#i think it would profoundly unsettle both my parents but

[castielsupernatural]

should i come out to my family this week

[weepylucifer]

For the dialogue prompt: 24 with Steban and Ulixes? :)

24. “You’re trembling.”

A loud knock at the door pulls Steban quite brusquely out of sleep. The bedside clock shows somewhere around two in the morning, and for a moment he's tempted to pull the blanket up around his ears and wait for the knocking to go away. But, he figures, this late at night it can only be an emergency, so he extracts himself from the blanket, puts some clothes on and goes to open.

Uli is outside, which is odd, because Uli's supposed to be on the other side of town, and a great, nameless turmoil is in his face. He looks so pale and shaken up that it wakes Steban fully, and he doesn't even gripe about the lateness of the hour.

"Uli?" he asks. "What's going on?"

"Oh- Steban, I..." Ulixes says, then looks him up and down and, studying Steban's sleep-mussed form in his underwear, seems to realize that it's the middle of the night and how highly unusual and alarming this all must seem. "I'm sorry, I should have waited until tomorrow, I didn't consider... I didn't mean to wake you up. I only... only needed..."

The words leave him in a confused jumble, and he's practically vibrating with that unnamed emotion. "It's okay," Steban says. "Did something happen? You're trembling..."

"I..." Ulixes takes a deep, shuddering breath. "I finally told my parents. About us."

"Come inside."

Steban sits back down on the bed. Instead of joining him as expected, Uli starts pacing. This moment had to come sooner or later, and they've both been aware of that, but now that it's finally here, Ulixes seems profoundly unsettled.

Steban doesn't quite know what to say. He feels absurdly guilty considering his own, relatively harmonious family life, which has done nothing to prepare him for the present situation. He's gotten the awkward "tengo un novio" confession out of the way months ago, resulting in nothing but some good-natured ribbing from his cousins and a promise to his mother to bring su novio around to dinner. With Ulixes, things... were bound to be more difficult.

"I take it things didn't... go well," he says as delicately as he can manage.

Ulixes huffs. "Well... they didn't immediately take me off the will, which I suppose constitutes a net win."

"Still..."

"Most of the fight was about politics, really."

"Which is... better?" Steban attempts.

"Eh. My father seems to think it's all... a phase he expects me to grow out of. Like obviously once it's time to take over my share of the family business, I'll obligingly turn into a lap dog of capitalism. Because that's just what humans are like, everyone acts in their own self-interest, everyone's weak to the promise of money, and someday I'll see reason and admit that to myself. You know how he is. He has his views on how everything is, and nothing I say will ever get through to him. It's like... it's like, to him, I'm not even there."

Steban hasn't met Ulixes' father and therefore doesn't know how he is, but he feels it's not the time to bring that up. Instead, he asks, "What is the family business?" because, come to think of it, he doesn't think Uli has ever told him. "What does your family do?"

Ulixes waves a dismissive hand. "Nothing. Father owns shares in Saint Baptiste."

Ah. And there's the reason why Uli never told him.

"Wow. Maybe you can score me some antidepressants?" Steban says, trying to lighten the mood, but he's not good at jokes, so it falls utterly flat. A bit sheepishly he adds, "I'm sorry, Uli."

Ulixes ceases his irate pacing and suddenly slumps. When he sits on the bed, he looks defeated. "If only he would yell or throw me out or hit me. Then at least I'd know I made an impact. That I'm not just some nuisance to be easily brushed off. That I matter at all."

Steban reaches over and puts a hand on his shoulder. "Ay, cariño," he says quietly.

"They didn't even really mind the gay stuff as much as I thought they might. 'As long as you keep it to yourself', they said. Same with the communism. But then I... I told them your name and some stuff about you, and then... suddenly, they minded."

Right. They asked him where I'm from and what my family does, and he told them. Steban nods.

"Mother said some things..." Uli pauses, discomfited. "Things I don't care to repeat."

"Well, I don't care to hear them," Steban says bluntly, because he can imagine fairly well what kinds of things Gottwaldian bourgeois might say about him. It doesn't come as any kind of surprise. He knows Uli doesn't think of him that way, and that will have to suffice. "Come here," he suggests and pulls up the blanket, shifting to make room.

Uli complies all too readily. Until now, the force of his righteous anger and indignation have kept him going, but his energy seems to be running out. When he curls up against Steban, he is silent, and he burrows underneath the blanket and smushes his face into Steban's chest like he doesn't want to make eye contact. This is, Steban knows, still the only way Ulixes can sometimes accept comfort. Uli is not well-versed in physical contact. One discovery that came with their relationship becoming physical is that Uli doesn't really... know hugs, or kisses, or pats on the head. Well, Steban knows all these things in abundance, so he wraps his arms around Ulixes and nuzzles into his hair. Uli has not taken his glasses off, so they poke awkwardly into Steban's shoulder, but that's okay.

There's still a tremor running through Uli's body, and Steban recalls that, while he insists he was never physically harmed, Ulixes does fear his father. It makes Steban wonder what it must have been like for him growing up east of the river, surrounded by the bright and impersonal ease of wealth and never acknowledged or touched. He doesn't really know what to do about any of this except call his own mother at the earliest opportunity and thank her for every kiss, every cuddle, every little sacrifice that compounded over the years. For now, he strokes Uli's back and murmurs, "Shh, shh, you'll be alright, I'm here," and hopes it will be enough.

[randomchaotichuman]

the worst of events has struck me in these trying times, the world suffers alongside me for in this moment i am bored. as a solution to this suffering that so badly plagues me, it has been recommended for me to write something complaining about it. – dramatic bitch, 2023

i write this in pursuit of my own entertainment, doing so in the most convoluted manner possible. i strive to write in a way that will confound scholars for decades to come until one singular genius (probably while in an altered state) has the earth shattering revelation that some things are written simply because people are bored and, to put it plainly, have nothing better to do.

(i feel the need to make it exceedingly clear that I very much have better things to do, in fact, i have several things that I need to get done within a timely manner, which of course means I will avoid them for as long as possible, ie.: paying attention to the actual class i am sitting in while writing this)

i quite like poetry, though I have never been capable of writing it in any way as i am graced by apathy and the logical inability to actually place my emotions into text (or feel them at all for that matter).

i hated studying poetry in school. the idea that every single word was thought over several times until the verse was absolutely perfect, granting it this deep and obscure meaning that you don't really need to understand, just memorise for long enough to get you through exams.

i quite like the idea of poetry i made up in my head.

i quite like poetry that just is. there is no need for layers upon layers of meaning, and hidden emotion, sometimes it can just be. 

not that this is something that troubles only poetry, prose can also be very much like this (at least the "classics" i had to study in school). sentences scattered with hidden mines in the form of metaphors and parallels to this thing that is both itself and bigger than that, maybe too big to comprehend or write about easily.

i guess it's easier to write about a family home that remains unchanged as times pass than it is to describe the profoundly unsettling way one feels when realising they are falling prey to the same cycles their own parents never broke. 

(i didn't like this book very much, it had an incest plotline that was completely unnecessary, only the first and last chapters are actually good)

i find myself divided between wanting my own writing to be easily comprehensible by all and wanting it to reflect the way my own mind processes things, jumping from one topic to the next without much of a driving plot. 

this would make it something only appealing to those with that same thought process or those that think my jumping around has a deeper, planned and thought through hidden meaning.

i guess the compromise would be to write in a way that both reflects my own process but also has comprehensible surface value. this would be no better than those books that say a thing and mean something else, layers of information that need to be deciphered before being able to be properly enjoyed in it's entirety.

maybe i am no better than those that came before me, maybe they too did it in an inscrutable attempt to channel their own ephemeral ever fluid thoughts into one solid and definite piece of paper.

i guess this was a success, from a reflection on the nature of my own writing to an insight into poetry and the overthinking of writing, class is over and I am no longer bored.

[gstqaobc]

CBC THE ROYAL FASCINATOR

Friday, April 09, 2021

Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is your biweekly dose of royal news and analysis. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox.

Janet DavisonRoyal Expert

Prince Philip’s life of duty

(Adrian Dennis/Getty Images)

For so many years, Prince Philip was at Queen Elizabeth’s side — or walking just behind — deeply devoted in his duty as consort to the woman who is now the longest-reigning monarch in British history.

But the Duke of Edinburgh, who died this morning aged 99 at Windsor Castle, was seen by many as having his own role in helping an institution steeped in tradition try to find its way toward the future.

Much of that began nearly 70 years ago, after the former sailor who gave up a successful naval career saw his wife ascend the throne.

“What Prince Philip did was help modernize the monarchy in the 1950s,” Michael Jackson, president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada, said in an interview this morning.

“It was still a very tradition-bound institution…. We can credit Prince Philip, with the Queen’s full support, of course, with modernizing [its] finances, protocols, how Buckingham Palace was run … its outreach to the Commonwealth.”

Philip pushed to have Elizabeth’s coronation televised in 1953, an idea she did not wholeheartedly welcome at first.

“He was the modern person,” John Fraser, author of The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty, said in an interview this morning. “He was in touch with real people, non-royal people, and so he always had the instinct to reach out. He understood both the dark side of the media presence as well as the necessity of it.”

Fraser credits Philip’s profoundly unsettled early years, after he was “born in poverty and insecurity,” with how he looked toward the future of the Royal Family, and the monarchy.

“I do think those early years were the single biggest factor in his life and how he approached life,” said Fraser. “I think he never assumed things would last forever because he didn’t make any assumptions like that, and I think he certainly assumed the monarchy wouldn’t survive if it didn’t reach out more to the constituency that it had to serve.”

Fraser met Philip, and recalled him as a man who would revel in asking questions and challenging others.

“He was — charming is not the word I would use — but he was an invigorating person to speak to.”

Jackson, who was Saskatchewan’s chief of protocol from 1980 until 2005, met Philip during four visits to the province — three with the Queen and one on his own — and remembered a man with “a great sense of humour.”

“Sometimes people found him a bit abrasive, a bit abrupt, but that’s the way he was,” said Jackson.

“He was a straight shooter and he complemented the Queen beautifully because the Queen is a very soft-spoken, more laid-back person. Prince Philip really spoke his mind and occasionally made jokes and … put everyone at ease. I found him very refreshing, good to work with.”

With Philip’s death, there is an inevitable sadness for the Queen, and inevitable concern for how she will cope with the passing of her husband of more than 73 years.

Both Fraser and Jackson say the Queen will carry on, with Jackson noting “That’s the way she is. She’s a very strong person” with a deep religious faith that will sustain her.

“She’ll do her duty,” said Fraser. “And I think that’s the big lesson of him. He did his duty.”

For a full obituary of Prince Philip, click here.

For photos from Prince Philip's royal career, click here.

Family dysfunction

When Philip Mountbatten married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, the family he was joining was in marked contrast to the fractured one he had known in his youth. His parents' marriage broke down and offered him nothing like the nuclear family arrangement (mom, dad and two kids) that Elizabeth had known throughout her childhood. "In marrying the Queen, [Philip] gained that sort of stable home life that he didn't have when he was younger," royal author and historian Carolyn Harris has said in an interview. Philip's parents were Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Philip was born a prince of both Greece and Denmark on June 10, 1921, on the dining room table at Mon Repos, a villa that was the summer home for the Greek royals on the island of Corfu. He was the last of five children — his four older siblings were all girls. At the time, he was sixth in line to the Greek throne. But life in Greece didn't last long. His father, a professional soldier, was exiled from Greece in 1922 as his uncle, King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate. Philip's family fled, with the story being that Philip was nestled into an orange box as the family was evacuated from Greece on a Royal Navy ship. They eventually made their way to Paris. Philip's childhood took a "dysfunctional turn," author Sally Bedell Smith wrote in her book, Elizabeth The Queen, when he was sent by his parents at the age of eight to England for boarding school. The family eventually broke down. Philip's mother, who was born deaf, was ill periodically, diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in a sanitarium in Switzerland. His father went off with his mistress to Monte Carlo, where he died in 1944. Philip was left to be brought up in the U.K. by his mother's family, shuffled among various relatives and boarding schools throughout his youth. He didn't see or have any word from his mother between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1937. "It's simply what happened," Philip said matter-of-factly in an excerpt from a book by Philip Eade, Young Prince Philip, Turbulent Early Years, published in the Telegraph. "The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does." As life went on, there really was no father to guide, consult or do anything else a father can do for his child. Several other close relatives died in his early years, including his favourite sister, Cecile, and her family in a plane crash in 1937. The following year, the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, his uncle and guardian, died of bone cancer. That left the marquess's younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, to bring up Philip. His family ties also extended into Germany. Three of his sisters were married to German princes involved in the Nazi party. Cecile and her husband, Don, had just joined the Nazi party before they died. Those family alliances had a visible repercussion when Philip and Elizabeth were married in 1947. "His sisters were not invited to the wedding as they were married to German princes who had been involved in the Nazi party during World War Two," Harris said. Philip's mother, Princess Alice, however, was at the wedding, and in her later years, came to live at Buckingham Palace. Alice had her own moment in the cultural conscience in 2019, as an episode during the third season of the Netflix drama, The Crown, focused on her. "She's just the most extraordinary character," Crown creator Peter Morgan told Vanity Fair. She set up charities for Greek refugees and later established a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns. During the Second World War, while her son was serving with the Royal Navy and her German sons-in-law fought for the Nazis, she was hiding Jews in Athens. As much as there was the distance between Philip and his mother in his younger years, there was a closeness later. Alice came to live at Buckingham Palace in 1967. Alice died at the palace in 1969 and was interred in the royal crypt at Windsor Castle. In 1988, her remains were transferred, as she had wished, to the church of St. Mary Magdalene in east Jerusalem. In a 1994 visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Philip planted a tree in his mother's honour and visited her gravesite. "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special," Philip said during his visit. "She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress."

No stranger to Canada

(Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)

Prince Philip's last visit to Canada was a short one in 2013 — on his own, without the Queen — to present a ceremonial flag to the Royal Canadian Regiment's 3rd Battalion. It came as something of a surprise. Philip had experienced a few health scares in the 18 months prior. So overseas travel was not necessarily a given for the Duke of Edinburgh at the time. But given Philip's feisty personality, dedication to his role and some of the interests he showed over the years, his return to Canada — he made more than 70 visits or stopovers between 1950 and 2013 — may not really have been a complete surprise. The 2013 trip was billed as a private working visit and was only a few days long. But while he was here, he was finally able to pick up the insignias he had been awarded as companion of the Order of Canada and commander of the Order of Military Merit from David Johnston, then Canada's governor general.

To read more about Philip’s time in Canada, click here.

Royally quotable

“He is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”

— Queen Elizabeth, publicly acknowledging Prince Philip’s importance to her during a speech on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997.

To read more on what Philip meant to the Queen, click here.

Remembering Prince Philip

Royal Fascinator readers are welcome to share their thoughts on the passing of Prince Philip, and any memories they may have of meeting him over the years. We’ll include some in the next edition of the newsletter.

I’m always happy to hear from you. Send your ideas, comments, feedback and notes to

royalfascinator@cbc.ca

. Problems with the newsletter? Please let me know about any typos, errors or glitches.

GSTQAOBC 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿

[heat-riser]

Some weird analysis of when you knew me.

I’ve thought about doing this for a while. One part screaming into the void, one part for anyone who was on tumblr in it’s heyday and watched me be strange and into- frankly- the worst characters and really terrible ships. I’m 26 now and understand a bit more about myself after finally finding a good therapist who specialized in sexual trauma and delving into the deepest darkest parts. Maybe it’s part insight for people who were friends with my at the time- and by ‘at that time’, I guess I mean any point in my life up until a couple years ago. From around 5 years on- I was in a constant state of incredibly deep sadness and anxiety but was too numb to even really consciously feel it. I learned some of the worst things about people and became acquainted with some of the worst things a person can feel at 5, and then again multiple times around 9 due to rape by two different boys. The first, my family and people around me knew about pretty immediately. The second was completely unknown to people until recently. It’s not an easy thing telling your parents another neighbor boy who was a ‘friend’ raped you too. I can’t really explain properly how deeply this effects a person and how people don’t really understand it. Things as little as not being able to be outside my house without a jacket and full pants to cover my whole body because I internalized that showing your body is vulnerability opened up the possibility of sexualization and therefore- attack. All the way to now with everything being resurfaced and having nearly no sex drive and being unable to feel arousal without more anxiety coming in and overpowering the arousal feeling. It was recently recommended to me by my therapist to not play horror games because the feelings of arousal and fear are so tightly linked. I’ve been with the therapist for three years and anticipate at very least another 3-5 and she has clients who have been seeing her 10+ years for having experienced childhood sexual abuse. I can’t remember if I’ve talked publicly here about any of that but most of my friends are aware of the first one (it’s not really something I want to throw out there randomly and conversations in covid time are strange). I was only aware of the first one up until a couple years back. When talking about buried memories, how they come up, how to tell if they’re legit, I halfway thought “what if there was more” and felt sick to my stomach. One of the sure signs of a memory being true is an emotional response. I’m in the process of reclaiming the memories of the events involving the second neighbor boy. But point being- I learned the world was awful very early on and it became the background for all future development (sexual, social, self, etc. etc.). I began to numb myself after the first event and went through half of elementary school and middle school angry, sad, and hateful- I especially hated men, but also just the world at large. By high school, I had learned to shove all of that down. I can’t really recall feeling much of anything in high school. So the people that knew me at the time really only knew a weird ghost of a person. Then there’s this thing called trauma reenactment- where victims are drawn to things relating to the trauma situation. So this is what takes me to explaining the characters I was interested in. 1- Adachi. I now see as little more than a sad incel but it does say a lot about where I was at the time to be so fascinated with him. He shared my resentment towards the world, the idea that anyone who wasn’t depressed simply didn’t understand, and saw more of a problem with the world than his current state of being. Of course that was relatable. I very clearly remember in middle school believing people that weren’t depressed simply had no idea what was going on around them. Of course I thought that and still struggle with that mentality. All I had really known was deep despair and numbing myself from the world. I didn’t understand how other people didn’t realize that but now know what the emotional world I was living in was not typical of children. So here was someone that knew how bad everything around was and how bad the world felt and I clung onto him the same way I did my own idealizations. With what I’ve been processing more recently, the dude needed therapy and to unlearn that depression was cool and correct but had shown multiple times he was unwilling to challenge any of his issues and just started killing people. There were a lot of favorite characters through this but one that sticks out as another really fucked up example of where I was was Damon Gant. I look back at liking him as the ultimate symbol of trauma reenactment. He’s older, he had power, he was creepy, intimidating, unsettling, and controlling. Everything my predators had been to me at the time. So- all of those things were in a way intertwined with my own sexuality as they’re what I first learned with anything ‘sexual’. Some of my favorite ships are due to the same reasoning. Gant and Lana- again, kind of inherently controlling, imbalance of power, and ends horribly and tragically. I always found something intriguing and beautiful about the most horrific and sad feelings. And I’ll touch on it just for the record. Cyrus is big fucked up- but I think he is, though maybe incorrect, well intentioned with his main goal being what he believes will actually be better for everyone cause of his projection of the awful things he feels on everyone. He doesn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone and certainly doesn’t enjoy other people’s pain but rather wants to eliminate what he sees as the reason for people hurting others with and end justifies the means mindset. His numbing/attempts to numb, hatred of emotion, and hatred of people inflicting pain on others is all incredibly familiar and I’m certain a part of me in middle school knew that when picking him as a fave. As I progress, I’m more interested his potential to relearn people and start opening up to feeling. (Pokemon Master’s definitely more than hinted at him changing and I’m hoping that means they’ll go that route with remakes.) I should note that during my most ‘numb’ parts would sneak out and I would be very- and increasingly over time starting with 6th grade- suicidal and became addicted to cutting and self harm (which I realize now are both just further numbing techniques). I described the feeling at the time as a parasite controlling your brain and a part of yourself knowing you had to fight against it. There was a period I was certain of how I would die, it was just when I would finally snap. I should also say how much people are able to numb themselves. I can remember getting so anxious that my heart would race and the world felt fast- I would get to the point of gagging but can’t remember ‘feeling’ any ounce of anxiety consciously. When first becoming sexually active, I had extended, horrific anxiety that would have hospitalized me for a couple weeks if not for my mom being able to stay home with me (also out of work for a couple months and left addicted to xanax for a bit). And still didn’t quite believe her all the way when she suggested it was anxiety. And I sure as hell didn’t make any connections to any possible mental issues around sex. So I’ve ranted enough but saved this bit for the end cause it hits kinda hard. People tend to feel the same things they felt in locations. Curiosity got the best of me and I drove around parts of my childhood I spend a lot of time at and specific routes I would take. (It’s called state dependent memory if anyone’s interested). I’m learning just how much I was numb to everything and wondering just what it was I was covering up my whole life. This isn’t easy to really type out cause of how fucked it is with the realization that I didn’t really experience childhood to a degree. During my drive, past my high school, up near my friends houses, the route I would take coming back from college- I was deeply, and very profoundly sad in my core. Nothing near what a person should have felt through their childhood. I missed so much. And I’m sorry to my friends at the time who only got to know a strange, numb, trauma reenacting, ghost of myself. I’m not going to be able to relive those times in a better light but I can at very least do some work to prevent a future spent numb and profoundly sad. But my brain is finally allowing me to remember some things because it’s deemed that I can handle it, I’m learning more about myself and my past, learning how to listen to what my brain and body are telling me and why, and getting better at expressing grief and real, raw, sadness and a touch of deep-seated anger so I think I might be starting to turn this around.

