the guts for it. i have a lot of regrets about this. i'd like to talk to more of you one day. it's not like the door is closed entirely. i will hold out hope for this as well, though. it's what i do.

[later attempt to capture the feeling better: i hold 205 very dear to me. my biggest reason, i think, is that for a time before rabbit went down and i got in my own head, i was part of something. we were a community for a bit. a lot of 205's appeal, to me, was the camaraderie between people, this sense of everyone being connected and caring for each other even while feuding or struggling. and that was what existed as a fan of it. i was alone for a long time right before getting into 205, going through a very weird and bad relationship where nothing else existed outside of it and nothing of myself existed within it. and then, once i was back in the world, stranded and alone, i met a lot of people i consider my dearest friends through 205, people i still carry with me every day even if we don't talk for months, even if i avoid the possibility of getting too close now. suddenly, i was a part of the world again, and it was everything! it was...it was very special, to me. 205 has always been associated with that feeling in my head, that feeling of...i don't know exactly how to say it. the feeling of knowing you can come home now. it's something that dissolved a bit as everyone went their separate ways and as i kind of withdrew from the world again, it's CERTAINLY something that dissolved in 205, and i guess i've spent a lot of time chasing The Glory Days Of 205 Live Etc Etc because i miss it. no one's fault. just mine. maybe it won't be this way forever, though. i would like to think it won't. i want to be able to change.]

this is weird i don't really know how to say all of this, it feels both larger and smaller than it should, or than i thought it would. i'll still be here, this blog will still be up, i will still talk about wrestling and i will definitely be treating a lot of cruiserweights like my ocs, i was not joking about that. i have a very developed internal universe for 205 lol. quite embarrassing really! but. this is the end of something as well. the continued canon of 205, and my continued interest and hope in it. so. maybe i will rewatch it finally! having a set beginning and endpoint for it. 237 episodes, i think. which is a lot, but also doesn't account for all the matches there are to skip over or pretend don't exist lol. or maybe i will just sit with what there is and build from there. or maybe i will just keep it all to myself. i don't really know. i wasn't as ready to say goodbye as i thought i'd been.

um. man. i'll probably keep talking about it eventually, because i love the sound of my own voice, so this isn't really an end so much as a very long, clumsy, unnecessary rumination. but...well. i will miss 205, and i will miss experiencing it with everyone. i missed those things already. but i will miss them in a different way now. and we will all see what becomes of former 205 members, of wrestling, and of the people we are when we watch it together. i'll look forward to it. and i will see all of you around. thank you for staying this long, i hope some of my derangement has been fun to read about, or something you enjoyed or laughed at or thought about afterwards. i hope i've been a fun addition to the text, if nothing else! or a funny cringe compilation (the first funny cringe compilation to ever exist). either way. it's truly been an honor. thank you, thank you, thank you all. i love you very much. i’m not going anywhere and i will see you again, i promise you this. take care until then <3

#long post -

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traumatized-motherfuckers · 4 years ago

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Stress-based sickness, psychosomatic disorders, and the F word. Fibromyalgia.

Read up or listen up @t-mfrs.com (podcast available wherever you stream.)

Waking up, like I didn’t sleep for weeks. Falling asleep after five minutes on my feet. A pounding head. That sense of dread. Sticky sharp pains through in my shoulders and neck. Brain short on energy, missing a few cards from the deck. Waves of nausea and stomach cramps. Chills and sweats, depending on the body amps. Swollen lymph nodes. Muscle weakness poorly bodes. Insatiable hunger but nothing sounds edible - shit, now desire to throw up is incredible. Eyes shriveling, dry, back into my skull. The aches in my legs, pulsing and dull. Foggy thoughts. Racing heart. When will this end, why did this start?

Did I finally catch the ‘rona? Or am I just past my limit for being stressed out again? Well, I just moved, so this time I know that the answer is very likely… stressed.

So who wants to talk about getting sick? Yeah, among this group, the answer might be surprising. A lot of us do.

Why? Not because we love bitching and complaining when we feel less than ideal - spoilers, that’s every day, there’s really nothing left to say about the raging shit storms inside of us after a few years of it. We’re tired of hearing about it, too… just like we’re tired of living it, feeling it, and fearing it.

No, for us, it’s because it feels like there’s always a surprising ailment right around the corner when we least expect it. One that seemingly has no logical basis or reasonable solution. One that no one else understands. One that feels like it’s born of mental illness, somehow, while being very physically present. One that we don’t even bother bringing to doctors anymore, because no one needs to be shamed and shoved out the door again by their flippant disinterest in anything we say after the words, “Yes, I have anxiety.”

Yep. If you haven’t tried to mingle mental health with western medicine before, let me give you a quick disclaimer: unless you’re missing an arm, don’t bother. In my experience, the only thing you’ll get is an eye roll, possibly a prescription bandaid that somehow makes you feel worse, and a bored recommendation to see a psychiatrist - even if you already do.

All of this, of course, has the effect of only making you feel more upset. First, mentally, as you ruminate over the disrespect of essentially being called a liar just because the doctor doesn’t have enough training. Then, physically, as your increased stress and systemic arousal pushes your body into a new level of overdrive.

Oh, was it a mindfuck just to make the doctor appointment, get yourself there, and deal with the social anxiety of a waiting room for 30-120 minutes? I bet it felt great for someone to then invalidate your health concerns, recommend you calm down, and send you out the door without even looking you in the eye. Feeling more upset, now on a highly emotional basis? Enjoy the shame, hypertension, and lost sleep, as if you needed any more of that.

Today, I want to talk about the stress-central area of my health that hasn’t been completely figured out… and the label that I - embarrassingly - just recently learned is highly applicable to my physical condition.

But also, the outrage that I feel over said label, because, well, it explains nothing. In fact, if anything, it probably does all of us a huge disservice after we’re granted this diagnosis by pushing us into the express lane for being written off. It also separates two issues that are poorly explained, rather than combining them into one full picture that might actually yield answers. Oh, and should I mention that I think this is a larger problem of gender bias in the healthcare system? Yeah, why the fuck not. Might as well air all my grievances as a nice lead-in to another upcoming episode; is mental illness diagnosis skewed by gender?

I don’t want to let my pounding head and aching shoulders deter me too much, so let’s just get started.

History of ailments

I’ve talked about this before, but to briefly cover how fucked up this body is… let’s take a trip back to 2013 when my system failed me out of the blue. And by “out of the blue,” I mean that I had chronically overworked myself running on anxiety, obligation, and starvation for 2 years, leading to physiological revolt.

So, looking back, “duh.”

But at the time? This was all-new. It was crisis-inducing and beyond comprehension that I went from a perfectly healthy, physically resilient, surprisingly strong and low maintenance specimen to a chronically pained, systemically ill, digestively impaired, and constantly exhausted sack of wallowing self-hated.

After a lifetime of zero health concerns, I found myself bedridden and obsessed with every weird thing my body was doing to me. Which, as you’ve probably guessed, came hand in hand with the new weird things my brain was doing to me.

You’ve probably heard the “What IS CPTSD?” episode by now, so I’m guessing you’re not a stranger to the details about the common emergence of complex trauma symptoms. Yes, that’s based on a lot of research, but it’s also a throwback to my own experience. I was a long time depression and anxiety lurker, first time complex trauma contributor around age 23, when my brain was suddenly uprooted by a series of new social and therapy-based traumas.

My depression became debilitating negative self-regard and stronger suicidal ideation. Suddenly, my social anxiety became agoraphobia. My new health issues became topics of obsessive and intrusive thoughts… you know, when I wasn’t ruminating about my role in every trauma, my worthlessness as a human, and my recently-unsettled childhood memories. My early twenties were a great time.

And with all the mental strain, came the unresolvable insomnia. Which fed right into the health problems. Which circled back to spark more mental duress. Health anxiety is not a fun way to live.

So, to call my illnesses psychosomatic is completely appropriate. But, also, completely insulting when a western medicine practitioner utters the phrase as if it was a turd slowly coming out the wrong end. And that’s exactly what happened every time I tried to seek help.

To be clear - back in the day I had some very easily detectable physical problems. I understand that doctors have a difficult job when it comes to interpreting the immeasurable inner experiences that their patients detail, but that wasn’t entirely the case here. When your body stops digesting food, well, there’s some evidence to prove that it’s a fact. When a 96oz medical grade laxative used for colonoscopy prep results in zero percent colon cleanse… uh… somebody isn’t doing their duty (pun intended). And boy, did my digestive system just decide that it was DONE doing its only job.

Everything I ate seemed to spark unpleasant physical responses, but moving materials through my guts and extracting nutrients wasn’t one of them. After months of garbage disposal failure, I was basically a walking sewer mixed with a compost pile. I found myself chronically starving, exhausted, puffy, distended, intestinally inflamed, and generally sickly. Your body doesn’t fare so well when it has no sustenance, it turns out.

At the same time, or maybe slightly predating my digestive protests, I started getting ill in weird ways. Things I had never experienced before started popping up, like chronic respiratory tract infections, sinus infections, and gum infections. I was having what seemed like allergic responses to something in my inner or outer environment. I was often covered in hives or my face and stomach were inflating like balloons for no apparent reason. I had near-constant pain in my continually-locked shoulders and neck. My actual skin, itself, hurt, as if I was being stretched to the brink of bursting. My lifelong migraines transformed into something new - disorienting tension migraines that came with horrifying loss-of-vision auras and feverish shakes.

Generally speaking, I was so tired all the time that I could barely get out of bed for more than a few moments before retreating back to my safe place to feel like garbage. My limbs felt like someone had tied weights to them and extracted several major muscle groups. I struggled even showering or washing my face, because both required holding my arms up higher than I was capable of enacting. I was so deliriously tired that I couldn’t see straight, think, or complete basic tasks.

