#i think my new antidepressants are starting to kick in? idk | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sampauwelsschrijft · 4 years ago

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Antidepressants are so weird.

Like, you forget to take them one day and the next day you’re this anxious mess and you’re constantly dissociating and your brain is so slow and you’re just in this constant state of panicking without reason while you feel like you’re floating and also you have no idea what the fuck is going on 100% of the time.

But also, that feeling when you start taking them for the first time? It’s so strange.

I remember the first time I started taking meds for my anxiety was when I was in high school and I remember just feeling so calm while walking to school the next monday? I was usually so anxious in the morning, especially on mondays, and I had literally not known it any other way for my whole life, but suddenly I realized I was not stressing out at all.

And then the side effects started kicking in and I was so fucking tired during the last class of the day and it was terrible because I had a very busy week and I was up late working on group projects every night.

But at the same time, it was great that I was taking the meds that week because, like I said, I was up late working on group projects in other peoples houses and eating at their place and I was socializing and masking my autism the whole day every day for a week and I never once had a panic attack and I had only one meltdown in that whole week.

And than the side effects went away and I felt so weird without the anxiety that I had known for whole my life? Like, obviously it was still there, but so much less? Before I started taking the antidepressants, I had panic attacks almost every week, but suddenly I could go literal months without panic attacks. And the suicidal thoughts I had also known for a very long time... just gone.

The same happened when I started taking new meds two months ago. The first week was terrible, I was really tired and I had these two days were I had so much executive dysfunction that I couldn’t even get up to make tea, but than the side effects went away and suddenly I felt so much calmer than before and I felt like I had so much more time in a day? And than I started going on walks and last week I even went to buy popcorn alone and that’s a really big accomplishement for me.

But the strangest thing is probably other peoples reactions when they hear I’m on antidepressants.

My grandma is great at that, saying things like ‘you don’t need meds, you just need to get over it’ in such a sweet voice and she really means it like advice. (No shade to her, she’s a great grandma and she’s really sweet and she really means it well, she just doesn’t understand it.) But it’s so weird to me, because, like, you won’t tell someone who’s taking medication for a phyisical condition that they need to stop taking their meds and get over it, right? So what’s the difference with me taking meds for a mental condition I’ve been struggling with my whole life? I’ve never been so happy as in the two years since I started taking antidepressants. I’ve been doing so many thing I would have never seen myself doing.

My grandma made it sound like ‘it’s just my age’, she literally said she ‘felt the same way when she was my age but she just got over it and than she got her drivers license even though she was scared of driving’, and I was just like, I’ve literally never seen you drive a car in my twenty years of existence but that’s great for you I guess?

And the excuse she gives me as to why I shouldn’t take my meds is because medication is always dangerous and it has side effects? And like, yes, I know, but panic attacks aren’t fun either? Suicidal thoughts are dangerous too? Meltdowns are dangerous when you have them at the wrong time or around the wrong people? And really... feeling scared and stressed without any reason every second of the day is just... terrible, and if taking pills is going to help me with that, I will take those pills.

The weirdest thing is that, while she’s saying that to me, she’s also constantly reminding my grandpa that he needs to take his pills, and I just wonder what makes her think the two are so diffenent?

Again, my grandma is a wonderful lady and I really don’t want you to think bad of her, but I just don’t understand why she finds it so hard to understand that mental illnesses are a serious thing?

Another dude once asked me why I don’t take my antidepressents only on the days I need them, like how I take my asthma medication only when I know I’m going to do sports or have a lot of allergies that day... and I’m just like... that’s not how it works? Not all medication is something you can just take whenever? A lot of medication, not just antidepressants, need time to start working, and you also just can’t stop with them out of nowhere, because that’s going to give you withdrawel symptoms?

And he’s reason for asking that was that he believed antidepressants make you a different person and, just, how? Are you trying to say my anxiety and depressive episodes are my personality or something? In my experience, antidepressants have actually helped me be more like myself. When I’m not constantly stuck in my own head, I have time and motivation to do the things I like and be myself, and when I’m not constantly anxious about what other people might think of me, I stop masking my autism.