[kelyon]

Trio: A Golden Cuffs Story 3/5: Morning

In which Belle and Jefferson have a heart-to-heart (and other-bits to-other-bits)

Read on AO3

Belle was still mostly asleep when she got cold enough to want to cover herself with blankets. With her eyes closed she groped around the big bed, feeling for the covers that she needed. She found them wrapped around a man’s body.

She groaned. Rumple didn’t need blankets! He was just toying with her and keeping her cold! She yanked them away from him and wrapped the warmth around herself and went back to sleep. 

When she woke up again it was because he was trying to roll her over.

 “Please don’t!” she whined, tiredness making her petulant. “If you want something, just order me to do it and let me sleep!”

“Can I just have one of the blankets? Please?”

Belle opened her eyes. That was not Rumpelstiltskin’s voice. She looked over her shoulder. Jefferson was lying next to her, clutching an edge of one of the blankets.

“I’m so sorry!” she said as she tried to disentangle herself from the cocoon of warmth she had made. She threw bedclothes over Jefferson haphazardly, trying to give him as much as he needed. 

“It’s okay.” He put a blanket over his naked shoulders and scooted over to her. “Do you mind if I get in close to you? For warmth?”

Belle didn’t answer, but straightened out the bed clothes so that they were both covered. The curtains were thin in this room and dawn crept in with the winter chill. There was no sign of Rumpelstiltskin anywhere.

“Would you allow me to hold you, Belle?”

Belle shook her head and made sure her blanket went up to her neck. “Not if Rumple’s not here to say it’s alright.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Jefferson, or didn’t trust him not to do anything untoward even when they were both entirely naked. But Belle was profoundly aware that she belonged to Rumpelstiltskin. Whether or not Jefferson touched her was not her decision to make.

Nodding, Jefferson eased back to his side of the bed. “He can be very possessive about his things. I’m honestly surprised to be here right now, like this.”

Belle relaxed and smoothed the top blanket over her body. It was morning now, and she wasn’t tired anymore. She might as well get to know Jefferson. “You’ve never shared a woman with him before?”

“I’ve never seen him with a woman before. I mean, I’ve seen him flirt with women but he flirts with men too. And with those who are both or neither. Until I met you, I didn’t think he liked women.” 

Belle rested her chin on her knees. “Until I met you, I didn’t think he liked men.”

“He’s a man of many secrets, our Dark One.”

She looked at him. “Why do you call him that?”

Jefferson shrugged. “He’s never invited me to call him anything else. I know his name is powerful and little good comes from speaking it.”

“In my village, they say it’s bad luck. But he ordered me to use his name and disobeying him would be very bad luck. How did you meet him?”

“He saved my life,” Jefferson said. “Do you believe that?”

“I do,” she answered. After all, he had saved hers. “It sounds like a story.”

“You wanna know?”

“Yes, please.”

Jefferson propped his head up on his hand while he told Belle his story.

“So my father was a man named Jeffer. He was a stonemason. My grandfather was also a stonemason. My uncles were stonemasons, and my brothers were stonemasons. Pretty much every man in my village who wasn’t a farmer was a stonemason. Every day, every man would march down to the quarry to dig in the dirt, using all their strength and skill to cut a block of stone that would go on to form the walls of a castle that they would never see. 

“My father was a good stonemason, strong and steady. I was his first son, but I was a runt and I had no patience to stay in one spot for more than an hour. He tried to work with me, tried to figure how to make me want to do what I was supposed to do. When I was ten, he apprenticed me to a stone carver, instead of a stone mason. For variety, you know. I learned to chisel all the little cherubs and gargoyles that are on the sides of castles. A fifty-pound granite demon is as light and cheerful as stone work ever gets. I tried to be good, but I was completely miserable. No one in my village could understand that I wanted… so much more than they had planned.” 

He sighed and rolled back on the bed, his arms folded behind his head. Belle understood his situation, how even loving parents could trap you in a life you didn’t want. 

Jefferson went on: “When I was eighteen, my father arranged for me to be married to the daughter--the only child--of the guildmaster, the head of all the stonemasons in our region. I don’t know how he managed that. This girl was the most sought-after maiden in our village. She might as well have been a princess for all the young men who were desperate for her hand.”

“That wasn’t Leona, was it?”

”No, I didn’t meet Leo until I started traveling. This was a girl that I had known all my life. She was very nice and very pretty, but I wasn’t ready to settle down. I had never been unsettled!” 

Jefferson chuckled weakly, but then became dreadfully serious. “I saw my future written in the stone I worked with: If I married this girl, I would have to become the only kind of man my village could tolerate. I would muddle through to become a journeyman stone carver, and then eventually a master of a trade I hated. I would only ever sleep with one woman. I would only ever live in one town. I would devote my life to making ornaments for castles that I would never see. I would have sons and whether I willed it or not, they would have my life as surely as I would have my father’s. Every day when I went down into the quarry, I knew I was walking into my grave.”

He looked haggard, as he said all that. The misery that could have been still haunted him. Belle understood his plight. She may not have recognized the feeling at the time, but she had felt the same way whenever she had spoken to Gaston. To see the future laid out in front of you, to know the steps that the rest of your life would take, could be a beautiful, hopeful thing--but not if it wasn’t a future you wanted. 

“What did you do?”

“I ran away. On the day I was to be married, I ran into the woods. I ran for half a day before I realized I had nowhere to go. I had no money, no family or friends I could ask to help. The only trade I knew was the only trade I swore I would never do again. It got so bad, I…” He looked at her, clearly unsure whether or not to tell this part of his story.

Belle reached across the bed to put her hand on Jefferson’s bare arm. He was safe now, and she wanted him to know it. “What happened?”

Jefferson looked at her for a moment, and then nodded to himself. He reached up to his neck and loosened the fastenings on his black leather collar. He turned his head from side to side. “Can you see it?”

A thin white line that ran from ear to ear across his throat. Belle gasped. “Is that a scar?”

He nodded and tightened his collar again. “On that day in the forest, I had no future, and no hope of ever finding one. But I had a knife, and even death seemed better than living as I had been.” He swallowed, not looking at Belle. His eyes seemed to be focused on some spot in the distance, in the past. “I watched my blood drip down into the dirt and I wished out loud for a world where I could be happy.”

“You made a wish?” Belle asked. “Did you say you would do anything?”

A grin flickered over Jefferson’s face. “I didn’t say that, but he came all the same. The Dark One saw me and… I don’t know if he took pity on me or if he just recognized my desperation. He healed my injury and saved my life. He left the scar so I could have a memento of surviving my darkest hour. And then we made a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He gave me my hat and showed me how to use it. Now I can go anywhere in any world. I can trade and sell between worlds, keep tabs on important people for the sake of other important people, and get paid very well to do so. I can go to places my father wouldn’t see in his dreams. I’ve been a guest in castles that my village toiled to create. Now I can talk to anyone and find myself in all sorts of amusing situations, just like this one.”

“And what did Rumple get from you?”

“The best of what I do. I report to him first of what’s going on in other worlds. I give him the most valuable treasures, the juiciest gossip--whatever he needs. Whatever I think he might like.”

“So,” Belle said slowly, “you didn’t make a deal for your body?” Was he not like her?

Jefferson smiled now, with devious but genuine pleasure. “No, that came a little later. Once I had the hat, I spent a long time traveling the worlds for myself, seeing how other people lived--and loved. I learned from a lot of different lovers, and I kept thinking that I wanted to go back and tell the Dark One what I had learned. The first time I heard about sucking cock, I thought, surely this discovery is the greatest thing to come out of any world in the history of sex!

“But as it turned out, the Dark One already knew more than I did. We took a holiday in a world of paradise and he taught me...” Jefferson sighed, “everything. Lust and love and loss and life.”

That word again. Love. Belle felt a strange unease in the pit of her stomach.

“What does your wife think of that? Does she know?”

“Yes, Leo knows everything I’ve done and everything I do. And I know about her past and her present. I met her on my journeys--she is not ashamed of anything. We’re honest with each other and we love each other and we’re devoted to our daughter. We get it to work.”

“You seem to have everything you wanted,” Belle said. She tried to be happy for him, but she couldn’t help being painfully aware that no one would ever say the same thing about her.

“I have everything I was certain I would never have on my first wedding day. This collar covers up my scar, but it also reminds me of it. Every time I’m happy with my work and my wife and my daughter, I remember not to take them for granted. I was willing to throw this future away. I was willing to let all my happiness spill out onto the forest floor. But now, by the grace of the gods and the Dark One, I am alive. And I have a future. And I am happy.”

“And you loved him?”

“Still do, a little. But you love him too. He’s easy to fall in love with.”

Belle went very still. She could feel her mind taking that sentence, You love him too, picking it up, and putting it away for safekeeping. It was too big a thought to think right now. She would think on it later, not now while she was still trying to talk to Jefferson. Not while Rumple could come back at any moment.

“You said… he taught you about loss as well?”

“Yeah, just… realizing you can’t be on holiday forever. Eventually you have to go back to work, move on from silly romances. See what else the worlds have to offer.” He shrugged. “But what’s your story, Belle? What was your deal with him?”

“Rumpelstiltskin saved my life too,” she told Jefferson. “And the lives of almost every person I’ve ever known. Our town was under attack by ogres, and--”

“That was you?” he sat up to interrupt her. “From King Midas’ land? The ogre attacks last summer? In the story I heard, the girl died. I always listen for stories about the Dark One. The way I heard it, he ate your flesh in front of the whole town and it aroused his appetite so much that he was able to devour the entire horde of ogres.”

She blinked at him. “You didn’t believe that, did you?”

“Of course not,” Jefferson shook his head. “But I didn’t think the slave girl serving us drinks was the high-born heroine who martyred herself to save her people.”

Belle stared down at the woven pattern of the blanket. “Do people really think I’m dead?”

“The man I met in a pub said he got this story from the Duke of the Frontlands himself.”

“Oh,” Belle nodded slowly. “More likely the Duke’s son.” At Jefferson’s look she explained. “I also was about to be married before Rumple found me. And I did tell my fiance he could tell people I had died.” 

With a twinge of guilt, she thought about her father and her cousins. They knew this story was false, but perhaps it was easier for them to believe it. From their perspective, a quick death would be a kinder fate than a lifetime of serving Rumpelstiltskin. Did they perpetuate this lie? Was it easier for them to say that than the truth? Did they think that he really had killed her?

“They said your sacrifice saved a thousand people. Is that number true?”

“I think so. The whole village was probably a thousand, what was left of it. All of them in exchange for just me. It was a good deal.”

“I’m certainly pleased with it!”

Rumpelstiltskin stood at the foot of the bed, fully dressed and leaning over them with a leer. “Why so far apart, little ones? Don’t you like each other?”

“We were leaving room for you.” Jefferson thumped the space between their bodies as an invitation.

Rumpelstiltskin grinned. “Breakfast first for those who need it! Jefferson, what would you like?”

Jefferson sat up, baring his chest as he spoke. “Do you remember that swamp world we visited? And the chef with the shadow problem? What was that food she made us? I forget what it was even called.”

“Jambalaya!” Rumple declared. He waved his hand and there was a steaming dish of meat and grain sitting on the little table. Belle could smell it from the bed, smokey and sharp and foreign. It made her mouth water.

Jefferson eyed the dish hungrily as he got out of bed. Before he got to the food, Rumple stopped him and offered him a dressing gown to wear while he ate. Jefferson robed himself and sat down.

“Belle, pour our guest a cup of tea.”

She was offered no robe. The cuffs pulled her out of the bed and to the tea tray, which was on the table next to Jefferson’s bowl. There was a teacup at his place setting. Another cup--the chipped one--was in front of the empty chair. 

“How do you take your tea?” she asked Jefferson. 

“Strong and sweet, like my lovers.”

Belle snorted and Jefferson chuckled at his own joke. She put two sugar lumps in his cup and poured.

“And you, Rumple? Will you be joining him?”

He hadn’t sat yet, but had been standing in front of the bed, looking at them. He kept his hands clasped behind his back.

“Yes of course. It would be rude not to.”

“Shall I get you another cup?”

“No.” He sat down in the chair, his legs in front of him, crossed at the ankles.

Belle served his tea with cream and three sugars, as she knew he liked it. 

There was something strange about his manner just now. He was distant, masked, acting cool to hide a fire. He was trying to disguise some terrible emotion. Was he angry? Was she going to be punished soon? Or was it just the presence of the chipped cup that made her think he was about to fly into a rage and beat her? 

He had said there would be no pain games during this encounter, but what if he changed his mind? What if she had done something wrong that merited real punishment? Belle couldn’t think of anything she had done to offend Rumpelstiltskin, except talk to Jefferson. And he hadn’t told her not to do that. In the mood he was in, would he punish her for a rule she didn’t know she had broken?

Would Jefferson want to see that? He seemed too kind a soul to take pleasure in her suffering. But if he was familiar with Rumple and his ways then perhaps he would know what a delight it could be to take punishment from him. She hadn’t asked if he had ever subjected himself the way she did. But Jefferson had been a lover, not a slave. Had Rumple ever made a deal like the one he had made with Belle?

She sat at Rumpelstiltskin’s feet and kissed his boots, waiting for whatever would come next.

“Aren’t you hungry, little Belle? Why haven’t you asked for breakfast?”

She shrugged. “You will feed me when I deserve to eat.” 

Above her, the noises of  Jefferson’s meal slowed down. He was looking at her.

“Shall we show Jefferson how I feed you?”

“Yes please, Rumple.” Being humiliated was a better game than being hurt for their amusement. And eating off the floor had become one of her favorite ways to submit herself to Rumple. 

The breakfast tray was on the floor in front of her. The cuffs pulled her to the ground and locked her into place. She was right in front of Jefferson. He would have a good view of her face and her breasts and her backside. Rumpelstiltskin was behind her, his boot pushing gently on the side of her bare foot. It was a subtle but constant reminder of his presence. 

Breakfast was porridge. Not too cumbersome. Belle bent her head down and lapped up the thick goo. She looked at Jefferson as much as she could, looked him in the eye and dared him to judge her. He didn’t. He looked down at her with desire and with awe.

“What a sight!” he said. “And you get to have her do this every day?”

“More or less,” Rumple said. “I like making sure she knows her place.”

“On your knees and licking is a good place to be!” Jefferson expelled a breath and took a sip of his tea. “I wish my wife could see you.”

“Would you ask this of your wife?” Belle asked as she ran her tongue over the empty bowl.

“No, I would want her to ask this of me!” Jefferson sighed. “I would gladly grovel three meals a day if it did to her what it’s doing to me.” He shifted in his seat but kept talking. “To have Leona act as my lady, my imperious mistress...” He shivered. “That would be… exciting.”

Rumpelstiltskin chuckled. “Has everyone eaten their fill?”

Jefferson locked eyes with him. “I’m hungry, but not for food.”

“Belle?”

She took her cue from Jefferson. “I’m ready for more in my mouth--but not food.”

“Excellent! Would you like to kiss Jefferson’s feet?”

Belle’s face fell, the sultry manner she had been playing with shattered. “No, Rumple,” she said softly, looking up at him. “I… I will if you order me to, but I don’t want to kiss his feet. I don’t owe Jefferson any fealty.”

 There was the slightest twitch at Rumple’s mouth, the smallest softness in his eyes. “Very well,” he said. “Will you sit on his lap?”

“Yes!” The cuffs released her and Belle leapt to her feet. Jefferson opened his arms and Belle wrapped her naked legs over his silk-covered hips. He held her steady with both hands--one arm wrapped around her waist, the other holding onto her shoulder. His robe was open at the front and his manhood stood out, long and pink. 

“Tell us, my girl. What do you think of our friend Jefferson?”

Belle looked at the man who held her in his arms. Playfully, he tilted his face back and forth, showing off every angle for her perusal.

 “I like him,” she said honestly. 

“What do you like best about him?”

“He’s fun. Easy to get along with.”

That didn’t seem to be the answer Rumple wanted. “What part of his body is the most pleasing to you?”

“Well, he has very expressive eyes.” But she knew that wasn’t what she was supposed to say. “And his mouth did bring me much pleasure last night.”

“And you, my boy? Do you like this girl?”

“Of course I like her. You’ve done very well for yourself.”

Rumpelstiltskin frowned and stood up. Belle shared a quick look with Jefferson. He didn’t understand what was happening either. Rumple came to them and bent over. He put one hand on the back of the chair and the other over Jefferson’s cock so that Belle was pressed between the two men when Rumple kissed him. 

He had kissed her like that before. It was a kiss of ownership, of dominance. Jefferson had no control over this kiss. His only choice was whether to fight it or accept it. He accepted it. One hand reached out to Rumpelstiltskin even as he nearly choked. 

Belle watched as Rumple’s scaly green hand wrapped over Jefferson’s pink shaft. He squeezed and Jefferson made a strangled noise that was muffled by Rumpelstiltskin’s mouth. 

Not wanting to be left out, Belle pulled herself up to push against Rumple’s chest. All she wanted was to be near his body. She reached her arm out behind her and touched Rumple’s tight leather breeches. She groped up and down his thigh and came to rest over his straining bulge. At that touch, he broke the kiss and sent Jefferson gasping for air.

While Jefferson caught his breath, Rumpelstiltskin stepped away from both of them and took a seat at the table. He pulled out a bundle of straw from his coat pocket and  began to spin it on a small spindle.

“What was that about?” Jefferson asked. He didn’t seem offended, merely curious.

Rumpelstiltskin shrugged and kept his eyes on the gold thread. “I didn’t get much use out of your cock last night, my boy. I wanted to check in on it.”

“Everything to your satisfaction?”

“I’ll adjust my plans according to your needs. For now I would have you finger the girl while I work.”

“Your wish is my command, Dark One.” Jefferson looked up at Belle with a smile. “Are you ready?”

Belle nodded. She wondered what Rumple was making, but she was certain they would find out soon enough. 

Jefferson kept the arm around her waist and used his other hand to open her folds. His fingers were longer than Rumpelstiltskin’s, and his nails were shorter. It felt strange to have this man inside her--to have anyone touch her who wasn’t Rumple. No matter how many people might fumble around between her legs, no one had mastery over her body like him.

“Don’t forget, you’re allowed to speak now, my slut. Why don’t you give Jefferson some of your lovely noises?”

“I will when he elicits them,” she answered saucily. 

“Is there anything I can do better?” Jefferson asked her. 

“Move around more. Don’t stay in one place all the time.”

“You’d think I, of all people, would know that! Alright.” He swirled his fingers around in her wetness--reaching up to her cleft and then dipping down again into her core. His eyes shifted between her face and her body and her master. Rumpelstiltskin was folding the thread between his fingers like a game of cat’s cradle. He glanced over at them occasionally with a small grin.

When Jefferson found her pleasure spot, Belle yelped and her body jerked so sharply she almost fell out of his arms. 

He brought her back to him. “You’re okay,” he told her. “Stay with me, Belle. Am I permitted to make her come?”

“That is the idea, my friend. And after you do, she’ll return the favor.”

Jefferson looked away from Belle and at Rumple. “What?”

“You’re nearly bursting already, my boy. I can’t ask you to last for as long as I want you to. It will be easier for you to start again after you’ve taken the edge off.”

He looked as though he might object, but then he shook his head. “You’re the boss.”

“Don’t forget it.”

He turned back to Belle, looked at her face for a moment, and then buried his head between her breasts. Thrown off balance, Belle leaned forward and grabbed the back of the chair to steady herself. Jefferson’s fingers never stopped and his mouth began to suck and bite at her flesh. She cried out and that only increased his fervor. 

Belle felt the pleasure begin to rise inside her. While Jefferson rubbed and sucked, she looked over her shoulder at Rumpelstiltskin. He watched them calmly, his hands stilled around a strip of gold cloth.