On top of giving up my impressive life trajectory in the aftermath of the physical breakdown - because I was too fucking exhausted to consider the next steps I needed to take for grad school - this is also where I’ve previously mentioned my drive-aphobia coming into play. When you can’t count on your own faculties, you definitely don’t want to be behind the wheel. And suddenly, life gets very restricted.

I gave up my… anything life trajectory at that point. I went from a wildly social and focused student with a fantastic sense of humor about life and stronghold of self-determination to… Hiding indoors. Keeping isolated. Obsessing over my health. Googling the most embarrassing things late at night. Having no answers. Feeling like a crazy person. Hating myself. Fearing that this was the end. Assuming that my future was over. Guilting myself for fucking up my past. Replaying my tragic story of a rapid flight and a crash, after everything I had fought so hard to accomplish. Giving up.

This is riiiiight about where I pull most of my inspiration for talking about living in perpetual “trauma states” from. Being consistently triggered, out of control, and terrified. Having no answers and no one to even ask. Watching mental illness take over my world without the slightest clue of what was happening. And, oh, the perpetual torment of unpredictable physical breakdowns.

Everyday a new surprise. Every moment the opportunity for a shocking change in vitality. Every night a battle of my brain versus my chronic pains versus sleep.

And so it persisted, throughout 2013 and into several later years… despite the fact that I actually came up with an answer for myself that vastly improved a good part of the sickness struggle... but definitely didn’t fix it all.

Finding AN answer

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned this, too… but eventually I found some respite in my health struggles through no help from modern medicine. In fact, I helped myself thanks to familial clues when I decided to exclusion-diet my way into an answer. My grandpa had celiac’s disease long before it was trendy and I decided gluten was a logical place to start. And what do you know? That helped about 60% of my ailments.

So began years of obsessing over figuring out the gluten free life. Which, contrary to popular opinion, fucking sucks. I get that it became a trendy idea at exactly the wrong point in my life, but goddamnit, I hate the question, "Are you ACTUALLY gluten free, or is it by choice?" It is not a dietary walk in the park when essentially every item is contaminated with some form or another of secret sauce and your body is going to flip out at the slightest dusting.

I remember being so distraught over having these drastic dietary considerations to figure out on my own that I would spontaneously break down into tears in all sorts of places - the fridge, the grocery store, restaurants, social contexts when people kindly asked, “how about you choose where to eat this time.” I can’t choose! I can’t eat anything! I would privately bawl to myself. What a fun time that was.

But that was not nearly the end of it.

It turned out, yes, entirely cutting the glutens helped immensely. I also realized that sugar was not my friend. In fact, processed anything was not going to have a great outcome. But then… there was this other weird pattern that I started noticing in my life… sometimes I was pretty healthy and (relatively speaking) happy with the way things were going off-wheat. But sometimes I was just as sickly and digestively screwed when I definitely hadn’t consumed anything questionable. As if other tried and true components of my diet randomly became gluten analogs that upset me just as much.

Plus, there were some ailments that just never seemed to go away. The insomnia was a persistent problem that stretched back to being about 5 years old, but got more severe with time. The aches and pains in my neck and shoulders only worsened, no matter how many tennis balls I rolled on, yoga classes I attended, or muscle relaxers I popped. The exhaustion came and went with connections to my mental health and diet, but not directly related to bready food items. The brain fog didn’t clear up when I had a strictly regimented diet. The tension migraines never fully returned from where they came.

I was still finding myself bedridden and ready to give up on the whole idea of living on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes it was every two weeks, sometimes once a month, sometimes a few months apart. But I never knew why, how long it would last, or how to control the system-wide failures.

And if you want to know how western medicine helped me with any of these continued challenges… it didn’t. I tried to get answers for years before I finally gave up. Every doctor turned me away. Every specialist was critically uninterested. Even the Mayo Clinic neglected to listen to what I said or utilize applicable resources, after I was so sure they could solve the medical mystery of my life.

So. I stopped trying at a certain point. I resolved myself to being health anxious and perpetually confused by myself. I realized that I would never know what any day was going to bring, because my discomforts and continued sicknesses seemed to come and go with the tides.

Eventually, after years of this bullshit, it got a bit better. I buckled down with - you guessed it - strict routines designed to circumvent some of the challenges.

I realized that my diet needed to be incredibly tight, and by that, I mean “boring.” Beyond gluten, I cut out basically everything sugary, carby, and processed. I noticed that without a certain variety of physical exercise on a regimented basis, everything started slipping. I prioritized finding ways to get to sleep at night, even if it meant being rigid and assessed as “dramatic” by less slumber-impaired humans. I gave up any activities that caused neck and shoulder strain, and tried to be better about things like stretching. I also noticed that dealing with my emotions was a gateway to pain and discomfort relief, which was an uphill battle all it’s own. And, you know, eventually I learned about this Complex Trauma thing that explained a HUGE part of early to mid twenties, including a majority of the physical ailments.

But, although I began to live like an above-averagely healthy human again… I’ve still always had a few mysteries about my health.

Sure, over the course of many years I’ve figured out how to live with a semi-predictable body after long periods of never knowing what tomorrow would bring. But, unfortunately, there are still times when my system throws me a curveball. During those unanticipated spans of health failure, I’m left ruminating on a question or three that haven’t ever been answered consistently.

One of the most common inquiries is coming at you next.

Stress or sick?

So, even after all my life changes and careful modifications. All my sacrifices and seemingly over-the-top regimes. I’ve still had an ongoing health obsession that pops up from time to time when my shit starts to go downhill.

The incrementally-observed question that runs through my head on repeat… “Wait, am I communicably sick, or am I just fucking stressed out again?”

I realized a while back - maybe in my mid-late twenties - that holy hell, I sure felt like I was coming down with the flu more often than it was logical. The thing was, my symptoms only ever progressed to the point of feeling like I was still actively fighting off the sickness as it took hold. I would get the temperature dysregulation, the headache, the muscle pain, the foggy feeling, and oh boy, the exhaustion - that generally serve as your first signs of contagious trouble.

I would be too deliriously tired to get up and do anything. If I made myself go to work, it felt like wading through a dream. Half present, half falling asleep at my desk. My body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Even my head was too heavy for my neck to manage the task.

Beyond the energy void, I would genuinely start to experience pre-illness complaints, like swollen lymph nodes, congestion, and the aforementioned shivers and shakes. I would find myself incredibly hungry, as though my immune system was ramping up for a fight. I would get weak, like all my electrolytes were purged from my body. I would characterize the experience as feeling “generally under the weather” in preparation for something much larger slamming into town.

Beyond the energy void, I would genuinely start to experience pre-illness complaints, like swollen lymph nodes, congestion, and the aforementioned shivers and shakes. I would find myself incredibly hungry, as though my immune system was ramping up for a fight. I would get incredibly weak, like all my electrolytes were purged from my body. I would characterize the experience as feeling “generally under the weather” in preparation for something much larger slamming into town.

And I would respond in kind. I would retreat to bed, Nyquil and vitamin C showering over me on frequent intervals, gearing up for the systemic war of a lifetime. I would drift in and out of sleep for a day or two, fending off the weird muscle aches and sweat sessions that come with an emerging fever. Interestingly, many of my old food reactivities would rear up during this period. I would get my neti pot and vomit-bags ready for action.

And then… nothing else would happen. Assuming I chilled out and retreated to a state of forfeit when I actually treated myself with kindness and care, everything would work out. After 1-5 days of being back in my bedridden state, determined that significant contagious sickness was headed my way, it would seem to just disappear overnight. Or, clear up by about 70% overnight, to be more realistic.

It took several rounds of this pattern - I couldn’t tell you how many - before I finally realized… heyyo, my body shuts the fuck down when I’m stressed out. Every time I experienced one of these sudden falls from health, it followed (or ran in tandem with) a period of significant stress, anxiety, and/or depression. And if I let myself relax for a week, it would all be okay. If I tried to push through it because ObLiGaTiOnS, I was signing myself up for a prolonged and far more serious health failure. It happened too many times; I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. Like I had postulated earlier in my adulthood - my health seemed to be drastically affected by my mental state. Particularly, my interpretations of stress, obligations, and fears.

And I can tell you, my health anxiety quieted down for a while in the aftermath of the acceptance. Call it immersion therapy. When you’ve experienced the same event over and over again, but A never leads to B, and C-alming your shit makes condition A disappear back into the ethers... well, eventually you take it for what it is and just stop panicking so much. I think I got tired of preoccupying myself with the whole dumpster fire at some point and preferred to extinguish the flames by letting them run their course.

This is where I’ve lived for the past many years now. Realizing that if I push myself too hard mentally or physically, or if I let too many stress signals infiltrate my brain… I’m about to get fucked up. My health will slip quickly. I will be reactive to essentially every food on this planet. My body will be puffy, inflamed, and painful. Not to mention, so goddamn tired all the time. But that’s it. It won’t last forever. I’m not going to die. Telling myself the opposite makes it all last a lot longer. Don’t pile stress about your stress-induced sickness onto your existing stress, and you'll be better soon.

And yet, when it’s happening, I also never know for a fact that my stress-based illness is definitely what’s going on. The result is getting trapped in a “will I or won’t I” obsessive spiral of anticipating the worst while reassuring myself that it might be nothing at all. There’s a lot of internal and external conversation about it, as people want to know if you’re sick and you want to be able to warn them that you feel like death… but also have to throw in the caveat, “Iunno, you have to realize that this happens to me all the time and it’s usually nothing, though.”