These kind of people aren’t the weirdest ones though, one of my high school teachers has taken that price.

In my last year of high school, we had a trip to Berlin, so we had to fill in this form about our medical conditions/ medical history and allergies and the medication we take and stuff like that. I filt out the form completely normally. I stated my allergies, I wrote that I had light asthma and might have difficulties riding a bike because of it, and I guess I must have written about my scoliosis and the jaw surgery I had had that summer (or maybe the summer before that, idk, my memory doesn’t really do timelines to be honest), and I wrote that I was autistic and had anxiety and that I sometimes had depressive episodes because I had had a depression when I was 14. And than I just wrote that I took medication for my asthma and antidepressants for my anxiety. And maybe I wrote down some other stuff, I really don’t remember how detailed the form had to be.

A few weeks went by, until the teachers started doing their paperwork for the Berlin trip and the teacher that was organizing it all started going trough the medical forms and read that I took antidepressants... and suddenly she just started treating me differently.

Like, at that point it wasn’t really a secret anymore that I had anxiety and was in the process of getting diagnosed with autism, all the teachers were supposed to know it, but I guess after reading that I actually took medication for it, this teacher started realizing how serious it was?

She began skipping me whenever we had to read aloud in class and she started being extra nice to me and even giving me better grades, because, idk, she felt bad for me or something?

And than, during the actual Berlin trip, she was constantly keeping her eyes on me. It was weird, because we were all 17/18 or even 19 at that point and the teachers mostly just let us do whatever, but this teacher just constantly came talking to me while I was just having fun with my friends. There was even this point where we were at a fair and this teacher saw me standing somewhere alone and started almost babying me thinking my friends had abandoned me, and I was literally just like... my friend is right there buying food for us? Why do you instantly think I’ve been abandoned when you see me alone? My friend is actually helping me and buying food for me right now? Like... what?

And than she almost seemed sad when she actually saw my friend handing me popcorn. Like, lady, how big is your saviour complex?

Well, anyway, I guess all this post is trying to say is that 1) forgetting to take your antidepressants makes you feel weird and like you don’t even exist, and 2) people react weird to mental illness

#actuallyautistic #autism #autisme #anxiety #antidepressants #persoonlijk #mental health #mental illness #depression

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mysleepdeprivedass · 4 years ago

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Another ML fanfiction idea

And here we go for another prompt fic idea that I got while reading a fanfiction on AO3. I want to write this idea but I’m too lazy for writing a whole fanfiction.

And just want to keep in my head but it was driving me crazy sooo let's go.

Btw I inspired by the fanfiction MDR by Yilena (on AO3) (@xiueryn on tumblr) (also I haven’t finish the fanfiction yet but I need to let go the idea of my head)

(let's go for translate everything a wrote again T^T and I just saw how long a wrote, the translation it's gonna be looong x.X also idk some term are correctly translate sorry if it's not)

Also warning, i’m going to talk briefly about eating disorder, bullying and suicide so skip the part in italic if the idea or the word can triggered you.

Have a nice reading on my 2.am writing idea. \0/

AU steamer / youtuber Marinette

Marinette begging steaming around her fifteen, and she become quickly know for her skills for some game

Marinette have now like 19 yrs old, almost 20.

She plays a lot of different games.

At first (when she was 15 ) she wasn't doing face cam steaming. After a years and a half, she start face cam but disguise. Her disguise is, a clothes always in polka dots red and black, and she have a mask which hide almost all her face and she wear a red wig (she have different wig, pixie cut, big curly, straits, ect,... But they're all red)

On twitch she is know as Ladybug, and she have a YouTube channel where she post all her rediffusion of her twitch live.

Marinette have a big community verry supportive and nice. She's the kinda of girl that going to play with her fan during live if she met them on the game.

She doing some explained and tip live on game that she's really good at or that she's love.

Her favorite game are Ultimate Mecha Strike saga. And a new independent MMORPG game call " The Tale of Miraculous" a kinda fantasy/fantastic game, that's become more and more difficult when your reach a levels.

Also it's a no-miraculous idea

At first, when she started live’s, qhe was doing a lot, like every night she was doing a live which ended around 4 or 5am. But after a big meltdown on live (she was around 17 years olds) she make a calender, which sometine change depending on he mood.