She was about to reach her hand out to him--invite him to join them, or at least get a closer look--when her orgasm took her. It was like a bolt of lightning in reverse, coming up from her cunt through her body and out her mouth in a shout. She rocked forward onto Jefferson, who caught her and held her while she shook. 

“Very good.” Rumple’s voice was low and smooth. “Now, Belle, get on top of him and show him what you can do.”

The cuffs pulled her over so that there was no room between herself and Jefferson on the little chair. His cock was red now, so hard it looked like it ached. One cuff moved her hand so that she had to pull him up and slide herself over him. Still throbbing from her orgasm, Belle’s cunt clenched around Jefferson. 

She closed her eyes and focused on the feeling of him filling her. His breath was ragged and shaky. She could smell her pleasure mingling with the scent of his sweat. She rocked her hips slowly and Jefferson moaned. She moved her body forward against him, undulating in a fluid motion that ended with her breasts in front of his face.

“You can suck them again if you want,” she murmured.

“Fuck!” he hissed. “May I, Dark One? May I suck on her?”

“Of course, sweet boy. Take whatever you like from my thing.”

Jefferson held Belle’s back and filled his mouth with her nipple. He licked and teased her, bit her gently and made her moan. But he mostly seemed content to rest his head against her breast and suck her like a newborn babe. The sensation created a sharp pull inside Belle, like a cord running from her breast to her cunt. It wasn’t entirely pleasure, but it was an undeniably erotic tension. 

Jefferson kept his eyes closed. He stroked her back and pushed Belle’s body rhythmically, encouraging her to keep moving. Belle moved around his cock slowly, rocking and leaning in as many directions as she could find. Gradually, she increased the pace. She noticed that Jefferson began to suck her more furiously the faster she moved. Before too long, the sensation was too much and she had to push him away from her.

He detached from her breast with a pop. His head lolled a little. His mouth was slack and red from his work. His eyes were unfocused and glassy with lust. 

“Are you ready?” she asked him. “Are you going to come for us, Jefferson?”

He was jerking before she had finished asking the question. His arms around her tightened and he pulled her into him with such force she thought her bones would break. He shouted and spurted and then sank back into the chair.

Rumpelstiltskin stood up. “A perfect show,” he said. “And now I get to join in on the fun.”

[salaciouscrumpet]

Whumptober Day 22

Whumptober Day 22 Prompt: “Hallucination”

As is becoming my norm I had a few different ideas to take this prompt in, but I ended up deciding that one of those ideas is big enough to be put in one of my future books, so I’m holding on to that one. Instead I decided to use this prompt to share a little backstory.

Introducing yet another new character who, for reasons that will immediately become obvious, won’t be featuring too heavily in the actual series.

CW: suicide (not a main character), suicidal ideation, complicated feelings about suicide, non-graphic references to childhood sexual abuse, victim blaming, homophobia, implied alcohol abuse, foul language

I don’t think it’s a particularly dark ficlet, even for Whumptober, but given the triggering nature of these issues I thought it important to caution for them.

Characters: Luke, Danny 

Once upon a time the rocky outcropping on the north end of the island had been Luke’s refuge. It was far enough away from the house that his parents couldn’t be bothered to come find him there unless he was in real trouble, and his younger sister Alice didn’t like the cold breeze that always seemed to come in off the lake. Milena was too young to wander off on her own, so she was easy enough to escape. The only person who looked for Luke there was Danny, and that was okay, Luke idolized Danny. 

Luke had idolized Danny. 

“You’re dead,” Luke said, facing out towards the water as his brother joined him along the rocks. The lake was especially choppy, dark waves topped with whitecaps. The water would be cold if he were to wade into it, and the air would be even colder when he got out. 

“Yup,” Danny agreed, sounding ridiculously complacent about it. He also sounded … young. 

After a moment of silence Luke turned and faced his brother, sucking in a startled breath when he saw him. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting – something gruesome, maybe, given that Daniel Kandarian Jr. had been dead for twenty years – but it wasn’t the young-looking person beside him. Danny had been three years older than Luke, and in his mind Luke always thought of his brother as being perpetually older than him, even as his memories of what his brother had looked like remained untouched by the years. Danny had died at sixteen, however, and while that had seemed so much older to thirteen-year-old Luke, thirty-four-year-old Luke recognized him as the child he’d been. And yet, still, Danny somehow seemed older than Luke. 

“This isn’t real,” Luke said, turning away again. He was glad Danny didn’t look the way he should look after being buried for two decades, but at the same time it cut something deep inside to see him there, that face so familiar and yet so painfully young. Sixteen had been too young to die; even twenty years later, Luke wanted to scream at the unfairness of it. 

“Nope,” Danny agreed, still cheerful. He’d always been a little shit; he’d just seemed cooler to the younger brother who had idolized him. He gestured vaguely out towards the water, and for a brief moment Luke thought he saw … something … out beyond the horizon. Glimpses of a hospital room, machines with too many wires and flashing lights, and a set of anxious faces bowed over the bed. Then it was gone, and there was nothing but the waves and the skyline, dark and forbidding. 

“Something’s wrong with me.” Luke frowned out at the water, trying to remember. There had been a patrol, he recalled that much. He’d been with Kate and Gin and … one of the new recruits, a young man whose name eluded him at the moment. Carter? Kerry? Carson? Something like that. They had stumbled across a nest of fledgling demons and then … Nothing. It was all blank. His body ached, though, all through his joints and muscles, and there was a sharper pain in his side. He felt cold and sore and unbelievably tired. He glanced at Danny out of the corner of his eye and saw his brother watching him intently. “Am I dead? Dying?” 

Danny shrugged. “Beats the hell outta me, dude. This is your dream.” 

“Right.” Luke sighed. “Great.” 

He turned away from the water, unsettled by the vague glimpses of an outside world that he kept getting beyond the waves. In the opposite direction there was nothing but trees, although he knew that if he were to walk further in he would soon come to his parents’ house near the middle of the island. He hadn’t been ‘home’ in over a decade, not since his father had disavowed him. He imagined not much had changed; his parents had never been big on changing. He’d learned that at a young age, and both he and Danny had paid the price for it in their own ways. 

“I never really forgave you, you know,” Luke said softly. He shifted restlessly, one foot to the other, and the fact that he could hear the wind through the trees but not the sounds of his booted feet scraping against rock reminded him that he was dreaming, or maybe hallucinating. It seemed his brain could only fabricate so much of the world around him; anything more, and the details just weren’t there. 

“Yeah, I know,” Danny replied, his own voice just as soft. He didn’t sound apologetic, exactly, but that might have just been because he, too, was a fabrication of Luke’s mind, and Luke didn’t have many memories of his older brother sounding genuinely sorry about anything. 

“For a long time I thought maybe they’d done it. I know Dad had the coroner’s report changed so that your death was ruled an accident, but I thought … maybe it wasn’t you. That it hadn’t been you who’d done it to yourself.” 

Danny let out a startled laugh. “That’s fucked up, dude. You’d rather think Mom and Dad killed me, than I killed myself?” 

Luke nodded once, jerkily. It was fucked up, but as a devastated thirteen-year-old he couldn’t understand why his older brother would have done something so selfish. How Danny, who he adored and worshiped, could just leave him like that. It wasn’t that it had been easier to believe their parents had killed him – or had had him killed – it was just that it was impossible to imagine Danny had done it to himself. It was only years later, as an adult, that Luke could look back on the situation and realize that although he hadn’t seen it at the time, his brother had been profoundly sad and troubled as a teenager. What had made it particularly confusing for Luke at the time was that in the days leading up to his suicide, Danny had suddenly started seeming happy and hopeful. Up until the moment that Danny was found hanging from a belt in his bedroom, Luke had thought he was finally, finally getting his big brother back after months of Danny being distant and cold. Adult-Luke recognized that brief period of hopefulness and happiness as a sign that his brother had made the decision to kill himself; child-Luke had had no idea. 

“They didn’t kill me,” Danny said. His tone was still unbelievably soft and gentle. “You know that, right, bud? I killed myself.” 

“Yeah,” Luke acknowledged. He did know, now. 

He wanted to ask why. Why had his older brother ended his own life? But the reality was, this wasn’t really his older brother standing here, and any answer this version of Danny could have given him would have to come from Luke’s own mind. And while Luke wanted to pretend that he didn’t know, the truth of the matter was that he suspected a number of things had played a factor in his brother’s decision to end his own life, and he would never truly know which reason was the real reason. Maybe they all were. 

Was it because their parents had put too much pressure on him, the same as they had done to Luke – to all of their children, really, except for Sam, who had been born six years after Danny’s death. Sam had been born and was instantly the golden child who could do no wrong, and even after Luke’s disavowal from the Order he had remained mercifully untouched by their parents’ abuse. Danny had been the Heir, the Kandarian who would go on to join the Knighthood and continue bringing glory and honour to the family name. He would marry well, and he and his wife would produce strong Incarnate children who would also carry on their legacy. 

Only Luke suspected that his older brother had been gay and trying to hide it, knowing full well that it wasn’t accepted within the more conservative members of the Order – including their parents. That knowledge had prompted Luke to hide his own interest in boys later on – that, and a persistent fear that Sleswick had made him be that way – and focus instead on his equal interest in girls. He had been able to hide that he was bisexual, but he didn’t think Danny had been able to successfully hide his homosexuality. Luke remembered the camp their parents had sent his brother to as a teenager, the camp he’d hated that had seemed nothing at all like the summer camp Luke had gone to with Ben and Adam. He would never be able to prove it, but he suspected that ‘camp’ had actually been a gay ‘conversion therapy’ camp, and that their parents had known about Danny and had tried to change him. 

Danny had come home from camp and a week later he’d been found hanging in his bedroom. He’d strangled himself with his belt, had tied himself up from the rafters. He hadn’t died right away, but had lingered on in the hospital for three days before his parents had agreed to let the doctors pull the plug and harvest his organs. Luke had never been able to step foot inside Danny’s bedroom again. 

At the time Luke had been so hurt and angry and confused. He had wanted to believe their parents had had something to do with it – and perhaps, in a way, they had, at least by contributing to the psychological factors that had led to Danny’s suicide. Luke had been working up the nerve to tell his older brother about Martin Sleswick, secure in the knowledge that even though everyone else might have thought Luke was just making it all up, Danny would have believed him. Danny would have known how to make the abuse stop. Danny wouldn’t have blamed Luke for it, said that he asked for it, said that he knew Luke had wanted it and had enjoyed himself. (All the things Sleswick had told Luke, when Luke had asked – begged – for him to stop and to leave him alone. It was Luke’s fault for leading him on. Luke’s mouth might have been saying no, but it had been obvious his body had wanted it. Look at the mess you’ve made of yourself, of me. We don’t want anyone to find out about this, do we? To know what a disgusting slut you are?) 

“He was an asshole, you know that, right?” Danny’s voice caught Luke by surprise, and he sucked in a sharp breath, looking at his brother in shock. “None of what he did to you was your fault.” 

“How did you …? How …?” 

“This is a dream, dummy, remember?” Danny grinned at him, but there was kindness and sympathy in his eyes. Luke realized, in that moment, that he and Danny had the same eyes. Was that a trick of memory, that he was simply seeing himself in his older brother, or had they always looked so similar to one another? “I know what you know, dude.” 

“Then you know I don’t really believe that,” Luke replied, stung. 

Danny let out an indignant snort. “I just said it, didn’t I? So that must mean at least a little part of you believes what I said.” 

Luke supposed that made a kind of sense, even if most of the rest of him still privately believed what Sleswick had told him decades ago had been true. He knew, intellectually, that Martin Sleswick had been grooming him almost from the moment he had arrived on the scene, and that his parents’ abuse and frequent absences made him a perfect target for a predator like him. Luke had been isolated and lonely and scared, and he’d been raised to shoulder more than his fair share of the responsibility – so why not the burden of initiating a sexual relationship with a man thirty years his senior? If he could be responsible for killing monsters and protecting humanity, then why not also be responsible for seducing an older man (even though at nine, when the abuse had begun, he’d had only the most fleeting notion of what sex even was, and no idea at all about the concept of seduction – or sexual grooming. He’d just been grateful that this kind, friendly man who everyone else respected and admired was paying attention to boring little him). 

If there was a part of him that knew not to blame himself for Sleswick’s abuse, then that part surely came in the form of Charlie and Kate. He’d gone through a period in his teens when he’d slept with every girl and woman that expressed interest in him in an effort to prove to himself that he wasn’t gay and that what he’d done with Sleswick hadn’t damaged him. Then, when he’d gone to university in Toronto – far away from his parents, his family’s fucking legacy, and a small town where everyone knew everyone – he’d gone all-out to demonstrate to himself that he could enjoy sex in spite of everything, in all its forms. Exposed to anonymous hookup culture for the first time and far away from anyone who could judge him, Luke had spent almost his entire four years of university drinking and sleeping his way through life. If someone so much as batted their eyes at him or offered to buy him a drink he’d go home with them – hell, some nights he’d just disappeared into the nearest washroom or out into the back alley, only to pop out again later in search of his next fix. Partying and sleeping around hadn’t made him feel much better about himself, his sexuality or his past, but it was the first real time he had ever rebelled against his parents and his upbringing, and while he’d thought he was sticking it to his mother and father what he was really doing was trying to destroy himself. Then he’d run into a mouthy redheaded bartender who didn’t care what his last name and who didn’t put up with any of his shit, but who liked him for who he was, not what he could do for her or to her or for the connections he had. (The fact that Kate was half-demon only served to entice him further, and in the beginning being with her had been a way of thumbing his nose at his parents.) And Kate didn’t really give a crap if he got his business degree or went on to become a famous politician, but she did care that he was throwing his life away, and so with her support he had just … stopped. Stopped fucking around, stopped partying, stopped drinking, stopped trying to self-destruct. He had graduated – by the skin of his teeth, but it still counted – and, stupid degree he’d never wanted in hand, followed Kate around Toronto like the lost puppy he’d been. She’d quit her job bartending because he’d made the decision to stop drinking and she didn’t want to risk his sobriety, they’d both found work, they’d found a place together, and for the first time in twenty years Luke was his own person. 

Then the Scions of Unforgiven had found him, the Knights of Oberon had kicked him out, and he’d joined the Alliance. And the hot Asian guy who’d always just been Kate’s best friend saved his arm for him and things had … sort of fallen into place. Kate had been the first step towards reclaiming himself, but Charlie – who’d grown up with an abundance of love and support, and who seemed determined to spread that wholesomeness around – had been the one to really spur Luke’s recovery and self-acceptance on. Kate had always had only a very marginal interest at best in sex, but Charlie had been raised in a very sex- and body-positive manner, and it had been eye-opening to see his approach to life and love. There was no slut-shaming in Charlie’s world, no kink-shaming, no doubts about his sexuality or whether or not it was right or wrong. Kate had taught Luke that sex didn’t have to be the big deal he thought it was; Charlie had made him appreciate that it was like any other pleasurable thing, something that could be enjoyed in a healthy manner, rather than an all or nothing deal. Kate had been like the first drops of rain after a lengthy drought; Charlie was like sunshine after a long and dreary winter. Both very vital and necessary to Luke’s growth, but in very different ways. 

“They’ve been good for you,” Danny commented, spurring Luke out of his thoughts. Well, maybe not exactly out of his thoughts, since Danny was just a figment of his imagination too, but still. 

“Yeah,” Luke agreed, turning back out to the water. The sun seemed to be coming up on the horizon – which made no sense, because his craggy refuge had been at the north end of the island, not the east – and he could see that faint … something … that was off in the distance more clearly. There was a beeping sound that didn’t belong out on the rocky shoreline of a small island, and the gentle murmur of familiar voices. 

He glanced back at Danny, who was standing by the water, his hands shoved in his pockets. The longer he looked at his brother the younger he seemed, and it brought to mind just how young Danny had been when he’d died. Sixteen. He’d had his whole life before him and yet he’d chosen to end it. Luke had gone there himself, more than a few times; he’d come really, really close, and even without necessarily meaning to there had been moments while out on patrol or in the midst of a skirmish where he’d thought about how easy it would be to just not fight. It wouldn’t even really be suicide, then, if he’d just let the monsters kill him. He could stop, and his family could rest easy in the knowledge that he’d gone out like a Knight of Oberon, falling in battle to an enemy. 

And then he’d snapped out of it, and fought harder, because he remembered what it had felt like to lose Danny, and he wasn’t doing that to anyone else – not even himself. 

“You don’t think it’s weird?” he asked, after a moment. “Me and Charlie and Kate?” 

“No, man.” Danny shrugged, grinning broadly. It made him look even younger, and Luke realized that had more to do with the fact that he primarily remembered Danny smiling like that when he had been younger. Danny, in the last few years of his life, hadn’t had much cause to smile. “I’m inside your head. You don’t think it’s weird, so I don’t think it’s weird.” 

“Huh. Makes sense, I guess.” Most people who found out he was in a polyamorous triad with Charlie and Kate wanted to know the details of how it worked. Don’t you get jealous? How do you make it work? Do they take turns? Most other people just wanted to make sure he knew they were doing it wrong, that it was supposed to be one man and one woman – or, grudgingly, two men together, but absolutely not three people, that was just wrong. There had only been a few people in his life – almost all of them other members of the Alliance – who simply took his relationship with Kate and Charlie as normal and none of their business. There had been some growing pains in the early stages of their relationship, just as there would have been with any relationship, but for the three of them it just worked. 

Danny snorted again, laughing quietly to himself. He faced the water, peering intently at the sun breaking across the waves. The skies were clearing and the water was growing calmer, even though that stretch of the lake was never calm. 

“You should go back,” Danny said, speaking out to the water. “They’re waiting for you to wake up.” 

“Yeah, I know.” Luke shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a woman’s voice, and thought it sounded like Ardyn, low and calm and reassuring. He looked at his brother again. “I kinda wanna stay here with you, though. I miss you, Danny.” 

“Yeah, I know,” Danny echoed him. “But Luke, dude … You know I’m not real. They are. And they’re waiting for you.” 

Luke opened his mouth to reply, to say something about how it had been twenty years and he still thought about his brother every day, but when he turned to face Danny his brother was gone. The air was still and the sun was out in full force, glistening over the waters he’d known since he was a little child, the lake he’d grown up on. His body ached and his heart was sore, but the incredible exhaustion that had seeped into him seemed to be dissipating. The noises around him were shifting, changing from waves lapping up against the rocks and wind blowing through the leaves to the beeping of medical equipment and the whispering of voices around him. 

Luke gazed out at the water one last time, then opened his eyes.

[wandabherrera]

Love Me, Want Me, Need Me!

The title should establish the pace for what we're going to talk about, so here we proceed to how about we have a good time!

Narcissism Is it just me, or has our general public become progressively, narcissistic? Up until the previous few years, I truly hadn't heard this word utilized previously. In any case, to get the ball rolling, a portion of its implications are expressed beneath from the online source, Wikipedia:

Narcissism is a term with a wide scope of implications, contingent upon whether it is utilized to depict a focal idea of psychoanalytic hypothesis, a psychological instability, a social or social issue, or basically a character characteristic. Besides in the feeling of essential narcissism or solid confidence, "narcissism" as a rule is utilized to portray some sort of issue in an individual or gathering's associations with self as well as other people. In ordinary discourse, "narcissism" frequently implies swelled affectedness, pretention, vanity, arrogance, or basic self-centeredness. Applied to a gathering of people, it is now and then used to mean elitism or an apathy to the situation of others. In brain research, the term is utilized to portray both typical self esteem and undesirable self-assimilation because of an unsettling influence in the self-appreciation.

Well, OK, that essentially summarizes everything isn't that right? That is to say, take a gander at those terms above, do you realize individuals like this? All things considered, shockingly they appear to spring up wherever you look. Nonetheless, to be reasonable here, we as a whole have a tad of narcissism in each one of us, isn't that right? That is to say, sure, most have shivered at the prospect of having our image in the paper, on the TV, put over the cinema, or our names on paper so anyone might see for themselves. It's simply common to see the value in it when somebody gives us a pat on the back, discloses to us that whatever we're doing is having an effect in the existences of others. Or on the other hand possibly we're only OK with ourselves, knowing who we really are. Indeed, it's just human instinct when something, or somebody causes us to feel much improved. In any case, when self-advancement, pomposity, and love-of-self rule somebody's character, all things considered, there lies the issue.