Of course, this creates the opportunity for my brain to 1) tell me I’m probably fine, quit complaining, pussy, and 2) compare myself to everyone else on the planet, who doesn’t crumble when their brain interprets times are hard. Because, of course, I have to make myself feel mentally ridiculous for feeling physically horrible. Other people are always happy to help in this regard, too. "You sure get sick a lot. I thought you had the flu last month. Wow, it always seems like something is wrong with you." Mhm, I feel the same on all accounts.

And, Fuckers, that’s why I stopped talking about it or looking for answers a long time ago. Instead, I've just relied on the most logical answer and quit worrying. I’ve done enough research on my own, not to mention all my Animal Science schooling, to know how stress responses work. They’re significant. They have the potential to disrupt your entire body through hormonal dysregulation. And they work differently - as far as we can tell - depending on the organism.

So that’s what I’ve leaned on. Acknowledgement that stress really screws with me. It zaps my energy. It fogs up my brain. It makes me overstimulated. It causes weird pains and immune system responses. It churns up my digestive problems. It also makes me feel like I’m starving but nauseous all at once. Over long periods of time, it can lead to infections. It, obviously, ruins my sleep, which reaaaaally doesn’t help with any of it.

That’s that. Pretty complicated but simple. Try not to stress yourself out and god help you, if you do. Chill for a few days and you’ll be alright, probably. No one knows why it happens. Doctors don’t care. Just watch out for yourself, because no one else deals with this shit.

Unless… they totally do.

So, that’s fibromyalgia

I guess this is where I tell you something that a lot of folks have probably already figured out. Sorry if you’ve been yelling at me through your headphones this whole time - chill, I’m getting to it.

There definitely is a term for everything I’ve described. There are millions of other people who experience it. And, yeah, doctors often still don’t believe it’s real… but the numbers and anecdotal evidence don’t lie.

Ever heard of fibromyalgia?

Of course you have. But have you ever really looked into what it meant? Because… I hadn’t.

Annnnd then a listener and I were chatting on Instagram a few weeks ago. And she mentioned... everything I just mentioned. And her diagnosis had been? Fibromyalgia.

Via DM, your fellow Fucker started telling me about being tired all the time, mysterious aches and pains that worsen with stress, IBS symptoms, improper temperature regulation, and over-exertion that leads to required days of recovery. My jaw hit the floor.

You know I hopped online and started doing more research of my own. And all of the information was confirmed and expanded upon in a way that drove my mandible straight into the basement.

Hey, you know how fibromyalgia is synonymous with “widespread pain?” Oh shit, if you dig into it, there is a lot more to learn. Here’s a (maybe, complete?) list of the currently known associated symptoms. Keep in mind, I couldn’t find a single comprehensive resource for this information. This list is compiled of information from the the peer-reviewed article I'm going to read from later, the American College of Rheumatology, the CDC, Healthline, and Medical News Today. And if it sounds like a bit of a "catch all" pile, I think you're right.

Pain and stiffness all over the body

Fatigue and tiredness

Depression and anxiety

Sleep problems

Problems with thinking, memory, and concentration, known as “fibro-fog”

Headaches, including migraines

Tingling or numbness in hands and feet

Pain in the face or jaw

Digestive problems, such as abdominal pain, bloating, constipation, and irritable bowel syndrome

Tenderness to touch or pressure affecting muscles, sometimes joints or even the skin

Irritable or overactive bladder

Pelvic pain

Trouble focusing or paying attention

Pain or a dull ache in the lower belly

Dry eyes

Sleeping for long periods of time without feeling rested (nonrestorative sleep)

Acid reflux

Restless leg syndrome

Sensitivity to cold or heat

Problems with vision

Nausea

Weight gain

Dizziness

Cold or flu-like symptoms

Skin problems

Chest symptoms

Breathing problems

Insulin resistance

Wait, wait, wait. THAT’S what fibro is? Because, I’m sorry, I have literally never heard any of that detail before… and although it gets so ambiguous that I suspect these ailments are all the conditions that just haven't been explained before by medical science... this list just described my life. All the way down to the tiniest detail of dry eyes, as I now recall chronically dumping drops into mine for those same years in my 20s. What. The. Shit.

Prior to this research, my symptomatic knowledge of fibro was essentially - pain, of the unexplained and incurable variety. No one ever once has mentioned anything else about the condition to me, or allll the ways that it correlated with my years of health trauma. Not my peers, not my doctors, and not even my amazing, well-informed therapist.

So, maybe I’m really late to the game here, but long story short, my mind was blown when I heard that there’s actually a term for this experience which I had forfeited to processing as a “unique way that my body individually destroys me” for all these years. I thought I was just uniquely uncomfortable all the time and stopped burdening others with my experiences.

Maybe that’s why I never had anyone clue me in to the diagnosis - I honestly stopped talking about the cyclical sickness a while back, after recognizing that people didn’t respond favorably to the narrative, “I just get too stressed out to function.” Shutting my mouth and writing off my experiences may have halted my potential for hearing a realistic account of living with fibromyalgia. Oh, how the trauma shame shenanigans never stop royally fucking you.

Of course, based on my own recent education, now I’m wondering if fibromyalgia applies to far more of us in the trauma community. Because if I hadn’t found reliable information on it in all my trauma and inflammatory illness research over the years… how many other people are in the same boat?

And this brings me to my next point. I really hate the term fibromyalgia.

Why I hate the term

There’s actually another explanation for why I never heard about everything that fibromyalgia describes. Uh, you’re going to hate me for this, but I didn’t think it was a “real” diagnosis.

Yep. I’m telling you with moderate guilt that for the longest time, I appraised fibro in the same way that western medicine considers all psychosomatic illnesses - not valid. And I’m unhappy with myself, too. Believe me, I feel like my least favorite kind of person... a hypocrite. But this also points to the systemic issue that undermines so many of our attempts to get help, and that makes me far more unhappy.

You see, a number of years ago, as a budding counselor with a few years of experience, my therapist friend mentioned something about fibro. Specifically, that it was a common label granted to more seriously mentally affected patients… and it wasn’t believed to be a real thing. I wish I could remember more detail on the context, but the basis of the story is, someone that I trusted - someone with many trauma patients - told me that in her experience, no one took fibromyalgia seriously. People with intense mental illnesses regularly presented with unfounded complaints of pain, and this is the term they were assigned as a result.

There was no proof of their physical discomfort. The patients tended to have myriad mental and physical health issues. They tended to be more difficult clients. Professionals had doubts about how serious the complaints were. No evidence, no respect. It was just about that simple.

To give more weight to the story, here’s one quick excerpt that is actually validating to read, from an article titled, The management of fibromyalgia from a psychosomatic perspective: an overview.

“People with FM often reported dismissive attitudes from others, such as disbelief, stigmatization, lack of acceptance by their relatives, friends, coworkers, and the healthcare system, that consider them as ‘lazy’ or ‘attention seeking’ people, with their symptoms ‘all in their head’. Such dismissiveness can have a substantial negative impact on patients, who are already distressed, and also on the degree of their pain.”

So… similar to the asshole social associates described above… for years after that, I paid no attention to fibromyalgia. When people brought it up, I nodded and moved on. I didn’t disbelieve that there would be a connection between mental illness and the onset of bodily pains after my own experiences, but the term had also been shuttled to a file in my head that sidled up next to, “seeking prescription pain meds.” This was an incorrect judgement based on incorrect, oversimplified information. But unfortunately, it left an impression.

So… similar to the assholes described above… for years after that, I paid no attention to fibromyalgia. When people brought it up, I nodded and moved on. I didn’t disbelieve that there would be a connection between mental illness and the onset of bodily pains after my own experiences, but the term had also been shuttled to a file in my head that sidled up next to, “seeking prescription pain meds.” This was an incorrect judgement based on incorrect, oversimplified information. But unfortunately, it left an impression.

It took the real life account of someone with the diagnosis to show me all the ways that my previous perception was completely incorrect. I suddenly realized how reductive and insulting the false information had been. Annnd all the ways that I could have really helped myself and a few others a lot sooner if I had just investigated the term on my own, rather than lazily falling back on someone else’s casually-expressed opinion.

So, I’m saying… fuck me. 100%. That makes me really upset with myself. But it makes me even more frustrated with the medical field.

And this is why I hate the term fibromyalgia.

It doesn’t actually explain a fucking thing… and it doesn’t seem like anyone is actually trying to.

At this point, there is no known cause for the development or persistence of the disorder. Fibromyalgia has essentially become more of a label for a grouping of symptoms that we “allow” people to assume when we don’t know what the hell might be wrong with them. I say “allow” very purposely, because it feels like our medical overlords have granted us this word as a way to pacify the uncomfortable masses - not treat them.

At this point, there is no known cause or organic mechanism for the development or persistence of the disorder. Fibromyalgia has essentially become more of a label for a grouping of symptoms that we “allow” people to assume when we don’t know what the hell might be wrong with them. I say “allow” very purposely, because it feels like our medical overlords have granted us this word as a way to pacify the uncomfortable masses - not treat them.

Millions of humans have detailed the same experiences, but science hasn’t yet come up with a way to explain them, so let’s go ahead and give them a new diagnosis that boils down to “Not sure what’s going on, but they say it’s unpleasant and it sounds a little something like widespread pain. Cool, let’s call it a day. Nah, we don’t need to educate the medical community or the public - we don’t need a single list of all the known comorbidities - because we don’t get it, ourselves. Let’s make sure we put that disclaimer right in the definition, so everyone knows it’s a controversial topic."