At the point when somebody is narcissistic, there attributes are so effectively distinguished they should drape a sign on their backs in intense, red letters saying, "Love me, need me, need me!" They stroll with a specific disposition and strut, realizing beyond any doubt that the world ought to consistently be spinning around them. Having said this, permit me to give you a portion of my perceptions from 49 years of living:

Narcissistic individuals not just profoundly love themselves, they consistently need others to feel something tolerating, tolerating nothing less. They should have that feeling or they will in general get exceptionally disturbed like little voices running inside a kindergarten jungle gym - would you be able to say, "Spoiled Hollywood Celebrity, Corrupt Politician, Greedy Corporate CEO, Cocky Sports Figure, or Fame-Obsessed Housewives of Wherever?" They urgently need your endorsement and are nauseated when they don't get it. They should feel like they're focused at the center of attention, reluctant to acknowledge even the smallest flaw or analysis from others. They love the mirror, the camera, their appearance, and their accomplishments regardless of how huge or little. Some are bizarrely noisy and ruling in discussions (both one-on-one and particularly among gatherings). Their conclusions are God-like and gospel, and not open for translation. Heaps of them are bigots, and possibly provide for others less-lucky if there's something in it for them (picture in the paper, and so on) On the off chance that somebody they know gets any sort of awards, consideration, karma, or favorable luck they either twist in a fetal ball or rapidly center their inclinations back around themselves. They essentially can't deal with sitting quiet while others succeed, on any level, and they have outrageous trouble working under an immediate control or authority. They should be the manager in light of the fact that nobody can at any point improve. Some even go as far as lying, and disparaging others trying to take their prosperity and dispirit their character so they seem prevalent. Lawmakers are aces at this, we see it ordinarily all through the wireless transmissions.

In case you're associated with any sort of relationship with a narcissistic individual (marriage, fellowship, business partner, and so on) consider how a plunk down lunch with them would go. Would the discussion be adjusted? At the end of the day, would both of you express thoughts, and remarks about one another, 50/50? Or then again would the words being verbally expressed be 99% about them? The most straightforward approach to advise is to utilize a slack in the discussion to say something, anything, about you or others in your life. Would they draw in, or circle the words toward them once more? Would they rapidly get disturbed, in any event, turning to censuring you to shoot the vibe great adrenaline back somewhere inside their veins? Is it true that they were on their PDAs messaging, in any event, talking, while at the same time looking at their watches in light of the fact that their time is significantly more significant and important than yours, at any rate, in their eyes? Is it safe to say that you were the one looking out for them for lunch, knowing through history that they were in every case late? In any event, during everyday connection, do they invest the energy to really converse with you on the telephone, or is correspondence rigorously restricted to text's and messages? Do they have outrage issues when being addressed, or requested to accomplish something they feel is underneath them? Is it true that they are fixated on looking better (heaps of plastic medical procedure, and so on), advancing their self-conceded excellence at whatever point given the opportunity? Do they persistently experience difficulty associating with others on an individual level, continually putting the fault and deficiency on the contrary party when things go off to some far away place? Is it accurate to say that they are hyper-serious, plunging towards sorrow when they lose at anything? Do they loathe dismissal of any shape, example, or structure? It is safe to say that they are difficult to if it's not too much trouble, regardless of how enthusiastically you attempt?

Getting the image here?

Narcissistic characters are executing our general public's essentials. We see it all the time on TV, the web, and in the work environment with voices yelling back attempting to cause us to feel unimportant and minor. So why have their numbers filled as of late, and where does this sort of conduct come from? Many trust it begins during youth, and the believing is (from perusing loads of brain science) that parental childhood has a huge impact. In the event that a youngster is spoiled, given all that he/she at any point requests, is rarely told "no," is overprotected, shielded, or even mishandled it can prompt a befuddled condition, subsequently, narcissism as a rule follows. A lot of this isn't simply the people shortcoming, yet how they act during adulthood is the manner in which they decide to carry on, once in a while not willing to abandon their juvenile instabilities.

I've had the favorable luck of meeting some effective individuals who positively had resumes which could uphold being a narcissist. Nonetheless, humbleness was their overwhelming characteristic. Regardless of their popularity or fortune, they generally conveyed on a level battleground with myself, as well as other people. They didn't require the recognition, or slap-on-the-back appreciation to traverse the day. Maybe, they let their work and accomplishments communicate everything, making liking them undeniably more simple and willing.

As expressed above, I think at some time, we've all been somewhat liable of being narcissistic in some capacity. In any case, deciding to be modest and unassuming is by a long shot, substantially more alluring.

[birthdaystranger]

Birthday Stranger #9 (2020)

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”

                                               — Pi Patel in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

First, thank you A.M. for taking time out of your life to meet with a complete stranger. Our conversation enriched my life. I wish you all the best.

There are three types of fencing: foil, épée & sabre - each a little different. A.M. had an early interest in fencing & got into it later in life. As I listened to her talk about fencing, it became obvious to me why sabre is her preferred discipline.

Though fencing may seem to have little in common with her current job in Human Resources, there’s a thread that runs through both & stitches her life together in a brilliant way. This thread consists of being proactive & utilizing all available resources.

A.M. spent her childhood outside of Peoria, Illinois with her parents & two younger sisters. She mentioned having varying degrees of relationships with them. As we talked about her childhood she mentioned how her family changed over the years after her parents’ divorce. A.M. cited her mother’s shift to a more progressive viewpoint as one outcome. From the interest & sincerity A.M. exhibited in our conversation it’s clear that A.M.’s mom raised her daughters to be ambitious mature women. “She's an amazing individual & sacrificed a lot for us,” is how A.M. describes her.

She & I had a wonderful discussion about the changes that growing up entails. A.M. told me that, now that she has moved closer to her mom again, she has received a number of boxes from her filled with personal items & old school projects. A.M. said some of the positions held in a few of those early school projects are completely cringe-worthy. She laughed when I quoted an unknown source; “You know you are growing as a person if you continue to look back & cringe at some of your decisions.” A few of her childhood dreams have remained the same though.

One example of A.M.’s ambition is from around age nine. She recalls an article from an airline magazine about the annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta held in New  Mexico. The countless forms & colors of the balloons stuck with her over the years and is still a life goal of hers to experience. That location is actually marked on a map that she & her husband keep of places they would like to visit together.

Another example of her good upbringing is her mother’s urging her daughters to grow outside of their comfort zone. Each daughter studied abroad to this end. A.M. herself did this in Italy.

Her journey came with an unexpected turn. This is where her proactive nature ripened.

A.M. traveled to Italy & stayed with a host family for her study abroad program at the age of 17. Within the first month she accompanied the family on a trip to their own relatives in Croatia.

She commented that tensions within the host family grew shortly after departure & added: “I didn’t think anything of the arguing.”

These arguments gave rise to a full-blown family dispute upon return to Italy. The next morning A.M. woke to find herself in a nearly empty house. A family schism had formed overnight & everyone but the grandmother had moved out with their belongings.

Understandably upset, A.M. walked into town to access the internet & contact her mom to tell her what was going on. A.M. highlighted the time difference as her major obstacle. Her family would be sleeping between 3 & 4 AM central time.

She contacted a friend who happened to be up during those wee hours. This friend in turn phoned A.M.’s mother who finally connected with her daughter.

She managed to turn an unsettling situation into a positive & memorable experience thanks her being proactive & using the resources at hand; she traveled to Hungary to visit extended family then to England to spend some time with a friend of her mother’s before finally returning home. What she called, “not a full year but a good story,” is an understatement. Honestly, if this had happened to me at seventeen I’d probably have freaked the hell out.

“I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.”

                                               — Pi Patel in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Her return to the states was a return to academia. A.M. majored in religious studies.

She said, “I’ve always [been] interested in people’s views on religion.” A.M. attributes these studies as what ‘broke’ her, as she put it, of Christianity. I find it interesting that she occasionally likes attending church to “see the [current] interpretation of what is read, what the pastor thinks is a good sermon & what the [believers] focus on.”

A.M.’s college also put her in contact with her now long-term interest of fencing. It is not an affordable sport, she explained. Though she could afford to join the college fencing club, enrollment had recently closed. Eager to hold a sword & ready to undertake any measure to make it happen she followed the coach’s advice of attending a weekend clinic held by the club. A.M. not only attended the entire two-day clinic but outlasted every other beginner. She made it in the club that day.

Though she combats irregularly, A.M. has coached & refereed sabre fencing for a handful of years. Her favorite age group to work with is 8 to 12 year olds. She says this is because they “understand what you want them to do & generally want to do what you tell them to do.” Her work in the sport reaches beyond overseeing individual fencers & bouts, however; as A.M. put it, “I see a need & just want to fill that need.”

Unhappy with increasing harassment in the sport, A.M. performed studies on sexual harassment & assault in fencing & has published her findings online.

A.M. did not consider marriage for most of her life. She said she had little interest in the type of relationship that eventually divided her parents. Consequently she lived a mostly autonomous life attending schools in different states. One longstanding male friend of hers, though, made a point to visit her in many of these places. This deepening friendship lead A.M. to ask herself if marriage was on the table.

Before that question could be answered their relationship had one more hurdle; while her partner lived in St. Louis, A.M. had just been accepted to grad school in New York. A.M. & her boyfriend managed not only to make the long distance thing work for two & a half years but also planned their life.

After earning her degree she moved to St. Louis. It was A.M.’s belief that moving in with her fiancée who already had a job & a house “made more sense.” This practical outlook is another example of her proactive nature.

Her grad school studies lead to her current position in human resources. A.M. credits a few “happy accidents” to the exact position she had at the time we met. She since has been promoted with expanded responsibilities. (Congratulations, A.M.!) She also may go back to school, citing: “the people who have the jobs I want in my department all have higher education than I do.”

Expanded responsibilities may sound daunting but she noted that she is usually a bearer of good news. I imagine working with the dynamics between an institution & a large number of employees utilizes similar skills as in sabre fencing: being proactive & taking advantage of available resources.

This is the thread I mentioned earlier. A.M. take on fencing also speaks to her approach to life: “What I like about sabre is its very proactive compared to épée & foil. You have to make the decision before the referee says fence...” Not to mention that sabre is different from the other disciplines in that strikes with the edge of the blade count in addition to strikes with the tip... that is, there is more to utilize during a bout.

This is a clear parallel to the way A.M. lives her life. Here’s another example: A.M. began crocheting recently to deal with increasing acute physical restlessness. She initially learned it from her mom’s mom, “Oma”. She found that keeping her hands busy helps her relax & allows her sit still for longer periods of time. Repetitive motion is quite meditative not to mention productive in this case - she’s got more sweaters & scarves now.

We also talked favorite movies. A.M. enthusiastically identified Life of Pi as hers. (Hence the quotes that fit in nicely with her life story.) Her religious studies introduced her to this movie - one she described as having “captured the essence of the book perfectly.” Elaborating she said, “I loved how it [is] blend of religions. The thing that [is] important to me [is that] it's not about whether or not the guy is right or wrong, [it’s] all about the faith of [the viewer] to determine whether or not they have faith in what he's saying - which is just a play on religion overall.” I found deep appreciation of that sentiment.

Never has it been so clear to me that a person’s favorite movie echoes their own way of living. {NO SPOILERS} In the movie Pi is nothing less than fully proactive facing uncertainty. He uses everything at hand as well; there is not one item he takes for granted floating aimlessly in the ocean.

A.M. has these qualities. Without giving anything away, I want to point out that Pi’s narration of the calamity he endures proved a foundation for his own faith in humanity as well as the viewer’s. I can’t help but feel those who know A.M. likewise benefit from her friendship. This is especially true during the outbreak we are all facing right now {note: this write-up was done mid-March 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic).

The pandemic highlights exactly how the actions of one person can ripple across the planet. As powerless as we feel I see so many people taking innovative & fresh action to make it better. We all have something to offer. The sooner we see that the better. We don’t all have to drown during this difficult time.

A mouthful of water will not harm you, but panic will.                                          — Mamaji to Pi in Life of Pi by Yann Martel

And to A.M., I will alter a quote from the movie to fit my feelings about your sharing your life with me: “How bitterly glad I am to have met you. You brought joy & pain in equal measure. Joy because you shared yourself with me, but pain because it wasn't for long.”

[egregiousderp]

@oraftel Hngh. Okay. See. I have...a lot of...very mixed things to say about Dune. Do I enjoy it as a book? Sure. Even if the first time I tried to read it I was twelve and I got thoroughly bored within the first hundred pages. I didn’t pick it up again until I was twenty-two and sweating and doing missions work in an I air conditioned house on the east coast, surrounded by conservative, Christian white people, at which point I finally had enough social grasp to get the politics and the scope of the thing, and in some cases, see ironies completely related to my own experiences at the time. Does it have a very interesting concept? Sure. Is the sixties-era ecology kind of fascinating? I think so. Is it...basically a white-savior story set in space and dealing with the idea of foresight? Also...yes. Is it kind of shitty to its lady-characters? (Meaning it’s debatable whether the main character is the lady Jessica, or her son, Paul Atreides, and her entire position as a concubine because POLITICS and RELIGION and shit?) Also...yes. Does it have exactly one gay character who is portrayed as extremely morally corrupt, devious, ravenous, and...implied pederastic with off-screen non-con stuff? Yep. (Although it should be noted he is a very intelligent character, of a Villain, which is more forward thinking than many of the depictions of gay people in the sixties and his preferences are just one aspect of the Baron’s overarching theme of Rapacious greed and Hunger extending to all things. His pursuit of those hungers not directly related to politics are usually relegated to offscreen but it’s very very apparent he thinks Paul is pretty and he’d like to...well. Have him.) Is there enough weird bullfighting motif to make Papa Hemingway do a doubletake? Er. Yes. Or...maybe just me. I squinted a little. Is it hard to talk about GIANT WORMS without laughing? Well. Yes. If you’re me, anyway. Are the sequels REALLY WEIRD? (as in “get possessed by the spirit of your dead grandfather/become a homeless prophet/turn into a giant alien worm?”) Shit yes. So weird. Do I find the idea of willingly manipulating and coercing a suffering people using their religion against them really pretty skeezy as a concept? Double shit yes. Should you avoid all the nonsense written by the dude’s son and Kevin J. Anderson? Also Fuck yes. Which was especially upsetting to me because I’d started out reading Anderson’s Star Wars stuff and had high expectations. (And that said, Sand People in Star Wars are bad ripoffs of the Fremen in a lot of ways.) It is...still a considerable epic. And I can’t say content-wise it’s necessarily worse than many of the mythologies or epics it tries to emulate. Or by any means the worst thing I’ve ever read because it’s considered a classic. That and...despite people’s attempts to turn it into a movie or miniseries, I don’t think the style of language or the political maneuvering in the background lends itself to a visual medium very well. It’s a type of thing that works as a book and only a book, I think? The internal thought processes of the characters are extremely important, I mean. And for some reason Sting is in the movie. The old one, I mean. Don’t get me wrong. Sting is good at being...well...Sting. But a curly-haired, Bell-bottomed matador being groomed to be accepted as the savior of a people or a sort of Ur-Protagonist, Sting, in my opinion, is profoundly NOT. I saw the movie very young as well, mind you, but the movie takes great pains to make House Harkonnen very very evil. (Like. Rip out a dude’s still-beating heart level over the top eighties evil) Whereas House Harkonnen is indeed quite evil and bloodthirsty, but committed to the end of creating a false-messiah figure for an oppressed people just as House Atreides is. And I always found that parallel and the ways both houses Lie and Manipulate a people looking to survive and put their hope in something a good deal more chilling. No one comes out looking like a perfect hero when it comes to Dune. Not to mention the idea of the Fremen in general : the concept of an entire system of life. Space travel. Religion. Precognizance. All dependent on the suffering of a people? I don’t find that a thing any less relevant in the current age than it was in the Sixties. So... It’s not BAD. Good and bad points, I mean? Without getting into the exact twists and turns or spoilers for how the book works, I mean. Some of those items are probably more dealbreakers for other people than they are for me. But that’s honestly partially my background. (Ie: My former major in literature didn’t really afford me the luxury of not reading things assigned to me just because they made me uncomfortable, I mean. Focusing on some other detail within the work, or refusing the visualize or linger was something I learned from that because I had to be able to speak and speak rationally about what I’d read. There are parts of Dune even now that I catch myself doing that with, which is...sometimes a tip-off and sometimes not.) The politics in the book are great. And the intrigue is fun to read about—especially when t comes to the idea of precognition and destiny. And it has a built up world that...like with Tolkien, or Martin, you can get lost in if it resonates properly with you. I tend to read it outside during a nice hot summer day, while staring at my glass of water like a freaking weirdo almost every summer, but that’s me. That said, I don’t want to discount the content in it or leave you without a warning that some of these things resonate...differently for those of us in younger generations than they might for someone of our parent’s generation(s). There are plenty of opportunities for Dune to be too problematic or unsettling for people and this is also fine and a perfectly reasonable thing. Don’t for a second think that because of the era it’s written in it’s a “safe” book, I mean. So please if you take that as a recommendation, take it as a very cautious one? I have many other books I recommend with far fewer hesitations, I mean. This just happened to be what I was rereading and packed for the hurricane and most of my bedside stuff is still from that stack. If you’d hit me with this a week ago, you probably would have gotten a quote from the Martian, I mean. (Which has since been passed on to my mom with a warning to the effect of “it has some language.”)

[somuchbetterthanthat]

If you're still taking prompts, how about, anything with Courfeyrac and Feuilly? I'm sorry, I can't think of anything specific, I'll be happy with anything though and I love your Enjolras and Jehan fic, you have a lovely voice for both of them. :D

Why is it so hard?? I’m starting to guess you’ve got an unnatural power to give me Challenges. I am looking at you very suspiciously. (in other news, realizing that you’ve got no idea how to write two amis together that you write generally well with others is terrible, I feel so GUILTY). Warning for time-period sexism :/. Also, this turned more into lots of De Courfeyrac’s drama family life……sorry. 

“I’m sorry,” said Courfeyrac, sitting down next to Feuilly on the porch.

Feuilly didn’t look at him, not because he was angry, not really, but because he was unsettled still, and perhaps a bit embarrassed by his earlier reaction. There was no reason for embarrassment - he knew he’d done the right thing, although perhaps he’d been a bit too emotional about it, and yet it sat uneasily in his stomach anyway. He played with his hat, silent, and glanced at Courfeyrac’s leg, who seemed to move on its own, frenetic.

“I’m sorry,” repeated Courfeyrac. “I don’t know what I expected; perhaps it’d been too long since I went home. They were gentler in my mind.” he licked his lips, and then immediately amended: “Well, more polite at least.”“You’ve got nothing to apologize for,” said Feuilly slowly.

“Well my sisters aren’t going to,” said Courfeyrac, sounding profoundly unhappy. “Idiots, the both of them. They have no idea what they’re talking about. I wish you’d met Angélique instead; but it’s much harder to hide in convent when you’re not of the fairer sex.”

“Louise is nice,” said Feuilly.

Louise laughed like her brother; warmly, and never meanly. She had the same light as Courfeyrac in her round, youthful brown eyes, a spark of passion and intuition that, hopefully, would only grow as she got older. Her cheerful and excited reaction to meeting Feuilly had been at odds with the rest of the family’s attitudes.  

“Louise has no chance, unless I take her with me in Paris, maybe, when she’s old enough,” said Courfeyrac categorically. He’d crossed his arms on his chest now, his cheeks flushed under the dying light of the sun. “Look who suggests to make her education! Joséphine never wanted anything more than a husband, and Eugénie is not much better, dreaming only of the latest fashions. It’s my parents’s fault, of course, but if Angélique and I could rise above education, I’m sure they would have been able to, with some common sense.”

Feuilly didn’t answer; if it had been any other time, maybe he would have tried one of Combeferre’s arguments - Combeferre talked very eloquently about women’s interests, and how they were shaped differently by a society who wished to keep them ignorant. It was possible that Combeferre could have defended Eugénie and Joséphine de Courfeyrac’s behaviors, and chastised Courfeyrac for not being kinder to his sisters, who would never have the same opportunities than him, but Combeferre was not here, and Feuilly was not feeling particularly keen on taking his place, especially after both women had been so casually insulting toward him.

“You should have gone with Enjolras,” said Courfeyrac, after a moment. “Or anybody else, really.”

Feuilly hesitated a second, and then he put his hand on Courfeyrac’s knee, pressing his palm down to keep Courfeyrac’s leg from moving.

“I don’t mind being with you,” he told him. “Do you think there are the first women I met with such behaviors? They like to put a barrier between them and me - you know what I think of barriers and walls; one day, we will tear them all down, and they’ll be left with the fact that we are all the same, once money is taken out of the equation.”

This brought a smile on Courfeyrac’s face at last. He leaned against Feuilly’s shoulder, bumping against it gently. 

“They say you don’t get to chose your family,” he said. “Maybe they’re right; but I like the idea that you get to make one of your own anyway. You’re more my sibling that they’re ever going to be. You, and the others - you’re my family.”

Feuilly blinked, quickly, and looked down at his lap.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “You know you’re all my brothers.”

Courfeyrac nodded, and wrapped his own hand over Feuilly’s. 

“Speaking about them, how do you feel about meeting with them sooner than planned? Enjolras is the closest from us.”

Feuilly frowned. “Is it careful? We purposefully decided it was better if we didn’t regroup too fast -”

“I don’t know about careful,” admitted Courfeyrac, “but I know about necessity. You see, after your striking speech, I might have gotten angry.”

“Oh, Courfeyrac -” started Feuilly.

“It’s very possible my sisters would have forgotten about you daring to talk back to them in such manner, of course,” continued Courfeyrac lightly. “But in the heat of the moment, I might have thrown Eugenie’s favorite scarf into the fireplace, and then light fire.”

“Courfeyrac,”

“I also insulted Joséphine’s husband; he asked to settle this in a duel - she did find someone worthy of our family’s habits, I’ll give her that - but I decided that dueling after almost dying in a revolution a few weeks ago was forcing destiny a bit too much.”

Feuilly hided his face in his free hand.

“You shouldn’t have - for me, it’s ridiculous, Courfeyrac –” he tried to mutter.

“I will defend your honor every time,” said Courfeyrac, half teasing, half serious. “Not that you need me too; i looked probably too childish after your excellent exit, but that’s the de Courfeyrac’s language, what can I say. It seems clear to me my sisters are going to report this to my parents - it’s been the same schema since I was five year old - and Monsieur and Madame de Courfeyrac likes to pretend they have some authority on me; they’ll send me away in punishment, to think about my actions. I’m afraid this means you as well.”

Feuilly breathed out slowly. He didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry. 

“We must see the positive side of it,” said Courfeyrac, just a tad too cheerful now. “We don’t even have to pack our bags, since we came with nothing much in the first place.”

Feuilly’s lips twitched.

“You called a fiacre already, haven’t you?” he asked.

“It should arrive in two hours or so,” said Courfeyrac.

Feuilly gave in; he started laughing at last.  

[therevivalfund]

A History of What I Survived, Or: On Why I Need the Revival Fund

It would, quite literally, prevent premature death.

I got out of a bad living situation with a relative; unexpected and chronic illness threw a massive wrench in my plans to get back on my feet, and I ended up going back to that bad situation to try to re-regroup. I assumed that things could be stabilized. It also seemed like the lesser of two profoundly misfortunate roads at the time, and time constraints required me to pick very freaking fast.

I officially got out of there on 05/22: though I was supposed to leave earlier, my relative tried to keep me physically stranded once they saw me face the risk of homelessness unfazed. At first, they had demanded that I leave, and procured the help of another relative to ensure that I could. On the day of my intended departure, however, they both did an about-face and went to incredible lengths to ensure that I stayed. Then, once they realized that this kind of emotional terrorism wasn’t going to get what they originally wanted out of me - accepting the abusive behavior, and silence about what they had done being two of them - that relative demanded that I leave again, with full awareness of the implications. So...despite the unsurprising attempt to pull me back, I did leave. I am gone. Though I absolutely need to ensure that I have a permanent home, as this turn of events messed with the money I had set aside for that.

Overall, this experience took an extreme toll - to the point where I couldn't work, nor secure a job before things got COVID-level wild. Moving my things without help ate a chunk of my cash. With your help, I can secure stable housing and move on to what I'm actually supposed to be doing with my life, without someone literally attempting to terrorize me into permanent disability. Or worse.

Anyway, the very lengthy Q&A:

How bad was this situation, and why were you in it?

I fell ill, and was originally invited there to convalesce. I had no true idea of what I was walking into. And the situation became pretty damn bad. Waking-up-to-find-my-relative’s-adult-child-watching-me-sleep bad.

I am taking a risk by sharing this: this relative is chronically paranoid and unfortunately has the resources to feed that paranoia on a whim. They have admitted to me, and demonstrated, exactly how far they're willing to take things when they're suspicious of someone, or want to retaliate, "fix" or "correct" them. 

To wit: back when they thought I supported their actions, they confessed to various things like having a PI follow someone they were suspicious of, using background checks to get dirt on others, stalking people who ignore them or cut them off instead of the other way around, etc. This person is wealthy enough to go on power-trips and play those kinds of games - think "can afford to offer $200k as a loan without sweating” wealthy, which they actually did with someone they're trying to pull back into their house and into a relationship. This person puts relatives on payroll, at least ones who appear to need their money, then cuts them off without warning when they feel that person’s no longer emotionally useful.

The only reason that I wasn’t caught in that financial trap is because I gave no clear indication of how much money I made while I was working, including as a diviner. Given that unknown money ensured that I wasn’t totally reliant on this relative, which they needed, they then decided to go out of their way to try and terrorize me out of being able to work, and specifically out of being able to divine for others. For my own health as well as the spiritual safety of my clients? I did, then prolonged the break after the first near-death experience. I am still not divining at this time. I am still taking time to detox.

In addition to the above, this is what I experienced/witnessed from my own perspective, which is clarified now that I’m no longer on the property and regularly triggered:

Physical assault, and I was NOT in a position to call the cops when I witnessed it

Verbal and emotional abuse not limited to harassment, not just of myself but of others

Homophobia, transphobia in particular to a hair-raising degree

Consistent and very aggressive anti-Blackness, specifically against Black Americans (why this is extra relevant: both of my parents are Black, but only one is Black American. The ways this filtered into how they treated me once I couldn't leave are worth an article)

Repeatedly harassing and goading a young person from suicidal ideation into attempt, very explicitly telling them to go kill themselves more than once, on the grounds that they are a member of a specific minority group - something they proudly admitted to me way back when they thought I also was against said minority group (I...most certainly am not)

Gaslighting

The use of surveillance cameras even when no AirBNB guests were present (this person used to host)

Spiritual abuse

These are only a few. This list is not even close to complete.

What stopped you from just leaving? Why didn't you fight back?

My go-to response was to try to fix my income, then use that to spring me out of here. But the physical consequences of my being here began to stack to the point that for a while I couldn't even work from home, including:

Chronic insomnia, in part due to my sleep being purposefully disturbed directly and at random - for months

Physical tremors and twitches

Muscle weakness

Debilitating migraines

Exacerbated inability to focus

I was later hospitalized for what was originally thought to be a stroke, though it wasn't: the results indicated neither stroke nor degenerative condition that would've created this. And given the degree of my relative's consistent exposure to COVID-19 yet total dismissal of how life-threatening it can be, I cancelled my follow-up appointments just to play it safe. I have not yet been tested, though I have stayed indoors as much as possible. This person was also hospitalized, though specifically for COVID symptoms, yet has given different answers to different people about their diagnosis. I truly don't know. This makes my finding a place to live even more serious.

But Nine, aren't you spiritual? Wasn't there spiritual work you could've done to just settle this once and for all?

The way things were crossed up, and for so long, no - not without serious harm to innocent people, which I couldn’t risk. At bare minimum, I will say the following:

The efforts to stop me from doing anything to protect or support myself have been extremely real and yes...I had formal divination confirming the matter. That divination revealed, and helped me avoid, imminent death. Those of you who know me know of the first experience in February. My own mistakes and poor choices weakened the protections that would have deflected the nastier elements of this experience. I live now to talk about it.

For most people, spiritual power is not dependent on quality of character. You can have a miracle-working gift and be so foul, your curses have curses. Subsequently, my relative has prayed people into death, more into illness. Two dead that I know of. Were it not for my spirits, I would be their third. In one of their religious rages they got so moved by...something...that they sought me out, struck me, then later came to crow to my face about how doing so (effectively) stripped me of the protections they deem evil.

There are, apparently, whole ministries of people who are hellbent on destroying "witches," "cultists," and "demon-worshippers." I've been accused of drinking blood, okay? It's wild out here. And idk who's answering their prayers, but apparently some of them do stuff and it works. I've had my spirituality treated like demon worship, and my gifts like gifts from Satan. And attacked accordingly.

Unhealed, unsettled, anti-Black ancestors will absolutely protect their favorite descendants, especially against a Black relative determined to correct the iniquities and lift the enslavement and servitude trauma specifically

Having said that, apparently anti-Blackness is absolutely stellar up until you need a Black church or ministry to deal with a Black "witch" who hadn't even so much as buried you, frozen you, or dropped you into a pot

Bonus round, and a word of caution for all the healers, spirit workers and/or witches out there:

Clinical narcissists are challenging to address or even help heal spiritually even without the above considerations, due to the sheer strength of their self-belief. I tried to approach this relative directly on a healing level first, as I considered appropriate to attempt before anything else. It did not work.

I feel like this says more than enough for those in the know.

[deliciouscollectorsandwich-stuff]