And implicit in saying that doctors and scientists don’t understand the term, comes a negative connotation of assumed delusion or attention-seeking complaints.

Essentially, what I’m bitching about is the tendency of researchers and practitioners to shuttle things they can’t directly measure to the back of the relevancy line. Despite all of the anecdotal evidence from fibro sufferers that corroborate the same causes, symptoms, and outcomes… we can’t see what they’re talking about and we don’t have an easy explanation, so we put this in the “fake news” stack of information - AKA psychosomatic illness.

Now, it’s also worth mentioning that fibromyalgia is deeply intertwined with trauma. Something like 2/3rds of fibro patients also have confirmed PTSD symptoms, if not higher. Exact numbers depend on which study you trust. Just know, it is a prevalent, accepted, correlation between trauma and the development of fibromyalgia. And of course, no one has determined the causative or affective relationship between the two at this point in time.

Hell, we all know that a lot of mental and physical health professionals don’t even want to acknowledge trauma at this point - or, do so with a smirk and an eyebrow raise, at best. So tethering the two poorly-comprehended disorders together? Oh boy, it’s a sure-fire way to ensure that no one listens to a word you say after honestly answering their background information questions. Might as well throw down your wallet and walk yourself right out of the office at that point.

The medical field’s lack of trauma education is a big problem. Making “psychosomatic” a dirty word isn’t helping millions of folks out there. Being invalidated by the people who could possibly help you is another mental health crisis waiting to happen. And all of this is infuriating to me, following my own experiences and thinking about other people’s.

Should we take this one outrage step further? Sure.

You know that a vast majority of fibromyalgia sufferers are… women. Sorry, about to get a tad feminist. Is anyone here surprised that primarily female voices tend to be written off by medical professionals? Ha, ha, ha. No, probably not.

For all of human history, the ladies have been getting the shit end of the stick when it comes to medical care. We all know that women were given amazing explanations for their ailments, such as having “hysterics” or "the vapors" not so long ago.

Furthermore, there is research showing that doctors do not take women’s accounts of pain severity seriously, in particular. Even fellow female doctors and nurses are given different treatment by staff when they go to the ER, versus male counterparts. And if you’re a minority or socioeconomically challenged woman? The data says you might as well take two aspirin and see what happens the next morning, because the medical attention research is even worse for those demographics. Huge surprise.

So, pulling this all together: Considering that the majority of us who receive complex trauma diagnoses are women… considering that implicit in this label, comes the increased likelihood that we’re not economically well-to-do and belong to minority groups one way or another… how do you figure we’ve ever had a chance of receiving real help for our unmeasurable physical conditions?

So, pulling this all together: Considering that the majority of us who receive complex trauma diagnoses are women… considering that implicit in this label, comes the increased likelihood that we’re not economically well-to-do and belong to minority groups… how do you figure we’ve ever had a chance of receiving real help for our unmeasurable physical conditions?

Yeah, we haven’t.

We’ve been given a term - complete with a wink and a nudge - that no one wants to meaningfully research or prioritize understanding. We’ve received a new phrase that doctors will “generously grant us” when we’re drowning in unexplained symptoms and pain. We’re then labeled with a word that essentially amounts to “disregard and humor” for all our future appointments. On top of it all, we’re carrying the burden of traumatic histories, which immediately qualify us for misunderstood diagnoses that more or less equate “ghosts in their blood” - because, hell, we can’t quantify mental illness, either.

The whole ordeal makes me really upset. The fact that I was inadvertently pulled into this biased disbelief makes me more upset. It also serves as quite a demonstration of how powerful or deleterious knowledge can be after it worms its way into your head involuntarily and becomes your only “go-to” piece of data, true or false.

One seemingly-trustworthy person mentioning a negative opinion of fibromyalgia one time in my past somehow infiltrated my thoughts to the extent that I didn’t have a second thought for 5 years? And we're talking about a goddamn trauma researcher - with, what I consider - an otherwise open and connection-happy mind?

The power of assumed authority and truth in opinion is significant. If I can be swayed in this way, how could less mental health informed medical professionals stand a chance in responding differently? That’s frightening and clarifying… though immensely upsetting.

So, since biomedicine hasn’t bothered to find any great information for us, despite the rapidly increasing rate of fibromyalgia diagnoses in the past two decades - how can we make sense of the information to actually help ourselves?

Let’s talk about that next.

What we can conclude

So it kindof blows finding out that you probably qualify for a new medical term… only to find out that we don’t actually know anything about said term. I say this, because if you’re waiting for me to pop off with some sweet research on fibromyalgia… uh… I haven’t found it yet. But not for lack of trying. So far every article I’ve seen has been pretty basic and uninspired.

Does fibromyalgia correspond with trauma? It does. Does stress mediate and moderate fibromyalgia, PTSD symptoms, GI problems, and depression? It does. Does it take a long time and numerous appointments to receive medical help for fibromyalgia complaints? It does. Does the comorbidity of post-traumatic symptoms make fibro more uncomfortable and challenging to overcome? What do you know - it fucking does.

(Wow. So enlightening. Having two debilitating disorders is less fun than having one. Who’s funding these research studies, anyways?)

The first thing I can conclude is, there’s not that much to conclude. This is to say, no one - that I’ve seen, so far - has revealed anything super shocking or thought-provoking about fibromyalgia.

Really, the most interesting things I learned from my reading are that

1) insulin resistance is another associated disorder, which explains even more of my baffling life

2) sex hormones are leached from your system under stress, which, refer to point number one... explains another huge chunk of my existence, and

3) the recommendations for treating fibro long term are the same recommendations I’ve given for getting your trauma life re-ordered.

You know how I always push for people to find out what’s manageable on their own through trial and error, rather than approaching trauma recovery with preventable fires burning in every area? Hey - someone agrees.

Namely, it's recommended that in order to manage fibromyalgia you establish routines including strictly nutrition-based eating habits, non-threatening forms of consistent exercising, prioritizing tons of sleep, and controlling your environment as much as possible for stressful stimuli. Doctors can also supplement your rehab with antidepressants, because, again, fibromyalgia is related to the same underlying hormonal imbalances as depression - but the larger health issues are managed best by changing your behaviors. Just like I’ve said.

I suppose this is no surprise, since this entire time I’ve unknowingly been talking, in large part, about how I’ve controlled my own fibromyalgia symptoms. I just thought it was mandatory trauma pains I was dampening. But the word is out! There's a separate phrase for it. The doctors and I agree; stop treating yourself like a turd, and maybe you’ll stop feeling like one. Whatdoyouknow. Sometimes there are reasons for the things I notice experientially, even if they aren’t originally informed by medical lingo.

Secondly, looking at what we can conclude at this point about fibro… Well, it justifies my previous hypothesis that stress is the root of my body’s evil. There’s not much to definitively say about fibromyalgia at this point, but we know for a fact that it is agitated and potentially caused by stress.

This perfectly aligns with my observations that a terrible work week mixed with a personally challenging month on top of a physically exhausting cleaning marathon will lead to a systemic breakdown every time. And, conversely, those times when life has actually been pretty chill correspond to periods of bodily health and limited upset - the times when I wonder “was I ever really sick at all?” and start to health gaslight my damn self.

Realizing the link between stress and sickness, of course, also begins to explain the correlation to trauma, and particularly, complex trauma.

Now, let me start by saying that there’s some debate over the downstream effects of PTSD - some researchers swear that it decreases system arousal in the face of later stress, others have collected data reflecting that a nervous system hyper-sensitization takes place. From my own trauma involvement, I’ve seen and heard more cases of the latter; we’re quick to upset and easily pushed into stressed territory. I don’t know many, if any, trauma folks who are non-responsive to disturbing life events... but that sounds more like a deep, dangerous, clinical depression symptom to me.

Personally, once I’ve been chronically stressed for a few weeks or months, then I notice the loss of stress response take over. My limbic system gives up, the HPA axis stops responding, and therefore nothing can rattle me. Perhaps you’ve also had the experience of laughing when your car breaks down, because it’s already been 3 months of disaster around every turn and there’s nothing else you can do for yourself. So, sure, people can reach a point where they legitimately don’t respond to the chaos anymore, but I’m not so sure that’s a consistent norm. I think it’s more likely that you turn off your stress reactions if you’ve been adequately prepped to dissociate for the sake of sanity or your chemical balance is so wack that your danger center has powered down.

I can tell you without a doubt that before the point when my stress threshold has been raised sky-high thanks to repeat exposures and wiring disconnections... I’m a rapid-responder when anxiety comes calling. Stimulus - rapid survival reaction - no space in between being startled and shaking from head to toe. And this is the case for basically every Motherfucker I know. I’m no expert, but I think we tend to fall more into the hypervigilant camp surrounding this podcast, rather than the laxadonical one. Always on the lookout, always ready, often bowled over by our own responses.

I’m a rapid-responder when anxiety comes calling. Stimulus - rapid survival reaction - no space in between being startled and shaking from head to toe. And this is the case for every Motherfucker I know. I’m no expert, but I think we tend to fall more into the hypervigilant camp surrounding this podcast, rather than the laxadonical one. Always on the lookout, always ready, often bowled over by our own responses

This nervous system sensitization, as they call it, explains a lot of trauma symptoms. I’ve regularly discussed the hypersensitivity problem it creates, when your brain doesn’t adequately filter out or assess neutral stimuli because it considers basically everything to be a threat. This can also contribute to the ADD and ADHD diagnoses that we receive, when our heads are too busy trying to sort all that data streaming in to direct our thoughts in a steady way. Or, the ways that we’re uniquely thrown immediately into panic mode when we sense a risk. Plus, we’ve probably all had the experience of tiny, secret triggers sneakily upsetting our bodies when the stimulation wasn’t even significant enough to pass through our cognitive recognition centers. These are all caused by the same systemic over-sensitization problem.