"You have but two final destinies: Heaven and hell. Know that satan will try to remove the reality of the existence of his kingdom, hell, from you. He will deceive you so that you will sin and remove yourselves from the Spirit of light. And when you remove yourselves from the Spirit of light, you remove yourselves from eternal life in the Kingdom of your Father, the most high God in Heaven.  - Our Lady of the Roses The following explanation, of life in hell was found among the papers left by a nun who died in a convent in Germany. In my youth, I had a friend, Anne, who lived near my house. That is to say, we were mutually attached as companions and co-workers in the same office. After Anne married, I never saw her again. We never had what can be called a real friendship, but rather an amiable relationship. For this reason, when she married well and moved to a better neighborhood far from my home, I didn’t really miss her that much. In mid-September of 1937 I was vacationing at Lake Garda when my mother wrote me this bit of gossip: “Imagine, Anne N. died. She lost her life in an automobile accident. She was buried yesterday in M. cemetery.” I was shocked by the news. I knew that Anne had never been very religious. Was she prepared when God called her suddenly from this life? The next morning I assisted at Mass in the chapel of the convent boarding house where I was rooming. I prayed fervently for the eternal rest of her soul and offered my Holy Communion for that intention. Throughout the day I was unsettled, and that night I slept fitfully. Once, I awoke suddenly, hearing something that sounded like my door being opened. Startled, I turned on the light, noting that the time on the clock on my nightstand showed ten minutes after midnight. The house was quiet and I saw nothing unusual. The only sound was from the waves of Lake Garda breaking monotonously on the garden wall. There was no wind. Nonetheless, I thought I heard something else after the rattling of the door, a swooshing sound like something being dropped. It reminded me of when my former office manager was in a bad mood and dropped some problem papers on my desk for me to resolve. Should I get up and look around? I wondered. But since all remained quiet, it didn’t seem worthwhile. It was probably just my imagination, somewhat overwrought by the news of the death of my friend. I rolled over, prayed several Our Fathers for the Poor Souls in Purgatory, and returned to sleep. I then dreamed that I arose at six to go to morning Mass in the house chapel. Upon opening the door of my room, I stepped on a parcel containing the pages of a letter. I picked it up and recognized Anne’s handwriting. I cried out in fright. My fingers trembled, and my mind was so shaken I couldn’t even think to say an Our Father. I felt like I was suffocating, and needed open air to breathe. I hastily finished arranging myself, put the letter in my purse, and rushed from the house. Once outside, I followed a winding path up through the hills, past the olive and laurel trees and the neighboring farms, and then on beyond the famous Gardesana highway. The day was breaking with the brilliant light of the morning sun. On other days, I would stop every hundred steps or so to marvel at the magnificent view of the lake and beautiful Garda Island. The sparkling blue tones of the water delighted me, and like a child gazing with awe at her grandfather, I would gaze with admiration upon the ashen-colored Mount Baldo that rose some 7,200 feet above the opposite shore of the lake. On this morning, however, I was oblivious to everything around me. After walking a quarter of an hour, I sank mechanically to the ground on the riverbank between two cypress trees where only the day before I had been happily reading a novel, Lady Teresa. For the first time I looked at the cypress trees conscious of them as symbols of death, something I had taken no notice of before, since these trees are quite common here in the south. I took the letter from my purse. There was no signature, but it was, beyond any doubt, the handwriting of Anne. There was no mistaking the large, flowing S or the French T she made that used to irritate Mr. G. at the office. It was not, however, written in her usual style of speaking, which was so amiable and charming, like her, with those blue eyes and elegant nose. Only when we discussed religious topics did she become sarcastic and take on the rude tone and agitated cadence of the letter I now began to read. Here, word for word, is the Letter from Beyond of Anne V. as I read it in the dream. Letter from Beyond Claire! Do not pray for me. I am damned. Do not think that I am telling you this and certain circumstances and details about my condemnation as a sign of friendship. Here we no longer love anyone. I do it on the command of “that power that never desires Evil and always does Good.” In truth, I would like to see you here where I will remain forever. (1) (1) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Suppl., Q. 98, art. 4:  "Therefore, they [the damned] will wish all the good were damned." Do not be surprised that I should say this. We all think the same way here. Our will is hardened in evil - in what you call “evil.” Even when we do something “good,” as I do now in opening your eyes about Hell, it is not with any good intention.(2) (2) In response to the Question whether every act of the will in the damned is evil, St. Thomas distinguishes the deliberate will and the natural will: “Their natural will is theirs not of themselves but of the Author of nature, Who gave nature this inclination which we call the natural will. Wherefore since nature remains in them, it follows that the natural will in them can be good. “But their deliberate will is theirs of themselves, inasmuch as it is in their power to be inclined by their affections to this or that. This will is in them always evil: and this because they are completely turned away from the last end of a right will, nor can a will be good except it be directed to that same end. Hence even though they will some good, they do not will it well so that one is not able to call their will good on that account.” Ibid., Q. 98, a. 1. Do you remember when we worked together for four years in M. You were 23 and had already worked in the office for a half year when I arrived. You helped me out many times, and frequently gave me good advice while you were training me. But what is meant by that term “good”? At the time I praised your “charity.” How ridiculous! You helped me to please your own vanity, as I suspected at the time. Here we don’t acknowledge good in anyone! You knew me in my youth, but I will fill in certain details. According to my parents’ plans, I never should have existed. The disgrace of my conception was due to their carelessness. When I was born, my two sisters were already 14 and 15 years of age. How I wish that I had never been born! I wish I could annihilate myself at this moment and escape these torments! There could be no pleasure greater than to be able to end my existence, to do away with myself like a piece of cloth reduced to ashes, leaving no remnant behind.(3) But I must exist. I must be as I have made myself, bearing the total blame for how I have ended. (3) Ibid., Q 98, a. 3, r. ib. Ad. 3:  "Although ‘not to be’ is very evil in so far as it removes being, it is very good in so far as it removes unhappiness, which is the greatest if evils, and thus it is preferred ‘not to be.’" Before my parents married, they had moved away from their country villages to the city and drifted away from the Church, making friends with others who had fallen away from the practice of the faith. They met at a dance, and six months later they were “obliged” to get married. During the wedding ceremony a few drops of holy water fell on them, just enough to draw my mother to Sunday Mass a few times a year. She never taught me to pray correctly. She wore herself out over material concerns, even when our situation was not difficult. It is only with deep repugnance and unspeakable disgust that I write words such as pray, Mass, holy water, and church. I profoundly detest those who go to church, along with everyone and everything in general. For us, everything is a torture. Everything we came to understand at death, every recollection of life and of what we knew, is like a burning flame that torments us. (4) (4) Ibid., Q 98, a. 7, r.: "Accordingly, in the damned there will be actual consideration of the things they knew heretofore as matters of sorrow, but not as a cause of pleasure. For they will consider both the evil they have done, and for which they were damned, and the delightful goods they have lost, and on both counts they will suffer torments." All of these memories only show us the horrible sight of the graces we rejected. How this tortures us now! We do not eat, we do not sleep, we do not walk with human legs as you know. Enchained in spirit, we reprobates stare with terror at our misspent lives, howling and gnashing our teeth, tormented and filled with hatred. Do you hear me? Here we drink hatred as if it were water. We all hate one another. (5) And more than anything else, we hate God. I will try to make you understand how this is. The blessed in Heaven must necessarily love Him, for they constantly behold Him in His awe-inspiring beauty. That makes them indescribably happy. We know this, and that knowledge fills us with fury. (6) (5) Ibid., Q. 98, a. 4, r.:  "Even as in the blessed in heaven there will be most perfect charity, so in the damned there will be the most perfect hate.” (6) Ibid., Q. 98, a. 9, r.:  “The damned, before the judgment day, will see the blessed in glory, in such a way as to know, not what that glory is like, but only that they are in a state of glory that surpasses all thought. This will trouble them, both because they will, through envy, grieve for their happiness, and because they have forfeited that glory." On earth, men know God through Creation and Revelation and are able to love Him, but they are not forced to do so. The believer – I say this seething with fury – who contemplates and meditates upon Christ extended on the Cross will love Him. But when God approaches as Avenger and Judge, the soul who rejected Him will hate Him, as we hate Him. (7) That soul hates Him with all the strength of its perverse will. It hates Him eternally, by virtue of its deliberate resolution to reject God with which it ended its earthly life. This perverse act of the will can never be revoked, nor would we ever want to do so. (7) Ibid., Q. 98, a. 8, sf 1, iba 5, r:  "The damned do not hate God except because He punishes and forbids what is agreeable to their evil will [the evil that they still desire to do]: and consequently they will think of Him only as punishing and forbidding." I am forced to add that even now God is still merciful to us. I say “forced” because even though I willingly write this letter, I cannot lie as I would like to. Much of what I put on this paper I write against my will. I also have to choke down the torrent of insults I would like to spew out against you and everything. God is merciful even to us here in that He did not allow us to do all the evil we wanted to do while on earth. Had He permitted us to do so, we would have added greatly to our guilt and chastisement. He allowed some of us to die early – as is my case – or permitted attenuating circumstances in others. Even now He shows us mercy, for He does not oblige us to draw near to Him. He placed us in this distant place of Hell, thus diminishing our torment.(8) Every step closer to God would increase my suffering more than every step you might take toward a fire. (8) Ibid., Part I, Q. 21, a. 4, ad. 1:  "Even in the damnation of the reprobate mercy is seen, which, though it does not totally remit, it somewhat alleviates, in punishing short of what is deserved." In another note, the holy Doctor of the Church says that this is the case above all with those who in this world were merciful to others (Q. 99, a. 5, ad. 1). You were astonished one day when I told you in passing what my father said to me some days prior to my First Communion. “Be sure you get a beautiful dress, little Anne,” he said. “The rest is all a sham.” I was almost ashamed then for having shocked you so much, but now I laugh about it. The best part of this sham was that Communion was only allowed at 12 years of age. By then, I had already tasted enough of the pleasures of the world, so I didn’t take Communion seriously. The new custom of allowing children to receive Holy Communion at seven years of age infuriates us. We strive in every possible way to frustrate this, to make people believe that a child is too young to properly comprehend what Communion is or to think that children must commit serious sins before they can receive. The “white” host [that is, the Sacred Host] will then be less damaging than if He were received with faith, hope, and love, the fruits of Baptism – I spit upon all this! – which are still alive in a heart of a child. Do you recall that I already had this same point of view on earth? I return now to my father. He fought a lot with my mother. I didn’t often speak of this to you because I was ashamed of it. But what is shame? Something ridiculous! It makes no difference to us here. After a while, my parents no longer slept in the same room. I slept with my mother, and my father slept in the adjoining room, which he would enter at all hours of the night. He drank heavily and spent everything we had. My sisters were employed but needed their money to live, or so they said. So my Mother went to work. In the last year of her bitter life, my father often beat her when she refused to give him money. With me, however, he was always very kind. I told you all about this one day and you were scandalized at my capricious attitude - but what was there about me that didn’t scandalize you? – such as when I returned new pairs of shoes twice in one day because the style of the heel wasn’t modern enough for me. On the night my father died from a stroke, something happened that I never told you because I didn’t want to hear your interpretation. Today, however, you ought to know it. The fact is memorable, for it is the first time that my true cruel spirit revealed itself. I was asleep in my mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping deeply, as I could tell from her regular breathing. Suddenly, I heard someone say my name. An unfamiliar voice murmured, “What would happen if your father were to die?” I no longer loved my father after he had begun to mistreat my mother. Properly speaking, I no longer loved anyone. I only had some attachments to certain persons who were kind to me. Love without a natural motive rarely exists except in souls that live in the state of grace, which I did not. “I’m sure he’s not dying,” I replied to the mysterious interlocutor. After a brief interval, I heard the same question. Without troubling myself as to its source, I sullenly replied, “It doesn’t matter. He’s not dying.” For the third time the question came: “What would happen were your father to die?” In a flash certain scenes passed quickly through my mind: my father coming home drunk, his scolding and fighting with my mother, how he often embarrassed us in front of our neighbors and acquaintances. I cried out obstinately: “All right, then, it’s what he deserves. Let him die!” Afterward, everything became still. The following morning, when my mother went upstairs to straighten father’s room, she found the door locked. Around noon they forced it open. Father was lying half-dressed on his bed – dead, a corpse. He probably took a chill while hunting for beer in the cellar. He had already been sick for a long time. [Could it be that God had depended upon the will of a child, to whom this man had shown some goodness, to grant him more time and an opportunity to convert?] Marta K. and you made me enroll in a sodality for young women. I never told you how absurd I found the instructions of the two directors, although the games were amusing enough. As you know, I quickly came to play a preponderant role in them, which flattered me. I also found the excursions pleasant. I even allowed myself at times to be taken to Confession and receive Holy Communion. I really had nothing to confess, for I never paid heed to answering for my thoughts and sentiments. And I was still not ready for worse things. One day you admonished me: “Anne, you will be lost if you don’t pray more.” In truth I prayed very little, and always reluctantly and with annoyance. You were indisputably right. All those who burn in Hell either did not pray or did not pray enough. Prayer is the first step toward God. It is always decisive, especially prayer to that one who is the Mother of God, whose name it is not licit to pronounce. Devotion to her draws innumerable souls away from the devil, souls who by their sins would otherwise have fallen into his hands. I continue, but with fury, being obliged to do so. Praying is the easiest thing one can do on earth. God rightly linked salvation to this simplest of actions. To those who persevere in prayer, God grants, little by little, so much light and strength that even a drowning sinner can be raised up and saved, even if he is immersed in mud up to his chest. In fact, in the last years of my life I no longer prayed at all, and thus deprived myself of the graces without which no one can be saved. Here we no longer receive any grace. Even if we were to receive it, we would reject it with disdain. All the vacillations of earthly life come to an end in the beyond. In earthly life, man can pass from a state of sin to the state of grace. From grace he can fall into sin. I often fell from weakness, rarely from malice. But with death, this fluctuating “yes” and “no,” this rising and falling, comes to an end. With death, every individual enters into his final state, fixed and unalterable. As one advances in age, the rises and falls become fewer. It is true that until death one can either convert or turn ones back upon God. In death, however, man makes his decision with the last tremors of his will, mechanically, the same way he did throughout his life. A good or bad habit becomes second nature, and this is what moves a person one way or another in his final moments. So it was with me. For years I had lived apart from God. Consequently, when I received that final call of grace, I decided against Him. It was fatal not because I had sinned so much, but rather because I had refused so often to amend my life. You repeatedly admonished me to listen to sermons and read pious books, but I always made excuses for myself, citing a lack of time. What more could I have done to increase my inner uncertainty? By the time I reached this critical point, which was shortly before I left the sodality for young women, it would have been difficult for me to follow any other path. I felt insecure and unhappy. I had erected a huge wall that stood in the way of my conversion, although you apparently didn’t realize it. You must have thought I could convert quite easily when you said to me once: “Anne, make a good confession and everything will be all right.” I suspected that what you said was true, but the world, the flesh, and the devil already had me securely in their clutches. I never believed in the action of the devil, but now I attest that the devil exercises a powerful influence over persons such as I was then.(9) Only many prayers on the part of others and myself, together with sacrifices and sufferings, would have managed to wrench me away from him. And then only slowly. (9) Devils and demons are the names given to the evil spirits that exercise this influence. For proof of their existence two texts from Holy Scriptures suffice: “Be sober and watch, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour" (I Peter 5:8). "Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places" (Ephes. 6:11-12). There are very few persons who are physically possessed by the devil, but many who are possessed interiorly. The devil cannot take the free will from those who give themselves over to his influence. Yet as a chastisement for one’s almost total apostasy from God, He permits that person to be dominated by “evil.” I hate the devil, and yet I like him because he and his helpers, the angels that fell with him at the beginning of time, strive to make you lose your souls. There are myriads of demons. Uncountable numbers of them wander through the world like swarms of flies, their presence not even suspected. Condemned souls like us are not the ones who tempt you; this is left to the fallen spirits. (10) Our torments increase every time they bring another soul to Hell, but we still want to see everyone condemned. Hatred is capable of anything! (11) (10) Summa Theologica, Suppl., Q. 98, a. 6, ad. 2:  "Men who are damned are not occupied in drawing others to damnation, as the demons are." (11) Ibid., Q. 98, a. 4, ad. 3:  “Although an increase in the number of the damned results in an increase of each one's punishment, so much the more will their hatred and envy increase that they will prefer to be more tormented with many, rather than less tormented alone." Even though I tried to avoid Him, God sought me out. I prepared the way for grace by the works of natural charity I often did, following the natural inclination of my nature. At times, too, God attracted me to a church. When I took care of my sick mother even after a hard day of work at the office, which was no small sacrifice for me, I strongly felt these attractions to the grace of God. Once, in the hospital chapel where you used to take me during our free time at mid-day, I was so moved that I found myself just one step away from conversion. I wept. The pleasures of the world, however, shortly swept me up in a torrent and drowned out this grace. The thorns choked out the wheat. Making the rationalization that religion is sentimentalism, the argument I heard at the office, I cast away this grace also, like so many others. Once you reprimanded me because instead of genuflecting in church, I made only a slight inclination of my head. You thought it was laziness, not suspecting that I already no longer believed in the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. I believe it now, although only naturally, as one believes in a storm, by perceiving its signs and effects. In the meantime, I had found for myself a religion. The general opinion in the office, that after death a soul would return to this world as another being, with an endless succession of dying and returning again, pleased me. With this, I shut out the distressing problem of the hereafter to the point that I imagined it no longer troubled me. Why didn’t you remind me of the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus, in which the narrator sent one to Hell and the other to Paradise after they died? But what good would this reminder have done? I would have just considered it just more of your pious advice. Little by little I arranged a god, one privileged enough to be called a god, and at the same time distant enough that I didn’t have to deal with him. I made him confusing enough to allow me to transform him, at will and without need to change religions, into a pantheistic god, or even to permit me to become a proud Deist. This “god” had neither a heaven to console me nor a hell to frighten me. I left him in peace. This is what my adoration of him consisted of. One easily believes in what one loves. With the passing of years, I became sufficiently convinced of my religion. I lived at ease with it, without its causing me any inconvenience. Only one thing would have been able to bring me to my senses: a profound and prolonged suffering. But this suffering never came. Do you now understand that saying, “Whom God loves, He chastises”? One summer day in July the sodality of young women organized an outing. Yes, I liked those outings, but not the pious beatas who went on them! I had recently placed an image very different from the one of Our Lady of Grace on the altar of my heart. It was that fine manly figure of Max N. from the nearby office. We had already conversed several times. On this occasion, he invited me out on the same Sunday that the sodality outing was planned. Another woman whom he had been dating was in the hospital. He had noticed, of course, that I had my eyes on him, but I had never thought of marrying him. He was wealthy, but too friendly with all the young ladies, in my opinion. Up until then I had wanted a man who would belong exclusively to me, and I would be his alone. Thus, I had always kept a certain distance between us. (This is true. There was something noble about Anne, notwithstanding her religious indifference. It astonishes me that “sincere” persons like her can also fall into Hell if they are insincere enough to flee from facing God.) Max began to shower me with attentions from the day of that outing. Our conversation, of course, was certainly different from that of your pious women. The next day in the office, you reprimanded me for not having gone with you. I then told you about my Sunday diversion. Your first question was: “Did you go to Mass?” How ridiculous! How could I have gone to Mass when we had agreed to leave at six in the morning? Do you remember that I heatedly added, “The good God is not so mean-spirited as your little priests!” Now I am forced to confess to you that, His infinite goodness notwithstanding, God takes everything much more seriously than any priest. After this first outing with Max, I only attended one more of your sodality meetings. I was attracted to some of the Christmas solemnities, but I had already dissociated myself from you interiorly. What interested me were movies, dances, and excursions. At times Max and I argued, but I knew how to keep him interested in me. After being released from the hospital, my rival was furious with me, and I found her quite disagreeable. Her anger worked in my favor, though, for my discreet calm impressed Max and ultimately led him to choose me over her. I knew just how to belittle her. I would speak calmly, seeming to be entirely objective, but spewing venom from within. Insinuations and actions like this can rapidly lead one to Hell. They are diabolical, in the true sense of the word. Why am I telling you this? To show you how I came to separate myself definitively from God. To remove myself so far, it was not even necessary to be entirely familiar with Max. I knew that if I lowered myself to that too soon, he would think less of me. So I restrained myself and refused. In truth, I was ready to do anything I thought useful to reach my aim. I would stop at nothing to win Max. Gradually we fell in love, for both of us possessed certain admirable qualities that we could mutually appreciate. I was talented and had become a good conversationalist, so I eventually had Max in my hands, secure that he belonged only to me, at least in those last months before our wedding. This is what constituted my apostasy from God: making a mere creature into my god. The way this can be more fully realized is between two persons of opposite sex, if they have only a material love. For this becomes the allure, the sting, and the venom. The “adoration” I rendered to Max became an ardent religion for me. At this stage of my life I would still at times hypocritically run off during the office lunch hour to go to church, to listen to the silly priests, to say the Rosary, and other such foolishness. You strove, with more or less intelligence, to encourage such practices, but apparently without suspecting that, in final analysis, I no longer believed in any of these things. I only sought to set my conscience at ease – I still needed that – in order to justify my apostasy. In the depth of my soul I lived in revolt against God. You did not perceive that. You always thought I was still Catholic. I wanted to be seen as such, and I even went so far as to make contributions to the church, thinking that a little “insurance” couldn’t hurt me. As sure as you were with your answers, they always bounced off me. I was sure that you could not be right. This strained our relationship, and when my marriage put some distance between us, the pain of our separation was slight. Before my wedding, I went to Confession and Holy Communion one more time, but it was a mere formality. My husband thought the same as I. We carried out that formality just like any other. You would call that “unworthy.” But after that “unworthy” Communion I had greater peace of mind. It was the last one of my life. Our married life was generally harmonious. We shared the same opinion on just about everything. That included our opinion regarding children: We didn’t want the burden. Deep down, my husband wanted one child, but naturally no more. I was able to remove even this notion from his head. I preferred fine clothing and furniture, tea with the ladies, automobile excursions, and other such amusements. And so a year of earthly pleasure passed from our wedding day until my sudden death. Every Sunday we went for a drive or visited my husband’s relatives - I was ashamed of my mother then. My husband’s relatives, like us, swam well on the surface of life. Inside, however, I never felt truly happy. Something always gnawed at my soul. I hoped that death, which was certainly far off in the future, would put an end to this. When I was a child, I once heard in a sermon that God rewards the good one does. If He does not reward one in the next life, He will do it on earth. Without my expecting it, I received an inheritance [from my Aunt L]. At the same time my husband received a considerable raise in his salary. With this, we were able to furnish our new house quite well. Any attachment to religion I might have had was almost gone, like the last glimmer of light on the far horizon. The bars and cafes of the city and the restaurants where we ate on our travels did not draw us any closer to God. Everyone who frequented them lived as we did, concerned about externals, and not matters of the soul. Once in our travels we visited a famous cathedral, but just to appreciate the artistic value of its masterpieces. I knew how to neutralize the religious air of the Middle Ages that it radiated, and I seized every opportunity for ridicule. I made fun of the lay brother who served as our guide; I criticized the pious monks for their business of making and selling liqueur; I disparaged the eternal pealing of the bells calling the people to the churches as solicitations only for money. Thus I rejected every grace that came knocking at my door. In particular, I let my sarcasm flow profusely at every depiction of Hell in the books, the cemeteries, and other places, where one could find devils roasting souls in red or yellow fires while their long-tailed associates kept arriving with more victims. Hell might be poorly drawn, Claire, but it can never be exaggerated. Above all, I always scoffed at the fire of Hell. Do you recall our conversation about the fire of Hell when I jokingly put a lit match under your nose and asked, “Does it smell like this?” You quickly blew out the match, but here no one extinguishes the fire. Let me tell you something else - the fire that the Bible speaks about is not just the torment of conscience. Fire means fire. That is just what He meant when he said, “Depart from Me, ye accursed, into the everlasting fire.” Quite literally. “How can the spirit be affected by material fire?” you ask. How, then, can your soul suffer on earth when you put your finger in the fire? Your soul itself does not burn, but what the man as a whole suffers! In like manner, here we are imprisoned in a fire in our being and our faculties. Our souls are deprived of their natural movements. We can neither think nor want what we used to desire.(12) Do not even try to comprehend a mystery that goes against the laws of material nature: the fire of Hell burns without consuming. Our greatest torment consists in knowing with certainty that we will never see God. How greatly we are tortured by that which we were indifferent to while on earth! When the knife lies on the table, it leaves you cold. You see its sharp edge, but you don’t feel it. But the moment it enters your flesh, you scream with pain. Before, we only saw the loss of God; now we feel it. (13) (12) Ibid., Suppl., Q. 70, a. 3, r.:  "Accordingly we must unite all the aforesaid modes together, in order to understand perfectly how the soul suffers from a corporeal fire: so as to say that the fire of its nature is able to have an incorporeal spirit united to it as a thing placed is united to a place; that as the instrument of Divine Justice it is enabled to detain it enchained as it were, and in this respect this fire is really hurtful to the spirit, and thus the soul seeing the fire as something hurtful to it is tormented by the fire." (13) St. Augustine said, “The separation from God is a torment as great as God." Cf. Houdry, Bibliotheca concionatorum (Venice, 1786), vol 2, “Infernus,” No. 4, p. 427. All the souls do not suffer equally. The more frivolous, malicious, and resolute one was in sin, the more the loss of God weighs upon the soul and the more tortured he feels for the abused creature. Catholics who are damned suffer more than those of other beliefs because, in general, they received more lights and graces without taking advantage of them. The ones who knew more suffer more than those who had less knowledge. Those who sinned out of malice suffer more than those who fell from weakness. No one, however, suffers more than he deserves. Would that this were not true, so that I might have more reason to hate! You once told me that no one goes to Hell without knowing it. This was revealed to some saint. I laughed at that, but the thought was entrenched in my mind. If this were the case, then there would be enough time for me to convert – that is how I thought in my heart. What you said was true. Before my sudden end, I had no idea of what Hell really is. No human being does. But I had no doubt about this: should I die, I would enter into eternity in a state of revolt against God, and I would suffer the consequences. As I already have told you, I did not change my course but continued along the same path, impelled by habit, just as people act with greater deliberation and regularity as they grow older. Now, I will tell you how my death occurred. One week ago – I speak to you in the terms by which you measure time, for judging by the pain I have endured, I could already have been burning in Hell for ten years. Therefore, on a Sunday one week ago, my husband and I went for a drive. It was the last one for me. The day was radiant and beautiful. I felt well and at ease, as I rarely did. An ominous presentiment, however, came over me as we drove. On the way home that evening my husband and I were unexpectedly blinded by the lights of a car rapidly approaching from the opposite direction. My husband lost control of our car. “Jesus!” I shouted, not as a prayer, but as a scream. I felt a crushing pain – a trifle in comparison with my present torment. Then I lost consciousness. How strange! On that very morning, the idea had come to me unexpectedly that I could, after all, go to Mass again. It entered my mind almost like a supplication. My “No!” – strong and determined – nipped the thought in the bud. I must finish with this once and for all, I thought, and I assumed all the consequences. And now I endure them. You know what happened after my death. The grief of my husband and my mother, my body laid out and the burial. You know all this down to the last detail, as do I through a natural intuition we have here. We have only a confused knowledge of what transpires in the world, but we know something of what concerned us. Thus I know also your whereabouts. (14) (14) S. Th. Suppl., Q. 98, a 7,:  “Accordingly, in the damned there will be actual consideration of the things they knew heretofore as matters of sorrow, but not as a cause of pleasure.” At the moment of my death I awoke from a darkness. I found myself suddenly enveloped by a blinding light. It was at the same place where my body lay. It seemed almost like a theater, when the lights suddenly go out, the curtain noisily opens, and a tragically illuminated scene appears: the scene of my life. I saw my soul as in a mirror. I saw the graces I had trampled underfoot from the time I was young until that final “No!” given to God. I felt like an assassin brought to trial before its inanimate victim. Repent? Never! (15) Did I feel shame for my actions? Not at all! (15) Ibid., Q. 98, a. 2, r.:  "Accordingly the wicked will not repent of their sins directly [that is, out of hatred of sin], because consent in the malice of sin will remain in them; but they will repent indirectly, inasmuch as they will suffer from the punishment inflicted on them for sin.” Notwithstanding, it was impossible for me to remain in the presence of the God I had denied and rejected. Only one thing remained for me: flight. Thus, just as Cain fled from the body of Abel, so my soul sought to flee far from this terrible sight. That was my private judgment. The invisible Judge spoke: “Depart from Me!” and my soul swiftly fell, like a sulfurous shadow, into the place of eternal torment! (16) (16) It is certain that Hell is a determined place. But where this place is situated, no one knows. That the punishment of Hell is eternal is a dogma, certainly the most terrible of all, rooted in Sacred Scripture: "Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels…And these shall go into everlasting punishment; but the just, into life everlasting" (Matt. 25:41, 46). See also II Thess. 1:9, Jude 1:13; Apoc. 14:11, 20:10. All are irrefutable texts, in which the word “everlasting” cannot be misunderstood or interpreted as “a long time.” If it were inappropriate to illustrate this dogma, then Our Lord Himself would not have done so in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. He described Hell in the same way that it was done here – he showed that it existed and what one must do not to fall into it. The purpose of the parable was not to excite the senses, but the same one that occasioned this publication. The aim of this booklet finds expression in these words, “Let us think of Hell while we are still living, so that we will not fall into it after we die.” This counsel is but the paraphrasing of Psalm 54: “ Descendat in infernum viventes, videlicet, ne descendant morientes,” which is found in a statement (erroneously) attributed to St. Bernard (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. 184, Col. 314 b). Some closing words from Claire Thus ended the letter from Anne about Hell. The last letters were so twisted as to be almost illegible. When I finished reading the last word, the entire letter turned to ashes. What was I hearing? After those harsh notes of the lines I imagined I was reading, what came to my ears was the sweet reality of bells ringing. I awoke suddenly to find myself still in bed. The early morning light was entering the room. From the parish Church came the sound of the bells ringing the Angelus. Had it only been a dream? I never felt such consolation in praying the Angelic Salutation as I did after this dream. I said the three Hail Marys. And as I prayed them, this thought came to me very clearly: One must always stay close to Our Lord’s Blessed Mother and venerate her filially if one does not want to suffer the same fate related to me here - albeit in a dream - by a soul that will never see God. Still frightened and shaking from that night’s revelation, I got up, dressed myself hastily, and rushed to the convent chapel. My heart was beating violently and unevenly. The houseguests kneeling closest to me looked at me with concern. Perhaps they thought that I was breathless and flushed from running down the stairs. A kindly lady from Budapest, frail as a child and nearsighted, suffering greatly but lofty of spirit and fervent in the service of God, spoke to me that afternoon in the garden. “My dear child,” she said, “Our Lord does not want to be served in such haste.” But then she perceived that it was something else that had excited me and made me so overwrought. She added kindly: “Let nothing distress you. You know the advice of Saint Teresa - let nothing alarm you. All things pass. He who possesses God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.” While she humbly consoled me with these words, without any sermonizing tone, she seemed to be reading my soul. “God alone suffices.” Yes, God must suffice for me – in this life and in the next. I want to possess Him there one day for all eternity however numerous may be the sacrifices I have to make here in order to triumph. I do not want to fall into Hell. “There is blindness much worse than loss of physical sight, the blindness of heart.  So many are heading for the flames blindly.  Man seeks to destroy the evidence of Hell, but he will learn the truth soon enough.  Hell exists and Heaven exists.  The sins of the flesh send more souls to hell." - Jesus

[citizentruth-blog]

'To Live and Die in Manila', Documenting Music's Defiance to Duterte's Drug War

We caught up with Angela Stephenson, the director behind To Live and Die in Manila (which you can watch free below), Boiler Room’s new short documentary on President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal authoritarianism and extra-judicial killings in the Philippines and the artists who oppose it using their creative output. Since becoming president of the Philippines in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has caused widespread fear and devastation across Manila. Set in one of the world’s most dangerous cities, To Live and Die in Manila gives a vital voice to the musicians putting their life on the line for their right to showcase creativity that their country associates with drug crimes punishable by death. After coming to power with an anti-crime campaign that pledged to slaughter thousands in a national crackdown (where he also compared himself to Hitler), Duterte and his sanction on extrajudicial killings raised the alarm of global human rights watchdogs in 2016. Two years on, its death toll is reportedly over 20,000, with DIY executions committed by police and citizens alike. The targets of Duterte's "narco-state" are all those taking part or suspected of taking part in illegal drug activity. Fear has skyrocketed within underground creative communities due to their assumed ties to drug culture. To Live and Die In Manila documents the lives of musicians and artists surviving under these conditions.  Manila-born artists Eyedress, Owfuck, BP Valenzuela, Teenage Granny and Jeona Zoleta share their musical inspiration, their unique methods of production, their thoughts on the city they call home, and their fears of possible death. Enjoy the interview and To Live and Die in Manila below. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from what is happening in the Philippines. You can also watch the short documentary itself at the end of the interview.

INTERVIEW

Hello Angela! To start things off here, what initially inspired you on this project? The artists in the film and the burgeoning music scene in Manila is what drove me to document what was going on at this particular point in time. They are all not only talented and deserved a platform to share their music with the world, but were vocal in expressing their concerns about the war on drugs and how it’s seeped into their collective consciousness. It’s both sad and kind of refreshing at the same time to see these youthful voices speaking out against the authoritarianism of Duterte. Yet, I suspect there are many more insidious and creeping effects behind his drug war than most people would think of. One thing I’m curious about there, what do you think the effects have been on freedom of expression in the Philippines in particular? I want to be able to say that there is still freedom of speech right now, but like with a lot of other places in the world currently, public opinion is extremely polarised. It means that you can say what you want, but if you go against the grain, people are going to tear you to shreds and they won’t be forgiving about it. Not unlike the US now. People are defensive when it comes to this current regime, a lot of public figures, be that journalists or politicians, have been shut down and even imprisoned in their efforts against it, so I feel like we’re starting to cross into really dangerous territory and it’s quite unsettling to witness. I fear the US may be getting closer to that sort of thing. It’s unfathomable that Duterte has got away with a lot of the statements he’s made. The one at the beginning of To Live and Die in Manila, which was taken from one of his speeches and left intact, is shocking enough, but that’s one of many absurd things that he’s said. It makes no sense that we’re discouraged by other Filipinos to criticise or question those statements, we only have concerns for the progress of the country and what damage he’s doing to the Filipino psyche by treating human beings like they are disposable. So many parallels with Trump. Do you see a larger resistance to Duterte and his drug war building? I believe his popularity rating has gone down in recent months, but I worry for any resistance being ignored and undermined. When you hear news of protests, or see articles that are critical of the government, it’s Filipinos themselves that are quick to dismiss those participants. We are mocked and ridiculed, and expected to fall in line by the majority of Filipinos that support the drug war and are unaffected by it because of their social status, they don’t understand the need for anyone to speak out on behalf of the people that have been killed unjustly. I hope by releasing this film we’re encouraging more and especially young people to continue to participate in public discourse, who need to make sure they’re ready to intelligently defend their opinions if they differ from the majority. It’s an odd thing when you look at places like the USA which are, of course, also dealing with drug issues (and variants of authoritarianism, which I have a question on below) but in many ways are choosing the route of liberalization (state marijuana laws becoming more open for instance) and treating the problem of drug abuse like a public health issue and not a penal one. Although we also dealt with people like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions who did all he could to make drug-related penalties more draconian, really not unlike Duterte, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Erdogan in Turkey. My question there, what do you think can be done to change the current course in the Philippines? There’s a big problem in Filipino society with classism and prejudice against the poor or anyone who doesn’t fit the average mold. In order for people to sympathize with the victims of the war on drugs, they have to first see those victims as human beings, and the unfortunate reality is that a lot of people in the Philippines don’t. The heinous crimes committed by the people participating in the drug trade need to be addressed without tarring everyone that are also victims of those crimes with the same brush. Instead of engaging with the affected communities and making an effort to understand the social and physical environments that allow people to fall into the trap of poverty or drug addiction, Duterte continues to perpetuate this underlying culture of violence that the Philippines has suffered from at the hands of previous governments, and encourages them to be killed mercilessly without any evidence of wrongdoing. And the problem with that is there are so many innocent people getting caught up in it, children included. As usually happens with these things sadly. If it isn’t children being killed in the crossfire, they’re finding the bodies, and they’re attending the funerals of their friends or parents, there’s long-term damage being done here. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of these struggling communities to police themselves. Those of us that do wish for the country to improve from the ground up, have to continue speaking up for those that don’t have a voice or the means to escape their situation, but we’re up against a very conservative mindset. What should Americans (with Trump and his authoritarian tendencies) learn from A- what’s happening in the Philippines and B- the brave example of the artists in your film in advocating for change? Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist who has just been named as one of TIME’s people of the year alongside other journalists from around the globe, is finally being recognized for her work in covering the war on drugs, and it’s people like her that we need to protect as well as the artists in this film who are being vocal. Absolutely. I fear that’s getting harder with the war on the press that is, unfortunately, being waged in the US. Ressa explained that ‘the Philippines is a cautionary tale for the United States’. In the case of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was assassinated, leaders like Trump have been slow to condemn the actions that led to his murder, and he’s not doing enough to say that journalism can continue to be a safe practice, and that’s what’s worrying. Precisely. Khashoggi was based in the US from 2017 onwards, and Ressa is questioning who is the moral leader in this case, who is going to set the right example if world leaders like the US won’t take appropriate action? Profoundly sad and scary. It’s also a scary time in which social media is being weaponized against real journalism, and I think there’s a lesson to learn in how we can protect ourselves from manipulation, companies like Facebook need to start being held accountable for the ways in which they’ve contributed to the problem, for example by failing to manage the fake news that Duterte’s campaign was built on. Indeed. Facebook is still utilized by the current regime to control Filipinos who spend a large part of their time online, I’ve witnessed some of my own family fall victim to it and I feel powerless to stop it. Yeah. The Philippines is actually the top country for social media usage in the world. Put another way with the initial question, with this seeming authoritarian trend worldwide, do you think there is hope on the horizon in finally getting the world in the right direction away from that? The recognition of people like Maria Ressa gives me hope even though her case is a bittersweet one. I don’t know if I could say that we’re going to move away from this trend any time soon, but I think we all need to continue to educate ourselves on the root causes of the issues that some of these authoritarian-leaning leaders are choosing to tackle in misguided ways, we need to learn how to put ourselves in positions to offer positive alternatives and work together towards that. Very well said. What can our readers do to help the artists in the film in their efforts for change? Just showing support helps, and being aware that these artists are in the minority in believing that changes need to be made, they’re still in the minority in believing that the deaths need to stop. Therefore they need to be encouraged to continue speaking out, it’s incredibly disheartening when a lot of people in the country continue to undermine their efforts to create awareness of the truth. Yes, it is. But their example does give some hope. Our final question, what’s next for you? I’m concerned about not being able to go back to the Philippines in the near future, but I would like to continue to make films there. There’s still a lot of aspects of Filipino culture that I’d like to celebrate as well as critique, and I hope to achieve that through either documentaries or narrative films.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwJJPPVgx7s Read the full article

[thedeliberatewanderer-blog]

BEING A WOMAN IS FUCKING HARD

Today I want to talk about something that’s been profoundly affecting my visit since I’ve been here. I encountered it from around day 2 or 3, maybe since day one with out knowing it.

The first time it happened, I didn’t really register the situation for what it was, but it certainly left me frustrated and disgruntled until I realized why. The second day I was here, Mohanad took me to Yarmouk University to register for my classes, but first I had to meet with the director of the language program. Aside from the usual condescending tone I typically experience from people in academia, he mocked my small attempts at my broken Arabic - mostly because I had been taught in the Lebanese dialect, which varies in certain, and sometimes drastic, ways from the Jordanian dialect. That was fine, I guess, I normally deal with that from my family and just graduated from a five year experience at a university, but I was unsettled about what happened next. Mohanad briefly left the room to tend to something. The director was across the room, behind his desk, and I was sitting in a chair with its back against the opposite wall. He had a piece of paper in his hand that had course descriptions for their Arabic Institute. First he asked me if I could read, and I said yes - my ability to read Arabic and understand it was and still is phenomenally better than my ability to speak it and understand it when it is spoken. Despite this, he got up from his chair, came over to where I was sitting, and stood less than a foot away from me - with his crotch in my face. He began reading the paper and pointing to each word as he read it. Not only had I already told him I could read it and understand it, but after he read it, I definitely knew that I could’ve without his help, and even if not, there was really no reason for him to not read it from where he was sitting behind his chair. Also, tf, why did he come at me only after Mohanad left the room?  

I left that room disconcerted. I was perturbed by it for two weeks and couldn’t shake the hate. But then I suddenly realized: Oh my God. I experienced blatant sexism.

And I feel that literally everyday. I’m told it’s not impolite to stare in this culture, but I constantly notice more eyes on me than when other women grace the streets. I stick out like a sore thumb with my blonde hair and blue eyes, so if I go outside I’m guaranteed to be cat called at least once and piss off some people because some asshole clogs up traffic, slowing his car to get a better look at me. My taxi rides are uncomfortable more often than not. 3/4 of them propose to me, just think they have a right to my attention, and demand - not ask, demand - for my number and address. One time it was so bad that I just got out of my taxi in the middle of a busy intersection. I am now accustomed to saying “I don’t want to talk” when the men get too pushy. Sometimes I have to double back on my walk home because some creep is following me. On some days it keeps me from going outside because I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. 

My experiences with male English instructors at the Academy aren’t much better. I’m a native English speaker and therefore find the language intuitive and understood more by context than grammatical rules. When one of them asks if I know something or other about English, and I say no, they take it upon themselves to start lecturing. Like, o wow, thanks, I’m so much richer for this useless knowledge you have bestowed upon me. Like, no thanks. I did not ask for an explanation. I do not need to be intellectually coddled.

But my experience at the Academy yesterday was particularly insulting on a variety of levels. After my first class (which went semi-well, I will elaborate in another blog post), I sat down with the director, his friend, and had some tea. He asked me about my focus in anthropology as an undergrad. I told him about my pursuits advocating for Muslim American rights, interning at an NGO, my thesis, etc, etc. So, of course, I told him in particular I was interested in Muslim American hijabi female identity, and we began having a discussion about that. I told him that, rather than the typical American stereotype of the hijab being inherently oppressive, I generally found the opposite to be true. Most Muslim American hijabis feel immensely empowered by covering, and I had and have not met one that does not wear a hijab out of her own volition. In fact, in some instances their parents tried to dissuade them from wearing it, because they were worried about the potential discrimination they might face. Since American society reduces a woman’s value to her looks and equates female liberation with bearing more skin, in some ways covering is a consciously defiant choice against American patriarchal standards. By preventing people from reducing them to objects in this way, they take power back into their own hands.

Before I go on, let me just preface this by saying that, here, I have too often been assumed to be pro-Trump, anti-Islam, etc. Only on a handful of occasions have political subjects have been a topic of discussion. But, unfailingly, every time, the other party either starts off with discrediting something Trump has said or denying x, y, or z stereotype many Americans have against Muslims, Syrian refugees, etc - both of which immediately let me know what they think I think. I have also by and large been assumed to be Christian. Seldom is there a conversation about Islam in which there are not efforts made to compare or compliment it with Christianity or Biblical references.

What I thought was supposed to be an attempt to alleviate the aforementioned presumptions from influencing the conversation was still perceived by the director as an attack on his Islamic beliefs and interpretations, but for much different reasons than I anticipated or even realized until some time after. He replied first by insisting that Christian women wear the hijab in church, and that American women used to cover their hair, arms, and legs in the 40s. I told him that the former is definitely not so, unless referencing nuns, but they are a pretty stark minority of Christian women. I know there are still some sects of Christianity and non-Muslim cultures where women cover, but, again. Very stark minority. Nonetheless, he took my mention of nuns me conceding to his perception that most Christian women cover in church (I don’t know if he actually knew what nuns were, then? Or Roman Catholicism?). I also tried to inform him that, yes, American women historically dressed more modestly and covered their arms and legs, but hijabs were never, like, a thing in America, lol. He kept insisting that it was, that in the 40s they wore “pieces on top of their heads” and I was like hats? Those were fashion statements worn randomly, not attempts at modesty. But still, there he was, smirking and nodding and apparently tuning out after I said the word “hats.”

I tried again from the historical angle he brought up. In America, women wore less clothes the more social freedoms they had. That’s why there’s a cultural conception that links bearing skin with freedom, and a cultural bias saying women are liberated and empowered this way. But we’re also not allowed to be sexual, so we’re basically expected to be empowered by nakedness under the condition that it’s sexualized and controlled by men. But that’s why the hijabi women I’ve met felt empowered by doing otherwise. They have control over their sexuality, it’s their choice, and I think that perspective is unique and pretty cool.

His retort was something like, well do they say that’s the only reason they cover?  And I was like, well no, of course not. There’s parents, cultural pressures and expectations, etc. But I would say, for the majority that I’ve met, yes. And that’s not to say people who don’t cover are more wrong or right. American women in general have some authority and control over their sexuality, including hijabis. 

“What about whores?” His tone was clearly insinuating disgust. 

We were both disgusted at that point. I got pretty blatant after that. I said something like:

Terms like whore and slut are considered sexist where I’m from. There’s nothing about a woman that says she’s more or less worthy because of what she wears or how many people she does or doesn’t sleep with. Even if she has one partner for her whole life or twenty in a week (at this point he shook his head, stuck his tongue out, and closed his eyes in a clearly disgusted face), she’s allowed that without shame because it’s her body.

Then he asked, “what about Christian women who convert to Islam that cover?” 

“What?”

“What about Christian women who convert to Islam and wear the hijab?”

“I don’t understand why you’re asking that right now,”

“What. About. Christian. Women. Who. Convert. And. Choose. To. Wear. The. Hijab. What does that say about the hijab and Islam?”

“That she’s read the scripture and decided covering feels right in her heart.”

He looked annoyed at that point and kept asking me if I knew this famous person or that famous person that were Christians that converted to Islam. As politely as I could, I just said, “no. I’m not a religious person. I don’t spend my time looking into stuff like that.” He showed me another. And another. It took me a few times of repeating what I had said for him to understand that a few Christian people converting to Islam is meaningless to me. Or, at least didn’t mean what he had expected it to mean to me. 

The conversation kind of ended with me saying the reasons I love anthropology so much and am grateful that it was my major. It taught me that you can’t quantify the human experience, that people aren’t numbers, blanket statements are never applicable to everyone, and human life and culture is complicated and conflicted. It leaves room for nuance, and it acknowledges relativity in cultural beliefs. He waved me off, looking for another video. I nonetheless looked at it patiently, nodding and acknowledging it before giving it back, and again reiterating my stance on my personal beliefs.

When I eventually and finally got it in his head that there’s nothing for me to convert from he did get quiet and stopped being patronizing and argumentative, though (which means one of his goals wasn’t purely to attract me to Islam, but merely to say it is superior to Christianity). I guess no religion is better than being a Christian? Either way, I think in the end he understood that I acknowledge and respect religious perspectives regardless of which one, but that doesn’t mean I ascribe myself to one or think one is more valid than another. His presumptions didn’t allow him to prepare for an anomaly, though, so I don’t think he had much of a choice but to stay silent at the end.

People convert from Islam to Christianity all the time, too. Or, I don’t know, to Buddhism to Paganism. It doesn’t mean that one religion is inherently better or more correct than another because of that conversion, as he was clearly trying to get me to conclude. Which, when you think about it, is pretty sinister. If he assumed me to be Christian, then his goal was to get me, as a perceived Christian, to invalidate my beliefs or say Islam is a better faith.

I realized the next day (today lol) talking to Nada, though, why my initial comments insulted him in the first place when I completely meant the opposite. The idea of a woman being in control of her sexuality and how she expresses it was inconceivable to him. When I said, “because SHE feels it is right in her heart,” the answer wasn’t satisfactory enough for him. He went tight-lipped and halfway rolled his eyes. And when he said, “is that the ONLY reason they say they wear the hijab?” when I expressed Muslim American women’s common feelings of empowerment from covering, he said it dismissively, waving his hand, talking over me, like he was searching for the answer he wanted to hear (Islam is better/women are meant to be covered) and didn’t care about a woman’s say in covering or not even though it’s her body.

Because he didn’t. To him, women cover because they are not allowed to be anything but modest. They are not allowed to be sexually expressive regardless of how they feel about, because men here expect it. Individual female empowerment doesn’t matter. Their agency is irrelevant. If she expresses any semblance of the power choice, she is devalued and dehumanized, likened to a "whore." What was intended to be a way to show respect for Islamic practices unintentionally came across as a threat to his male privilege. And I'm okay with that. 💁🏼

To some extent, Muslim American women do have the luxury of choice. Their agency is integral to whether or not they wear the hijab in most instances. Not to say they don’t get shit for wearing it or don’t experience sexism, racism, and oppression in other ways. They certainly do. But in a greater respect than what I’m observing in Jordan, their say matters, and wearing the hijab can, indeed, be a source of empowerment. But I can’t for sure say the same thing about women here. Many of them tell me that they choose to wear it. And, granted, a small number of women here do not. But do they really choose to wear it when it’s the norm and what’s expected of you from your family and peers? When men scoff at the idea of them having a voice or choice in the matter? Is there any sense of empowerment when there’s no rebellion in showing less skin rather than more since less is already the standard? Does the questioning of a woman’s character if she doesn’t sway her opinion? Is it really, fully, and completely her choice in that instance? 

Also, Nada told me that, last summer when she still covered, she was still hounded in the streets of Jordan. Even though she did as what was told would make her a respectable woman, she was still not respected. She was still objectified. There is no rest for women even if they’re compliant with Islam. If men staring is a norm in Jordan, then I guess the Islamic tenant of "lower your gaze" doesn't mean shit, either. Therefore, rather than the issue being a question of Islam, it's an issue of a patriarchal culture. The director had confused his sexism with his religiosity.

And, you know, I really fucking hated the idea of writing this. Because I’m essentially throwing Orientalists and anti-Muslim people a bone for their racism. And it makes it sound like Jordan is a terrible place and that all its men are sexist assholes. Let it be known that Fareed and Mohanad are nice, lol. And that I have enjoyed and treasured my time here in a lot of ways. And of course I think of the American way as better. I’m a God damn American. Ethnocentrism is a thing. But even so it doesn't make my experience okay. I have never experienced sexism like that. Never have I felt so devalued in a place because of my sex. I know sexism is a problem in America, too, both at the individual and institutional level (a “clash of patriarchies” as some scholars have argued). There is no question about that. But it is still not fashionable to be sexist in America. You do not want to be called sexist in America. That doesn’t make it go away, though. It just makes it more covert. But here, it’s so overt that it’s right up in your face, shoved down your throat, and pulled out your ass. Either way, whether covert or overt, it's not okay, and the experience was deeply insulting to me and women everywhere. 

I’ve been reading some blogs about other white women’s experience in the Middle East, and a handful said the visit made them question their values. I’m very grateful for my education in anthropology, because no doubt, otherwise I would probably be doing the same. 

Last thing, the director has a PhD in linguistics, a subfield in anthropology, like tf???! How does he not know this shit????

Kbye:) ~ NewKat

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Conceding Freedom: The ups and downs of an Iranian mother’s migration to Canada

April 2008

           In a city as multicultural as Vancouver, immigrant issues frequently receive media attention. A recent article by Fiona Anderson in The Vancouver Sun features immigrant success stories alongside 2006 census data released by Statistics Canada. Anderson (2008) reports that immigrants comprise 28.6 percent of British Columbia’s workforce. While the majority of immigrants to Vancouver hail from Asian countries, the number of Iranians migrating to the city has nearly quadrupled since the 1980’s (Swanton, 2005, p. 37). In his examination of Iranian immigrants’ experiences in Vancouver, Dan Swanton (2005) seeks to disrupt the homogenization of Iranian migration (p. 10). Such a quest proves necessary in a political climate fueling widespread animosity against Canadians of Middle-Eastern descent. According to Swanton (2005), in Vancouver these pervasive sentiments manifest in the conflation of violence and criminality with Persian ethnicity (p. 18). Thus, he interprets Iranian migration stories as:

Negotiations of political and economic changes in Iran since 1979, lived through the cultural politics of gender and sexuality, economic necessity and material desires, and patriarchal familial relations as well as the shifting ways in which the Canadian state attempts to regulate its borders through immigration legislation and programs. (Swanton, 2005, p. 5)  

           In response to this agenda and the relative absence of women in Swanton’s sample, I set out to discover how Iranian women and, more specifically, mothers experience the journey of migration from one patriarchal state to another. Beginning my research I asked: How have Persian mothers experienced immigration and integration in Canadian society? What kinds of cultural tensions, contradictions, losses and/or gains have they experienced and how has this altered their family structure? Thirdly, how has race intersected with gender and class to shape their experiences as mothers in a “multicultural” society?