In general: yes, we trauma folk are sensitive to our environments - inner and outer. We are easily pushed down survival pathways to fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses. We rapidly catastrophize ambiguous information, which can convince our brains and bodies that the worst has already happened. We’re hyperaware and easily overstimulated, often agitated, and regularly on edge.

I maintain, in the face of controversial evidence, that we get stressed out easily. And our bodies react dramatically.

I feel like I should also state that this is especially true, as most of us have read, when we have unresolved emotional strain floating around in our meat jackets. We can be overstimulated and aroused (in a bad way) from the inside, out. Since the majority of us are not skilled in emotional recognition or resolution, we’re often walking around with a lifetime of hard feelings stored in our guts. And there’s been roughly zero doubt in my head about emotional and environmental stress contributing to dissociation, contributing to a vagal nerve shutdown as a big part of the digestive failure that characterizes fibromyalgia, IBS, Crohns, and so many autoimmune disorders.

On top of the unresolved emotional root of stress, this pings another episode that I've previously released. The one about being overly restrictive in your diet and exercise for the sake of appearance perfectionism. If you physically exert yourself too strongly through caloric deprivation or extreme work outs, you can easily stress your body into a survival response. It can't tell the difference between starvation for bikini season and starvation for lack of food. Running your ass off for your upcoming wedding or running your ass off for your upcoming bear attack. Your danger sensing center is sensitive and it overreacts, much like myself.

Now, considering that all these examples of central nervous system sensitization and physiological survival states that go hand in hand with Complex Trauma and Fibromyalgia, so many weird health mysteries are potentially resolved. But, not exactly the pain component. Or, is it.

Again, the authors out of Italy and Brazil who penned, The management of fibromyalgia from a psychosomatic perspective: an overview, have a potential way to think about that. They state:

“Even if the causes and pathophysiology of FM are not completely known, widespread chronic pain could be explained by a vulnerability due to a perturbation in the central processing of sensory information, named ‘central sensitivity’ or ‘central sensitization’, that amplifies the response of the central nervous system to a peripheral input. Hence, people with FM and/or other central sensitivity syndromes have a lower threshold for interpreting sensory information as noxious. Several factors, such as genetic predisposition, deficiencies in neurotransmitter levels, biochemical changes in the body, endocrine dysfunction, mood states, anxiety, sociocultural environment, psychological trauma and past experiences in general, expectancy beliefs, and catastrophization have been proposed as explanatory mechanisms of patients’ subjective experience of central sensitivity. Current research indicates that abnormal sensory and pain processing is a key factor in the pathophysiology of FM. There is robust evidence that abnormalities in central pain processing, rather than damage or inflammation of peripheral structures, play an important role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain in patients with FM.”

Interesting, huh? I still think inflammatory responses are a big part of the 1000 piece stress puzzle, but I don’t disagree with the idea that our finely-tuned danger detection systems amplify pain and discomfort signals to deafening levels. Putting all the system data together, you can deduce a fairly complete picture of how strain, physical degradation, and pain are all related.

Finally, I have confirmation that being overly stimulated causes everything from my energy drain to my dietary responses, migraines, and autoimmune attacks... all the way down to my temperature sensitivity, random presentation of allergic reactions, and even that occasional sharp pain in my jaw… not to mention all my life-altering functional problems, like being unable to sleep at night, existing with debilitating pain, and living while feeling sedated?

All of my strange health complaints from the past decade have aligned with this new label. And that label corresponds perfectly with my inkling that running on cortisol and overzealous guardsmen have been the major source of my health anxiety sauce. Welp, it’s been validating research for all of my educated guesses, to say the least.

Long story short, there’s not a ton of helpful information about the reasons for developing fibromyalgia or what makes it get worse. But there’s one thing we do know for a fact; stress is the enemy. At least I think it’s comforting to conclude that stress is the root of many of our C-PTSD complaints, as well as depression, anxiety, insomnia, obsessive thoughts, and now… a whole list of common maladies, labeled fibromyalgia.

Whether or not it’s really understood, at least there is a connection between everything. At least there’s something that ties ALL the random, disjointed pieces of torture together. I’m guessing that for many of us, fibromyalgia is similar to complex trauma, again, in that regard.

And, lastly, I can conclude that… I have more questions

More questions than answers

Here’s one last excerpt from the aforementioned article, which is the only one I found that’s worth hearing from.

They state: “FM is labelled, often with a negative connotation, as a ‘functional somatic syndrome’, part of a ‘somatization disorder’, ‘fashionable diagnosis’, ‘idiopathic pain disorder’, ‘non-disease’, ‘psychosomatic syndrome’, dismissing the true suffering of the patients. In the absence of a univocal identified biological cause, subjective reports of symptoms by the patients are often viewed derogatorily and discredited as ‘psychogenic.’”

Like I said, there isn’t a lot of helpful information out there if you’re looking to learn more about this controversial condition. Unfortunately, it has been categorized as a “functional somatic disorder” which essentially means that we don’t have an explanation for the organic basis of the disorder.

Uh, I don’t know what could be more organic than the endogenous hormones in our own bodies creating downstream health effects, but hey, I’m not a biologist anymore, what do I know?

The fact remains - there’s a lot more to understand about the assorted mechanisms that lead from trauma into depression, generalized stress disorder, and physical manifestations of a biochemical system that’s running off-balance. And this is where I have the biggest questions.

First, I have to get this out of the way. I’m wondering about the known gender split in fibro. The numbers are horrendously skewed towards women as the primary sufferers, and that’s not helping the medical legitimacy case. So, what are the chances that men just don’t have fibromyalgia at the same rate as women? Either they don’t get stressed to the same magnitude or their bodies respond completely differently? It’s possible. OR. Is it something else?

It seems to me like this follows another similar mystery - what are the chances that men just don’t suffer from Complex Trauma at the same rate as women? Pretty poor? Probably more of a diagnostic or seeking-help issue? Yeah, I think so, too. Yet, if you look strictly at the numbers, it sure seems like there are more women hearing about C-PTSD than men.

This analogous labeling issue between the genders makes me think of a few explanations…

1) Men don’t seek help for their physical ailments the way that women do, either because they’re less in tune with their bodies or because they’re shamed for not being tough enough if they complain. Just like C-PTSD.

2) Men don’t hear about fibromyalgia, because it is an engendered diagnosis reserved for dramatic women at this point. Just like C-PTSD. They receive other partial diagnoses, like IBS, that are less controversial. This leads me into a whole spiraling rant about several genital-dependent psychological diagnoses that I feel similarly about, but one of them is…

3) Men don’t receive the same level of fibromyalgia labels as women because men don’t often receive Complex-PTSD labels, which would serve as a hint to their doctors, since trauma is a well-known predisposing factor…

This brings me to the next set of questions.

It’s unpopular opinion time, but, frankly, I don’t know that any of these trauma and fibro issues are really that separate.

It seems to me like we’re talking a lot about one particular problem that splinters off into a thousand different outcomes, depending on the circumstances, the biology, and the human in question. Not separate conditions.

First comes the trauma, then comes the presentation of downstream physical and mental symptoms. Presentation, magnitude, and personal recognition of these symptoms varies, just like severity of Complex Trauma does. But under both conditions, our experiences are often so similar - the hard part is that we struggle to describe them and often lean on abstract language which can be used in such diverse ways. We focus on different problems, depending on our own life impacts.

So, maybe we notice and report internal events differently, but it’s hard for me to believe that the two disorders aren’t more than corresponding diagnoses - and are, in fact, one and the same.

I could be very wrong, but I’d sure like to find out.

So, to the small percentage of fibromyalgia sufferers who don’t have trauma… you sure? To the depressed and anxious folks who can’t seem to get a grip on their physical health, but never saw their life as traumatic… want to take another look? To all the traumatized folks with Raynauds, food allergies, hypertension, ADD, aches, and migraines… have you really looked into the full definition of fibromyalgia?

ARE these conditions of trauma and fibromyalgia different? Or is this another complication in identifying unseeable symptoms in a population of folks who never learned to name their mental and physical experiences? Is this an artifact from a group who tends to underestimate and under-report their own experiences in light of unhealthy others’ core beliefs? How prevalent is fibromyalgia, really? Especially in the context of Trauma?

Is it possible that everything boils down to one underlying event - trauma - that produces a whole host of other biological adaptations down the line? Did we create a separate term for it, simply based on a lack of standardization?

Or is this an exclusionary problem?

Have all the various ways we’ve learned to categorize and describe our experiences actually separated one full disorder into two half-disorders; one that encompasses the brain and another that covers the body? Is it our societal misunderstanding of the connection between our perceptions and our meaty husks, forcing us to separate the issues of mental and physical health that would be better understood together, as one?

I’m not sure! But I’m definitely thinking a lot about it.

Partially, from personal bias. I always considered my physical issues to be part of my trauma life, not separate from it - and that explanation made perfect sense to me. Where do these disorders really split? Maybe it’s possible to have Complex PTSD without the physical symptoms, but that's really not what I hear from people. The most of us have at least some periods of physical ailments, even if they're not persistent. To me, it seems like a distinction that should be made within the trauma diagnosis - with or without physical wellness degradation - rather than piling a separate, largely-ineffective diagnosis on the vast majority of us who have some variety of said bodily ailments.

I feel like the real issue isn’t “what is fibromyalgia?” The actual problem is a lack of biological understanding in the Psychology field. And a mirrored failure to understand Psychology in the medical field. Then, throw in a reluctance to study the conglomerate of bio-physiology and mental health issues in the scientific research literature because both experiences are difficult to measure or confirm and the studies would be less elegant.