           To find answers to these questions, I interviewed a woman named Arin.[1] Arin immigrated to Vancouver from Tehran, Iran in 2000 along with her husband, Fardin, and her two daughters, Fetneh and Nazboo. Having grown up as “a free person” in pre-revolution Iran, Arin decided to leave her country when she realized its current political regime would not permit her children to live with the same freedom she so cherished in her upbringing. According to Arin, this desire for freedom alone spurred her entire decision to immigrate. As she recounted her experiences for me, three interesting themes arose which I now consider here. Firstly, immigration has reconfigured the gendered nature of Arin and Fardin’s parenting. Secondly, racism continues to shape the experiences of Arin and her family in profound ways. Finally, Arin speaks of the overall shift in meanings attached to “home” and “family” in the absence of extended family in this new space. Thus, Arin’s immigration story reveals how a mother’s search for freedom for her children unsettled any preconceived notions of family structure and security she may have harbored pre-migration.          

 Methodology

 In their introduction to qualitative research methods, Caplan and Caplan (1999) explain that “political philosophies, personal feelings, and a host of other factors can shape the research questions that are asked, the way research is done, and the ways the results are interpreted and then applied in educational, work-place, social and political situations” (p. 109). I thus considered these elements of subjectivity when conducting this qualitative research. Employing the method of in-depth interviewing proved both challenging and rewarding. Arin welcomed me into her home on a rainy evening after her long day at work, and we settled into her living room with tea and cookies. The minute I placed a tape recorder on the couch next to Arin and poised my pen, I felt firsthand the contradictory nature of interviewing; the floor was hers yet I would ultimately walk away with material to be dissected and manipulated for the purposes of research.

Firstly, I question the effects of interviewing Arin in her second language. Especially given the nature of the topic, my understanding of Arin’s experiences would be drastically different had I interviewed her in Farsi, her mother tongue. Arin would likely express herself differently; not only would her ease with Farsi facilitate explanation, but the cultural knowledges underlying her language would inform her story much more profoundly. By conducting this research in Canada’s dominant language, I thus ironically reproduce the very power imbalance that characterizes immigrant relations.

According to Kirby, Greaves and Reid (2006) “a first step in any research endeavor is to understand the current thinking that informs you and locates, or positions, you and the research you want to do” (p. 41). My personal experiences and positionality rendered me both an insider and outsider with respect to Arin. Having grown up in a nuclear, two-parent, heterosexual and middle-class household myself, I personally related to both Arin’s family of origin and her current family. More importantly, as a first-generation Canadian I am deeply invested in and have been shaped by issues of immigration such as discrimination, questions of belongingness, cultural conflicts, and assimilation and integration. My position as an immigrant thus injected the interview process with an unspoken understanding of this particular subjectivity as a marginalized identity. Because of both our age difference and the different ages at which we immigrated (Arin as a middle-aged woman and I as an infant), however, mine and Arin’s experiences differ greatly. Indeed, I related to her more as a mother figure while she likely equated me with her oldest daughter who is, incidentally, a friend of mine.

Age difference further exacerbates my outsider status when paired with the differences in sexuality and race between Arin and I. As a young, unmarried queer woman without children, I fail to personally relate to the experiences of a middle-aged mother in a long-term heterosexual marriage that has undergone such tribulations as parenting and international migration. Considering the topic of parenting in immigration, this difference must be accounted for as my research likely fails to capture the emotional dynamics of the experiences I explain and theorize about. Moreover, despite my empathy as the child of a non-white father and two parents who speak English with accents, the fact that I am white and “Canadian”-sounding casts me as an outsider. Exploring the topic of racism with Arin, our differences in race thus underlie the interview process and influence both Arin’s narration and my research. Ultimately, my status as “outsider within” (Hill Collins, 1991, p. 35) creates both possibilities and limitations along the divide between subjectivity and objectivity.          

Throughout the interview process I learned that active listening is of utmost importance. Arin told me after the interview that my attentiveness made her feel relaxed and comfortable; the transcription reflects this and benefited as Arin generously shared detailed stories about her life with me. Moreover, my active listening alerted me to the fact that the narrator holds the ultimate authority; Arin’s narration produced new ideas and themes that dramatically deviated from what I initially sought out to explore. Through active listening, I was able to analyze the interview on Arin’s terms. While transcribing and analyzing, I also learned that personal bias influences memory to a great degree; the details and facts I uncovered upon close examination of the interview often surprised me as they contrasted my initial perception and subjective memory of Arin’s narration. Thus, recording qualitative data is a necessity.

Given another opportunity to interview Arin, I would ask more spontaneous questions throughout the interview. Overwhelmed with her wealth of information, I hesitated to interrupt Arin or to zero in on points of interest. Although I employed the use of open-ended questions, the interview was ultimately restrained to an extent as I continually returned to my list of questions instead of posing the new questions raised in my mind. Indeed, I later regretted that I did not ask Arin all of the questions that I pondered during the interview.

Finally, my primary methodological concern regarding in-depth interviewing as a means of informing knowledge-production is the matter of appropriating the voice of the Other. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak (2005) concludes that, as long as those complicit in oppression speak for those subjected to oppressive forces, the oppressed do not have a voice. By virtue of authoring this research, however informed by Arin’s detailed narration, I thus speak for Arin. No amount of accuracy in representation absolves this conundrum as the fact remains that research only achieves just that: representation. As I compiled my research, I became acutely aware of the objectifying nature of describing Arin and her experiences in my words. In and of itself the act of quoting, as a process of selection, reflects my subjectivity as much as it reflects Arin’s. Thus, in-depth interviewing as a methodological approach to research only begins to capture the complexities and nuances of human experience that feminist, anti-racist research strives to better serve and understand.    

Conducting qualitative research ultimately involves negotiating its problematic nature. Ethical and epistemological questions aside, however, my in-depth interview with Arin produced an invaluable resource of experiential knowledge about immigration, mothering, racism, family, and the interconnectedness of all of these within the context of the Canadian state.

 Unsettling Gendered Parenting

 The family is a complex social institution, a malleable and flexible institution that variably responds to external and internal pressures. Household arrangements are determined by multiple factors, including material needs, ideological norms, cultural beliefs, and collective and individual interests. (Parreñas, 2001, p. 115)

             Arin’s deep love and admiration of her father became apparent throughout her interview. Raised in a “financially stable” home with a “really comfortable, great family,” Arin remembers her childhood as “just perfect.” Having experienced such a life in a pre-revolution Iran, Arin frequently mentioned her father and the positive model of parenting he provided her for. He filled her upbringing with wisdom and financial stability while Arin’s mother provided domestic care; together, her parents’ traditional, nuclear family structure served as Arin’s ideal home for her childhood of freedom. Following immigration and its life-altering effects, the family Arin went on to create vastly deviated from this model originally sought after.

           “I was the one who actually made all the decisions,” Arin explains. Fardin did not initially agree, but Arin decided that her family would immigrate and how and when they would do it. This contrasts typical gendered decision making in immigrant families (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, p. 57). However, Arin’s expectations hinged on traditional, Iranian gender roles; “a man is supposed to support all the family, financially, you know, whatever.” Furthermore, following traditional immigration policy, Fardin was the primary applicant with his wife and children listed as dependents. Creese and Dowling (2001) explain that notions of immigration and the migrant woman are rooted in the traditional, nuclear family (p. 6). As they argue, “the very definition of ‘skills’ so central to contemporary immigration policies in [Canada] is embedded in male breadwinner norms and masculine privilege” (Creese & Dowling, 2001, p. 6).

Accepted into Canada because of Fardin’s education as a civil engineer, Arin’s role as decision maker diminished as her husband assumed the responsibility of securing paid employment. Indeed, Arin appears to devalue her role as a secondary breadwinner: although she desired to continue her fashion career in Canada, she feels that Fardin, in his pursuit of an engineering job, “was under pressure a lot…much more pressure than me…All the pressure is on the guy.” Thus, in spite of the fact that Arin shouldered the emotional instability of her husband and two children—“I was there [in Canada] against all of them,” she explains—she upheld the traditional notion she, as the wife, should privilege Fardin’s status as primary breadwinner above her own.

           When Fardin failed to find employment in Canada, the family faced a dramatic split: he moved to the United States to work while Arin remained in Vancouver with the children. As Parreñas (2001) finds, families often become transnational to achieve necessary “goals of accumulating capital” (p. 106) and, in doing so, they “[subvert] modern family norms” (p. 105). With Fardin established in his industry, Arin explains, “everything was just the way he wanted and we wanted, except the part that he was again far from us.” Arin expresses a tension between the financial benefits of Fardin’s employment and the drawbacks of sudden single parenting. “I was alone,” she recalls, “I was working, I was going to school, I had to pick up [Fetneh and Nazboo], giving them rides; everything was on me.” Entering adolescence in a new country and language, Arin’s children required emotional support for which Arin felt solely responsible. “It was hard on me,” she states. Arin’s experiences reflect Parreñas’ (2001) findings of “the struggles undergone by transnational mothers in balancing the emotional and material needs of the children” (p. 86). Indeed, “studies have acknowledged the emotional stress incurred from prolonged separation” (Parreñas, 2001, p. 82); transnational families thus experience various emotional difficulties. After two years of transnational parenting, Arin decided that Fardin should return to Canada. Because he never found employment again, Arin regrets her decision to this day.  

           Parreñas (2001) argues that transnational arrangements lead to the “reconfiguration of the gender division of labor in families” (p. 85). This could be due to the fact that, “in the absence of their husbands, women’s work routines and responsibilities [expand]” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, p. 62). For six years following the transnational split, Fardin relentlessly job hunted until finally accepting work in a restaurant kitchen. Meanwhile, Arin secured full-time work at a bank. While this shift clearly reverses the gendered expectations of labor originally upheld by Arin and Fardin, Arin modestly justifies her decision to enter the paid labor force by explaining that she needed a distraction from her emotional turmoil. On the other hand, much like Russian unemployed men in Ashwin and Lytkina’s (2004) study, her husband was “mentally damaged” as a man who could not secure employment in his industry and finally accepted downward mobility.

           The changes Arin experienced mirrors those of Mexican immigrant families in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s study. Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) argues that, “through migration women and men reinterpret normative standards and creatively manipulate the rules of gender. As they do so, understandings about proper gendered behavior are reformulated” (96). These manipulations often result in decreased male dominance (p. 101) and increased benefits for women such as independence, participation in public life, and overall satisfaction (146). Thus, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) states that, although “male migrant labor is produced by patriarchy for the benefit of [state] capital” (p. 188), the conditions faced by immigrant families result in a fluid restructuring of “patriarchal gender relations” (p. 188).

To this day, Arin incredulously laments Fardin’s failure to enter the Canadian engineering industry; this sentiment reveals a discomfort with the gender role reversal that has occurred in her family. Today, Arin’s contribution to her family income surpasses that of Fardin. First as a “single” mother in a transnational family and then as primary breadwinner, Arin’s immigration experiences have drastically reassembled the traditional family structure she had once hoped for.

 Instability in the face of Racism

             Prior to immigration, Fardin suspected he may have difficulties finding employment in spite of his exceptional skill, to which Arin replied, “Canada is the best country in the world…especially because you’re going there because of your education…so when they say ‘yeah, please, you are welcome,’ it means that they can provide a job, right?” Fardin feared that, at forty, his age would deter employers from hiring him. Indeed, his attempts to find work in Canada both prior to and after his time in the United  States proved fruitless. When an Iranian friend told Arin and Fardin that Fardin’s “[non]-Caucasian” name on his resumé was likely the problem, Arin retorted, “No, my god, that’s unbelievable, it can’t be.” But when Fardin changed his name, he was suddenly flooded with responses and interviews. Unfortunately, none of the interviews resulted in a job offer. It was then that Arin first detected racism in Canada.

           Fardin’s experience of deskilling in the Canadian market supports Bauder’s (2003) assertion that “professional associations and the state actively exclude immigrant labor from the most highly desired occupations in order to reserve these occupations for Canadian-born and Canadian-educated workers” (p. 699). According to Bauder (2003), immigrants’ labor-market performance does not reflect their level of education (p. 700), and this process of exclusion “[facilitates] the reproduction of a professional class” (p. 702) based on nation of origin. The constant modification of criteria that valorizes domestic education perpetuates this reproduction (Bauder, 2003, p. 702), along with the manipulation of subjective categories such as “cultural knowledge” that excludes immigrants from professional groups like engineering (Bauder, 2003, p. 703). Faced with these barriers and depleting savings, many immigrants in Bauder’s (2003) study switched careers and accepted work far below their qualifications (p. 708). As with Fardin, such changes result in a dramatic loss of social status (Bauder, 2003, p. 709).    

           In her own workplace, Arin noticed that white employees quickly climbed the corporate ladder while her exemplary performance remained unrewarded. She felt that if she questioned management about their promotion decisions, they would say, “‘Oh, because she’s so talented, she’s so bright, she’s so…’ They never say the truth, right?...They always have the way to show that, oh, they didn’t say any bad thing, they didn’t mean it. That’s why you cannot prove it; it’s just a feeling.” Statistical research validates Arin’s “feeling:” immigrants are less likely to hold “managerial and professional occupations” (Balakrishnan & Hou, 1996, p. 315), are more likely to be credit constrained than non-immigrant families (Worswick, 1999, p. 167), and are found to have a lower average income than non-immigrants (Balakrishnan & Hou, 1996, p. 321).

In addition to management’s racist promotion choices, Arin’s coworkers frequently exhibit racist attitudes towards their customers, masking their frustration under the guise of language barriers. Arin herself experiences her white coworkers’ discomfort with non-English accents and languages when she speaks Farsi with fellow Iranian workers. “We are living in Canada,” the white coworkers joke; according to Arin, however, these jokes veil the fact that, “deep inside, they believe” that immigrants like Arin are not actually Canadian. Creese and Kambere (2002), in their research on African-Canadian women’s experiences with accent discrimination, argue that these women’s “embodied accents form a boundary that excludes them from full citizenship, and is the frequently named cause of disentitlement from jobs, housing, or respectful treatment in public institutions or public spaces” (p. 19).

Despite her company’s anti-discrimination policy, Arin does not feel comfortable reporting racist “jokes” without solid evidence. She believes that management cares about preserving multiculturalism only when it is “bringing money, bringing business…but deep inside, they don’t like it.” Over time, Arin’s acute sensitivity to racist undertones has increased and today she thus concludes that multicultural policies such as those enshrined at her workplace only serve capitalist motivations and fail to eradicate anti-immigrant sentiments harbored by those in power.

Balakrishnan and Hou’s (1996) research produces evidence of income and occupation disparities between non-visible minorities and visible minorities that cannot be explained by controlled variables such as age and language proficiency, and therefore most likely result from racial discrimination (p. 324). Anti-immigrant racism, responsible for Fardin’s experiences with deskilling and Arin’s difficulties with the glass ceiling of her career, has thus directly impacted the financial situation of Arin and her family. “We had better life in Iran,” Arin states, financially speaking. “But now we don’t.” She frequently regrets that she cannot provide her daughters with the material comforts they would have had in Iran, while acknowledging that they obtained religious freedom for the price of a decline in socioeconomic status. While succeeding in her quest for freedom, Arin feels that, due to their financial losses, “everything was damaged, like the whole family.” Thus, the reality of racism integral to immigration experiences proves a most definitive factor in Arin’s current family concerns.    

 Home is where the Family is: Immigration and Loss

             Tension around a state of liminality frequently characterized Arin’s journey through immigration. Before leaving Iran, she underwent three nerve-wracking years of applying then re-applying for immigration which she describes as “the worst time in my life.” The tension of preparing for migration while being uncertain of their ability to do so made Arin feel like a “prisoner” in her own country which, incidentally, she felt was “not [her] home anymore.” Upon arrival, Arin’s children and husband frequently pressured her to return; she promised her children that if they could not cope after six months, they would go back. Fardin also felt that if he could not secure employment, the family should take advantage of their house that remained in Iran. As it became clear that they were, in fact, settling down in Vancouver, her family acquired an ambivalent understanding of home. “I know future is here [in Canada],” Arin’s daughter Fetneh expressed to her, “but still my heart is there [in Iran].” Moreover, Arin began to realize that migration had severed the important ties with their extended family.

           In Iran, Arin’s role as daughter continued to be as prominent as that of mother. Fardin faced deep guilt upon leaving Iran as, with his only brother also abroad, his mother remained alone. Arin’s children frequently lamented the loss of their aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins after immigrating, and Arin herself now expresses regret: “I missed all those days that I could be with my nieces, the way, when they were growing up, the way I could be nice auntie, the way I always dreamed of…And I’m missing all of those parts.” Thus, the loss of extended kinship relations presents a gaping hole in Arin’s family today.

           Seeking a new extended kinship network, Arin encountered a cultural impediment to forming friendships that could replace the relationships so intimately linked with her family in Iran. “I’m not saying—because I do have really good friends, my colleagues, and—that they are not my friends, but it’s just different, it’s just different. I cannot explain it, it’s just different,” Arin states. Cultural differences in standards of reciprocity create rifts in her relationships in Canada, and Arin feels no security in her ability to rely on her new friends for the kind of support needed in extended kinship networks. This may result from what Swanton (2005) terms the “territorializing [of] differences” (p. 18) whereby, despite the formation of cross-cultural friendships, “discourses of irreconcilable difference and ‘undesirability’” (p. 18) posit Iranians as Others who never truly belong in Vancouver.

In his study of Iranian immigrants in Vancouver, Swanton (2005) identifies themes of loss and of Iran as the motherland (p. 23). In their need for belonging, immigrants find themselves displaced, distanced from the motherland while struggling to create a new home for themselves. As Swanton (2005) argues, “ideas of home do not simply refer to collections of inanimate objects, but involve the ways in which we feel homes as ours, through the presence of habits and the effects of spouses, children, parent, companions and so forth” (p. 33). Some immigrant women form new networks and achieve a sense of belonging through community work and organizing (Miedema & Tatsoglou, 2003). Arin, however, has not achieved a new sense of home as comfortable as that she possessed in Iran. Thus, immigration has forced Arin to reconfigure her notion of family and home. Although her immediate family remains intact, the absence of a network to substitute the extended kinship relationships she had in Iran ultimately leaves, in her words, “a huge gap.”

 Conclusion

             Undergoing the tenuous process of migration inevitably alters the structures, dynamics, hopes and realities of families such as Arin’s. As Arin discovered, the sacrifices she has made as a mother unexpectedly produce a string of effects inextricable from one another and profoundly impacting her family; far from the traditional Iranian family model Arin once aspired to, her family following immigration now adapts to changing gender relations, the adversity of racism, and the absence of extended kin. These findings thus reveal that immigrant families, by virtue of journeying into the Canadian state from the outside, most intimately experience how the interlocking structures of the standard North American family and the hierarchy of privilege embedded in Canada’s economy shape individual experiences in the private sphere of their homes.

           Regarding the shifting gender roles in her family, Arin seemed somewhat uncomfortable as she so lamented Fardin’s current employment while failing to praise her own accomplishments. Indeed, Ashwin and Lytkina (2004) find that such challenges to gender normative households can prove unsettling for all family members (p. 199). As they argue, however, “the household is an important sphere in which men could potentially gain a sense of efficacy and identity” (Ashwin & Lytkina, 2004, p. 196). Furthermore, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) found that Mexican immigrant women benefited greatly when flourishing in the public sphere (p. 100). Perhaps future research could further probe the tangible benefits for both men and women who reconfigure gender relations throughout migration and consciously reevaluate their family structure without privileging either the public or private sphere over the other.    

           Another question mark lingering in my mind is the potential for Arin to find relationships or communities that could in fact fill the void left by her extended family. Miedema and Tatsoglou (2003) found that immigrant women in the Maritimes discovered communities through activism, while Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) champions the benefits of immigrant-specific communities (p. 118). In his study of Iranians in Vancouver, Swanton (2005) unfortunately encountered what he describes as “inclusion by virtue of Othering” (p. 19). Thus, future studies ought to examine what kinds of friendships, communities, organizations or groups Vancouver could provide for Iranian families in order to satisfy their need for adequate support networks.

           The research I present here further informs an increasing understanding of the gendered and racialized nature of immigration in Canada. Hopefully this understanding will serve future immigrant families so that they do not feel “tricked…by Canadian immigration policies and labor-market regulations that do not disclose to immigrants prior to their arrival in Canada that their human capital will be devaluated” (Bauder, 2003, p. 713). This understanding might also assist the feminist project of recognizing and serving postmodern family structures, such as the transnational family, that today find themselves largely limited in a patriarchal society. As Arin believes, understanding is the key to change. Referring to all Canadians, Arin states that, “if they learn deep inside to respect and to understand…to understand different cultures, different people, then the world will be paradise. Everywhere would be just great to live.”  

References

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 [1] Arin did not want her last name included.