If more psychologists actually learned system biology and more medical practitioners actually studied abnormal psychology, maybe we wouldn’t have disparate diagnoses that each come with a half-recognition. Maybe we could have one term that encompassed the full experience of trauma. Maybe these professionals could confirm all the details that we don’t understand by working with a more comprehensive approach to how humans work as a whole, rather than organ by organ. Just a fucking thought.

Because, I can tell you, if my therapist friend had the same biological education that I did at the time, I guarantee that she wouldn’t have told me fibromyalgia was a “pseudo diagnosis.” If she had knowledge of the connection between stress hormones and bodily breakdown, plus the trauma physiology that determines our sensitivity to stress - there’s no way she would have been so flippant or insensitive with her words. But under the influence of her counseling peers, the diagnosis became a fallacy.

I think this highlights the danger of the problem at hand. It only took one industry-determined void of knowledge to pass along an unfair opinion that skewed at least my perception for years down the line. And, think about it, how many times has one innocently-baseless comment in the psychology or medical fields probably created a lifetime of bias in an up-and-coming professional?

Maybe this is why we have the self-perpetuating negative connotation of psychosomatic illness in our society that seems to crawl its way towards improvement, while every other disorder makes significant strides. A lack of personal understanding of the biology-psychology connection is easily turned into a respected opinion, and readily transmitted to unknowing people who are eager to learn from their wise mentors. And so, the next generation inherits the same set of half-baked progress-stunting ideas. Over and over and over.

Depressing! And enlightening.

And that’s roughly where I stand today, after days of fibromyalgia research and very few satisfactory answers. Depressed and enlightened.

More or less, asking myself more questions about the legitimacy of our entire mental and physical healthcare system and all the lines we draw in the sand. Confident that trauma leads to increased stress leads to increased brain and body trauma. Somewhat happy to know that I’m actually not the only one who consistently apologizes for feeling like shit and questions if it’s “valid” or not because it seems connected to my brain. But also, pretty pissed off that we’ve been given a word that comes with no explanations and a hellofalot of medical field judgement, as if we needed more of that.

Oh, one more factoid to throw into the end of this conversation. There’s a link between low socioeconomic status and fibromyalgia.

Hey, the same link exists between socioeconomic status and complex trauma. Hey, it’s another predisposing factor for post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms’ emergence. Hey, big surprise, if you have a stable and predictable physical and financial environment, you’re less likely to develop the terror-based conditions brought on by earlier trauma.

If you have financial resources, you’re also less likely to be chronically stressed by the demands of life. You’re probably also more likely to receive respectable medical care. Therefore, meaning that you’re both less likely to have enough perturbation to develop over-sensitive nervous system responses and less likely to be dismissed by doctors with a label they don’t believe exists. Plus, probably more likely to have access to mental health care that could prevent the onset of Complex Trauma presentation, and likely fibromyalgia, altogether.

Oh, look, logic explains so many things. Or, fuckit, let’s just choose to believe that poor people are lazy and always want to complain about something, whether it’s in their heads or their bodies. Whatever the rich white men say.

Big issues to think about.

Like I state way too often on this show, it’s the small things in this trauma life that bring you comfort. And monumental societal failures that make you scream. (Okay, I just added that last part today.)

Wrap it

Okay, let me get out of here before I question more beliefs that are way out of my paygrade. Sorry, medical and psychological practitioners. I know that I’m just a critical observer who, like that kid everyone hates in class, perpetually asks too many questions.

At the bottom of all my complaints, I just wish that we could come up with a way to characterize these disorders that actually helped people understand what was happening. If you know how your body is reacting to what stimuli and how the symptoms are all related, that's a lot more powerful than throwing assorted barely-defined titles at them.

If we can't definitively say that fibromyalgia and trauma symptoms are one and the same, fine. Let there be a distinction. But I think it would be preferable to call fibro something more telling and true to the accepted cause. Call it semantics, but something like Stress Affective Syndrome would be more useful than the made-up word of fibromyalgia. Please, anyone feel free to come up with a better phrase, because I just made "Stress Affective Syndrome" up so I could say "I've got SAS." It already fits the bill.

I guess I’m just up in arms that I’ve tried to find answers for my brain and body health all these years, and turned up completely empty handed until random connections have eventually given me the information I’ve needed after a decade of effort. Maybe if I had my complex trauma diagnosis before I had my health complaints, someone would have mentioned fibromyalgia. Maybe, they would have knowingly smirked and sent me to a psychiatrist. Hard to say.

Even if I had gotten that information about fibro, would it have helped separate from the C-PTSD diagnosis? Honestly, probably not. I would have just been harder on myself for suddenly being too weak in the face of stress. And after reading that medical professionals doubt the validity of fibromyalgia, in the first place? Well that would have been a whole other source of disbelief, anger, and negative self-regard. Maybe a whole new crisis, once my inner critic got a chance to hammer away at my head.

I suppose that figuring out the patterns of my strange bodily conditions actually needed to happen organically for this Fucker, because any semi-questioned diagnosis would have just been more fuel for my trauma fire at that point when I so thoroughly despised myself. Confirming to myself, for a fact, that stress fucks me up may have been a prerequisite for accepting that I might be “one of those fibro people.” You know, the ones who lie about their symptoms. Ha.

And, again, this says a lot about the potential damage that poorly-described labels can do to people… just as much as it says about my own reluctance to be considered a weak-minded over-reactor by outsiders.

All of this being said, I’m so grateful for finally finding out exactly what all fibromyalgia actually entails. It took too long, but honestly, the information came at the perfect time. Two days after I got it, I was stress-sick. Ahhh, it's fibro time. How’s that for irony?

As always, I do think there is some empowerment in the basic root understanding that you aren’t the only one who’s dealt with any of this. The mysterious illnesses, the pain, or the lack of care from modern medicine aren’t individual experiences. Hey, you might even be relieved to know that someone else on this planet routinely asks herself, “Do I have cancer for real this time, or am I just overworked again?”

After years of nobody I spoke to having a tale that even mildly resembled my autoimmune breakdown, finding anybody who related to my issues was extremely relieving. Not only was it a common experience, but it meant that I hadn’t somehow brought the discomfort on myself - through mental illness, physical shenanigans, or plain old weakness - the ways that I feared.

Furthermore, it proved that I hadn’t imagined it all. Because believe it or not, you’re surprisingly willing to throw yourself under the bus after all the pain has passed. I’ve spent the past decade telling people, “I think I have the glutens, as I call it... but I don’t really know though, it’s never been explained, sometimes other things bother me, and sometimes it’s really not a big deal, I don't know what it is” as an almost-apology. A disclaimer that I, too, doubt my own memories and conclusions because they weren’t properly validated by who I considered authority figures.

Hearing that other people had digestive disorders and autoimmune disasters in the wake of Complex Trauma, via the book The Body Keeps The Score, shocked me into self-acceptance of my prior experiences. Hearing that all of it can be encapsulated by this term fibromyalgia a few days ago - well, shit. This is a more mainstream occurrence than I ever previously thought.

And you know what? It does matter to me that I’m not the only one who falls apart when my brain gets overwhelmed. Even if it doesn’t fix anything. Even if my own postulations for how fibromyalgia is born from trauma feel more applicable than the scientifically proven ones. Even if I don’t believe the term deserves to stand alone as a medical label without further delineation - especially of the connection to and overlap with trauma. Even if I think… it might be inseparable.

And you know what? It does matter to me that I’m not the only one who falls apart when my brain gets overwhelmed. Even if it doesn’t fix anything. Even if my own postulations for how fibromyalgia is born from trauma are more enlightening than the scientifically proven ones. Even if I don’t believe the term deserves to stand alone as a medical label without further delineation - especially of the connection to and overlap with trauma. Even if I think… it might be inseparable.

Now I know. When I feel a physical breakdown coming on, with the suspected cause being stress… I don’t have to apologize for it. I don’t need to tell people that I just can’t handle the pressure with unfettered shame for my own biochemistry. I can rest assured that what I’m going through is common - far more common than we know - and completely valid. Even if there are people ready to tell you that it's not.

But, to be honest, I still probably won’t tell anyone that it’s called fibromyalgia. I’m not proud to say, I wouldn’t want them to think I’m just being dramatic.

UGH.

#cptsd #healcptsd #actually CPTSD #just cptsd things #traumabrain #Complex Trauma #trauma recovery #complextrauma #complexptsd

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boutonniered-blog · 6 years ago

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(( this isn’t really here or there, ive just got cowboy dnd on the mind and ruminating over dming again. its about accessibility and why its humm important!!!

but anyways- accessibility is like, really important to me? i struggle immensely with dyscalculia- i struggle to make sense of graphs, clocks, use my damn calculator, rudimentary math for even adding or subtracting rolls is kind of beyond me or else it takes far too long to comfortably fit into the span of time of a turn, counting the number of days until or past something, etc: it stinks, because im often looked down on for being Not Really Smart or being Lazy And Not Applying Myself because while i am academically gifted in language arts and those soft skills easily transfer to other subjects, i have always struggled with math- i didnt know how to rearrange basic equations until the year before senior year of highschool.

and while i can cope and muddle my way through things (i used to memorize equation variants all the way up until i hit the wall with academic physics and broke down, for example) its like. tiring, and embarrassing, to be the person who can’t do the seemingly simple basic mental math to calculate how much older an older siblings is or whatever else.

and like for the longest time i have wanted to play dnd, only i was immensely intimidated because of how much math is involved with debuffs and buffs and rolling for stats and saving throws and all that and- i was really sad because i wanted to play, but i felt like i couldnt because I Just Wasnt Smart Enough To, even though i was confident in my improv and general writing abilities having done roleplay and ran my own arg before. and it SUCKED missing out on this hobby that i really, ardently wanted to join in on, but felt ashamed and stupid and incapable of playing because... brain broke on main! and it was really, really embarrassing.

anyways! fast forward to my dnd group over the summer- although i had butchered and cribbed the stats layout and mangled google sheets into making very rudimentary, basic scores, of 1-5 and short explanations of what each did to contextualize these linguistically for myself, and a consensus to basically just one One Fucking Die (d20) for Everything and then a d6 for damage because the general health was ~25 or so to make it easier on me, and was basically just a combination of para and script rp, i was getting like. really overwhelmed with tracking damage, especially with the confusion of having Many Characters At Once and also, healers, so i often lost track and would get flustered as hell while playing dm and very. upset on main about it because i felt like Ohghgh. Elle Being Dumb Baby Again

but! one of my friends, hes in school for compsci and programs stuff, he made me!! a little discord bot!! and “courtney” as she was dubbed after one of the npc healers, like, could do the math on peoples healing and damage and also reset it at the end of matches. i like legitimately cried when he showed me her and the little guide on how to use her too with Examples... because i struggle a lot with parsing through how to operate discord bots and frequently have to summon up their to do commands list thing Pretty much every time, and, like, bro

like it seems like a little thing Maybe in terms of her use in game but it Really made it so much fucking easier for me to manage what was going on. especially because if i had trouble reading the numbers or figuring out the damage, other people were able to use the command prefix to like Do It For Me and usually what would happen is we would designate it as Someone’s Job For The Night To and like... it was so much more fun and engaging and i didnt have to like, stress out or be upset over not being able to do math and like? Bro. I Got Emotional, same as how when i figured out that i could use our rollbot for basic math and i still use that little guy in fucking every day conversation when it comes to ages or months or stuff but like

the point being? i was really upset and sad over being excluded or Struggling with something that was supposed to be fun because of stuff i couldnt help, and it really made me so fucking Happy to be able to participate just like everyone else but also that my friend recognized a need that he could fill and Went Ahead And Did That like. wow. im emotionally squishy. the fact that my friends were patient and accommodated my Whack ass “baby dnd” or loose approach to letting them choose their own stats rather than rolling and discussing how many turns should something last and keeping track of it, didnt mind me fucking running to the rollbot for like five times three or something, were cool with helping with courtney like.... Uhm.... MY HEART?

and so tl;dr: adjusting stuff so that Everyone can have fun is like... really important... and i appreciate it SO much because i wanna have fun! just like everyone else, yknow? Thasnk i love to talk

#mun talks #ooc #http://sakurouji.tumblr.com/post/89326638630/kanoe-yuuko-icons #<--- where i got this icon from. its like a manga thingy #long post /

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writetoremainsilent · 5 years ago

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10/15/19 the accompanying story 3

This one is called Ersatz. I don’t feel super confident about it, ‘cuz it’s kind of a deviation from the norm.

******************************************************************************

The word ersatz is funny to me in that it seems antithetical to its own definition. Ersatz (pronounced air-sotts) basically means an inferior substitute for something. But I think the word ersatz is a better alternative for ersatz terms like worse, false, and artificial. It’s just so much more gut-punching. It’s a fancier upgrade from those blasé other words. There’s no room for misinterpretation. Anyway, enough about that.

******************************************************************************

Her therapist had told her to treat sophomore year with a more open mind. Stop doubting. Start doing. She didn’t really leave any alternatives.

Her parents had told her that she was wasting her best years on feeling sorry for herself. ‘You’re fine, baby,’ they would say. ‘College makes everyone feel bad. This therapist is unnecessary.’ They didn’t really get it.

Her friends, if you could call them that, were dwindling. The few that tried to coax her into coming out with them did their best to show disappointment when she declined. They gave up, eventually. They didn’t really care.

Which was fine. She wasn’t really doing a great job on her end, either. She understood.

Despite the advice, despite the scolding, despite the concern, she just felt empty.

******************************************************************************

She wasn’t exactly sure when, or why it started. Maybe it had been all of a sudden. Maybe it had been a slow burn.

She had been so self-assured in high school, just two years ago. She knew what she wanted from life, and usually ended up getting it. She only did, never doubted.

And now...

Lately, it felt like she was playing a parody of herself rather than actually being herself: she responded how she thought she would’ve responded, and engaged in activities that she thought she would’ve liked. Doubted every action she made.

A shoddy replica of the person she wanted to be. An ersatz mockery of the real thing. A hollow shell, a melancholy reminder, of whatever she had been before.

She realized that she hated herself. She saw herself crying as she sat alone, scarfing down sorry excuses for meals between classes. When she could stomach food. She felt herself losing weight because she was too tired to do anything besides sleep.

(running shoes lay fetal, just as motionless as she was)

Her housemates didn’t care much to talk to her. She was a random, and they had all been a friend group before she moved in.

Her friends weren’t real. They were satellites, orbiting cautiously around her, and stayed that way because she was too scared to let them get close to her, but too needy to let them drift away. She was ecstatic when they opened up to her, and devastated when they found better friends.

Her romantic endeavors were nonexistent. It should be said outright that she didn’t care for relationships. She understood attraction. She understood physical intimacy, though she didn’t really want it. But she could not wrap her head around meeting someone and basing one’s life around them. She did not want to give up her time for someone else. She did not want to share in someone else’s problems. She had enough problems already.

******************************************************************************

Back in high school, she had had a best friend. They were like equal and opposite reactions. He was her exact counterpart: sharing humor, worldviews, and interests, but never sharing the same opinion as her. They eagerly argued about the same books and movies. They tried and failed to outwit the other. Their friends said they bickered like an old couple.

She still smiled as she recalled the many late nights they spent trying to do homework together, only to give up and watch T.V. instead. Just passing time with him made her feel good.

She was pretty sure it was love. She didn’t feel empty, back then. He was her everything. Fleeting thoughts of him would sprint through her head all day: a goofy laugh, a witty joke, a serious, handsome expression. Her lips would always curve into a smile at the thought of him, and she resented the effect he had on her.

Of course, it did help that he was terribly good looking. She would never have said so to his face, though. Like he needed the ego trip.

They didn’t talk anymore. They weren’t friends anymore. She had been stupid.

(what else is new)

It was like a cliché movie scene. High off of feelings, of nostalgia, of pent-up adoration, she had taken him aside on their senior night and confessed that she had feelings for him. That he felt like her soulmate. That she needed him to feel like herself. Back then, she only did, never doubted.

He held her shoulders gently and exhaled shakily. Equal and opposite clichés. Just like a movie scene, she was the first person he would ever come out to.

They could have remained friends. In fact, it was probably awful of her to have cut contact after he came out. Probably made him feel like garbage. Probably made him feel how she did. But it was too much for her to try and act like nothing had changed. She realized she had already thought of them as a couple. That best friends and lovers were interchangeable. Indistinguishable. She had expected too much, and it had scarred both of them.

The one silver lining was that she came to a very important realization: love, in all of its messy, convoluted, and emotionally exhausting glory, was merely a delusion that tangents from friendship.

A painful variation of what she had had with her best friend. A shoddy replica of companionship. An ersatz mockery of the real thing.

A meaningless reminder on how to lose your soulmate.

******************************************************************************

As she ruminated on her sordid backstory for perhaps the five-hundred-millionth time, she felt herself coming fully to consciousness. She groaned and flipped over her phone, which lay buzzing by her head.

It was half past two. Both her classes for the day were already over. She had slept through the day without having once really fallen asleep. It was upsetting how routine this had become.

Her roommate was long gone, having started her day at 6:30 as usual. There was muffled laughter coming from the room next to her.

One of her other housemates had their boyfriend over, and they were both giggling while watching some stupid show. She was surprised the racket hadn’t woken her up sooner.

She groggily flopped out of her futon and oozed onto the carpet. She felt like jelly, but she swore she heard her knees creak when she moved her legs. Her roommate had left the window open (‘The weather is so lovely in fall!’) and cold air continued to spill into her room, making her teeth clatter against one another.

Through sheer force of will, she stood up, slammed the window shut, and went to the bathroom to start her day.

******************************************************************************

She had been a pretty decent student in high school, so she acted how she thought she would have acted. She sat at the desk in her room and started leafing through a textbook that cost more than three sessions with her therapist. Idly, she mused that her parents found the book a worthwhile investment, but not their daughter’s sanity.

Another giggle sounded from the other room. She was starting to get annoyed.

She sighed and heaved all her school supplies into her backpack, and dressed to go out. Her baggy sweater and sweats made her look shapeless, and she smiled at the thought.

The walk to campus was uneventful. She realized upon reaching the library that she had put her headphones on, but forgotten to play any music. She shrugged and took them off. Music wasn’t fun anymore, anyway.

******************************************************************************

The library was abuzz with other students also desperate to cram information between the folds of their brains. The constant white noise of backpacks unzipping, papers rustling, and students quizzing each other was kind of comforting for her. She preferred noise to no noise. She preferred crowded places to vacant ones. She didn’t like when things were empty.

The table she decided to sit at was far in the back of the building, where students were less intent on focusing and more interested in socializing. It definitely wasn’t conducive to a healthy study environment, but she didn’t care. Studying while others slacked off inspired her. She had to be better than someone.

She got out her laptop and notebook and started copying lecture slides down. She had no context for them, so she heaved her textbook out, as well. From the corner of her eye, she could see a boy ask to sit down next to a girl and started talking with her. From their body language and expressions, it seemed like they weren’t previously acquainted.

They were hitting it off, though. And why wouldn’t they? They were both happy, healthy, attractive individuals. The boy seemed a little shy, which made his initial approach all the more endearing. The girl was laughing at his jokes and making a few of her own. And after maybe ten minutes of talking, they both had their phones out and were exchanging contact information.

Upon seeing this, she rolled her eyes. A part of her found the whole courtship ritual cute, but she felt committed to deriding romance as a whole. A waste of time. An ersatz companionship. She wanted someone to talk to her like that understand that.

A couple of times freshman year, she had been like the girl she was now furtively observing. There had been boys who had miraculously taken notice of her. Asked to sit with her. Asked for her number. She loved the attention, though she did not do anything with it.

Gradually, the attention stopped. She did not want it to stop, but it did. She had been ecstatic when people took an interest in her. She was devastated when they found better people to care for.

Her inbox had been empty for a while, now.

******************************************************************************

The budding couple she had been watching had left long ago. Others came and went as the hours waned on. She looked out the window once and was startled to see the street lamps flickering on and the horizon sporting a deep violet.

There weren’t many people left in the library. Even where she sat, the noise and conversation had significantly subsided.

But from the corner of her eye (which she made excellent usage of) she saw a lanky frame draw near.

Nearer.

Wait, too near.

The boy was standing right next to her. His lips moved, forming words, but she didn’t really register them. She took off her utterly silent headphones and made a quizzical expression. He looked familiar.

In a smooth, deep voice, the boy repeated his question:

‘Can I sit at this table?’

‘Uh, sure.’ Her voice was raspy from disuse. Her heart rate had quadrupled. ‘If you want to.’

He smiled disarmingly and put his things down, taking the seat directly across from her.

******************************************************************************

Half an hour had passed, and she was sweating. The boy had stuck around, studiously scribbling into a notebook. He was looking more and more familiar, too. Which made no sense, because she didn’t know enough people for anyone to look similar to another. She cautiously watched him, taking note of his dark hair and symmetrical features.

The boy looked up from his laptop and laughed at her pensive expression, and she quickly averted her eyes.

She realized why he looked so familiar, though.

He was the spitting image of her best friend.

It was uncanny, actually. Her throat closed. She tried to steal glances at him occasionally, but his soft gaze always greeted hers, his brown eyes twinkling mirthfully.

After a few such interactions, his lips curled into a rosy smile

(just like his)

and he spoke.

‘Hey! I, uh, snuck a peek at your textbook, and I think we might be studying for the same class. Do you–would you wanna study together? Today’s lecture went completely over my head.’

His voice was so smooth. She could only hope she sounded nearly as effortless in her reply.

‘...Sure. That’d be nice.’

He beamed and walked around the table to sit next to her. And she suppressed her desire to melt into nothingness.

******************************************************************************

There were a few key differences, she thought, between the boy and her friend from high school.

The boy had asked to walk back with her, because it turned out they lived in complexes near one another. Who was she to say no? And so they ambled on, side by side. The streets were empty, and the crisp fall air nipped at their exposed necks and face.

They had gotten to talking, and he was very much an open book. She was ecstatic that he was so willing to talk to her about personal topics. And she was devastated when he affirmed that he was like this with most people.

Yes, only a few differences, but significant ones. The boy wasn’t nearly as quick-witted as her old friend had been. He had struggled the entire time with learning the class material, despite having attended class that day. She had to explain the lesson to him.

She had tried cracking a joke, a stupid pun, and he stared blankly at her with a puzzled, but friendly smile. She gave up on humor, after that.

And somehow, she could feel his openness by the way his face looked. There was no extra layer to his smile, no hidden depths in his eyes. She could tell that she was interacting with the entirety of him.

Her friend from high school had been mysterious, like he was guarding some painful secret that tortured and ate at him. Well, actually, that was what he had been doing. With this new boy, she did not need to do any work to see his secret sides. They came up naturally.

She felt awful for constantly comparing this boy to her friend from years ago, but she continued to do so.

The boy was talking about feeling sad and out of focus after his breakup, which had happened about a month ago. He had looked meaningfully at her when he mentioned that. Her heart skipped a beat, but she convinced herself that she was overthinking things.

It turned out that he had always been with someone since his sophomore year of high school. She smiled inwardly. He couldn’t handle being alone, either.

There was something about the night air, or the boy, or maybe just having someone’s attention that made her open up, too. She admitted that she didn’t understand love. That she thought it was a waste of time. That it was like getting a dog: investing in future pain and sadness.

He laughed at that last part. ‘You’re quite the cynic,’ he chided.

Her friend would’ve had an ironic, fourth-dimensional quip about how the term cynic came from a Greek word that meant dog-like.

But the boy continued. He confessed that he didn’t know what love really was, either. He just knew he needed to be with somebody to feel like somebody. And he needed to feel like somebody.

They fell into comfortable silence.

They had reached her apartment complex. She shyly waved goodbye, but the boy stopped her before she walked away. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, and asked if they could please exchange contact information. For talking. About school.

(don’t do it don’t do it you’ll be such a hypocrite don’t do it please don’t)

She smiled and said that that would be very nice.

******************************************************************************

Her inbox was no longer empty. It now housed a hey there! how’s it going? :)

******************************************************************************

She tossed and turned in bed that night. She was thinking about the boy.

Why had he taken an interest in her? Why was he so easy to talk to? What did he see in her? Why did he have to look so much like–

–the fact that the boy might have taken an interest in her was the last key difference between him and her old friend. It confirmed that the boy was just second best. A stand-in. A replica. An ersatz mockery of a soulmate. A reminder of whom she had lost.

And that was okay.

Eyelids suddenly heavy, she fell into a deep sleep.

******************************************************************************

A month after they had met, the boy asked her out. They had been hanging out frequently to study together, get meals together, and just pass the time together. He made sure she was eating. That she was waking up in the mornings. She didn’t feel quite so empty around him.

Apparently, she made him feel like somebody, too. At least, he said as much. So she said yes. She hated herself, but she said yes. She was scared of losing him.

She knew she was setting herself up for failure. That it would end badly. That love would screw her over, again.

But she said yes.

******************************************************************************

Having never been on a date before, she didn’t know what to expect. She kind of thought it would all crash and burn.

The food was nice. It was a fancier restaurant, so they shared a meal. She didn’t feel like eating much anyway, though. She was full off of a couple bites.

They didn’t really know what to talk about. Most of dinner was just them smiling at one another awkwardly. Sitting with one another. Ersatz companionship.

He paid for the bill (thank God) and they left. He took her hand and she resisted the urge to melt into nothingness.

He guided them to a part of campus that she wasn’t super familiar with. They sat on a bench there, side-by-side.

Empty words exchanged. Kind of sweet to hear, but that was about it.

Then he kissed her. She closed her eyes. Wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great. Too late to just stay friends.

******************************************************************************

One year after they had met, she had her last appointment with her therapist. She mentioned that things were getting serious between her and the boy. They were planning on living together after they graduated and found jobs. Her therapist had told her that their relationship was unhealthy. That it wasn’t love. That it was a shoddy imitation of it. That they were using one another as crutches. A reminder of their inability to live their own lives. The term codependency was thrown around quite a bit.

She decided to finally heed her parents’ advice.

******************************************************************************

Two years after they had met, she was heaving a suitcase onto his bed. He was smiling gently at her as she unpacked the last of her belongings for their shared apartment.

She was pretty sure she loved him. It was similar to what she’d felt for the better version before. She was able to feel without the constant fear of losing him, this time. He was her everything. His problems were hers. She didn’t feel empty when she was with him.

She was pretty sure it was love.

And she thought she was good for him, too. He was driven, focused. He always told her that she made him feel like somebody. She was happy to be of use.

He didn’t really tell her that he loved her, very often. But she could feel it through his actions. He stuck around because he had to have loved her.

******************************************************************************

Five years after they had met, they went out for dinner. He was paying, and she was thrilled. She kind of liked the big fuss he was making over it, especially because lately money wasn’t as easily come by for either of them. He didn’t usually make such gestures anymore.

A fancy restaurant. Like their first date. Roses and wine. They dressed to fit the part. He looked handsome in his black coat, which they both knew was a knockoff.

Prior to this anniversary, she had also done some research into gemstones. Diamonds. Not for any particular reason. She’d also left the tabs open on her computer for him to see. Not for any particular reason.

Here with him, she felt content. She felt a sense of pleasant inertia. She felt full to the brim. They had been looking for houses for a while, now, and she appreciated the routine. The safety of having someone to share her days with.

Briefly, she wondered if this feeling was her settling down

(or just settling)

and looked back up at him, smiling sweetly.

Dinner was served. They shared a meal. They didn’t talk too much.

It was there, after the plates had been whisked away and as the patrons began to dwindle that the boy, now very much a man, got out of his chair. He got down on one knee in front of her, and opened a small felt box that he produced from his breast pocket.

She grinned and felt, deep in her belly, the bubbling of what she thought was happiness.

She was nodding before he even asked the question, embarrassed to find tears rolling down her cheeks. Like a cliché movie scene. He laughed handsomely and slipped the beautifully shining ring onto her finger, and she raised it to the light to admire it.

The lack of discernible color, the lack of optical flaws, the obvious discrepancy in weight.

He had bought a fake diamond ring. Cubic zirconia, she recalled from her research. A shoddy replica. An ersatz mockery of the real thing.

She could feel something draining out of her, emptying her, and he hugged her, whispering sweetly, lovingly:

‘It reminded me of us.’

#short story #story

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