Monday Night : Games of her choice, most of the time she play at TTOM (The Tale Of Miraculous) or fighting games. From 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.

Wednesday Night : if she started a let’s play, she is doing the let’s plays, if she not she’s doing two or three games, most of the time horror games or strategy games. From 8p.m to midnight or 1 a.m.

Calender most of the time :

Friday Night : chill night, she talk or debates with viewers while playing at Minecraft or she opening fan mail or for some occasion she is cooking. From 8p.m to random but between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.

Sunday Night : Let’s plays or games selected by the community. From 8p.m to Midnight.

Marinette has become very hermits and go out just a few time. She works at her parents bakery and has her own shop (known as Ladybug) her community know that she makes homemade clothes and she has a lot of customers from her community but also from famous people.

Every other week she doing a live between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m. in addition, where she plays indie games or flash games or during fashion week (or any fashion show) she like to do reviews about it and commentary.

Marinette finished school at home because of harassment, she had ended up making several suicide attempts, and had a severe eating disorder and was anorexic

She suffered bullying very early, already in elementary school, and it got worse in middle school where the physical attack was violent. She got kicks, push down the stair, she got a lot a fractures, spit on, etc,..

After a big lynching after school, she try to kill herself, she got hospitalized and her parents finnaly knew about what she suffered. After that she become homeschooled.

A lot of cosplayers ask for commisions.

Chloé had started insults her in primary school but had stop everything before middle school except that others took over, like Lila.

Chloe apologized to Marinette after her suicide attempt. Even though Marinette and Chloe are not best friends, the two get along. Chloé always feels it's her fault that things got there

During her convalescence it’s when that she became Ladybug but was not in face cam.

She started streaming after being released from the hospital

She had a general ES bac (it’s a degree in french school, if you want i can explain french school in a other post... because I’m french ._.) and she studied fashion by correspondence.

For the 3 years anniversary of her twitch channel, she explain her firt years as the stramers, he past, and explain that twitch literaly save her live.

She self-harm for a long time (betwenn 11 and 16 years old)

She still have drugs and antidepressant, and she is follow by a doctor for her eating disorder.

During her depression, she developed agoraphobia, she doesn’t go to convention where she’s invited because of that, also because she wants to avoid overloading Tikki.

Fu is her psychologist.

Tikki is her service dog because she have anxiety attacks and panic attacks and she can hurt them during those.

Tikki is a Labrador, viewers sometine see her during live (try to climb on Marinette lap’s) or hear her bark (very rare but can alway happen)

Marinette loved roasted the clothing collections and clothing choices in video games. She also loves talking about RuPaul Drag Race.

She’s openly bisexual and gender fluid,

She lives in a small apartment not far from her parents to be able to stream quietly.(And without disturb her parents)

Viewers know other room of her apartment. She stream on green screen, but when she live and do open fan mail she is in front of a wall with drawings and gifts from fans that she received. They also know her kitchen but she rarely on the kitchen.

She don’t do much live on the Kitchen but she doing some videos edited on cook video for explain some bases and some recepis. It is to teach the beginner how to cook or the person who is on a tight budget.

Her first cooking live become a meme. She fall several times, managed to stick an egg to the ceiling (god know how), set fire to heroven, and spilled milk and flour all over her floor.

In her live chill, call “let's talk little, let's talk well” in her playlist of rebroadcast on her youtube channel, she brings people on discord to give their opinion on the subject or their experience. She has with subjects from religion, the LGBTQ community, mental illness, to motor disease, to lighter subjects like which animal people find the cutest or whether or not she should go and throw eggs at her neighbor that she hates or she talks about the series or TV show she watches.

Marinette only go out, for work, appointment or hang out with Luka, Juleka and Rose, all are her childhood best friends.And all know that’s she is Ladybug.

Marinette is known for screaming when she plays horror games and there's quite a lot of compilation of her falling off her chair or screaming, often accompanied by Tikki who jumps on her knees think of a panic attack and suddenly she falls off her chair because of Tikki.

*scene*

Marinette after a litlle jump scar :

“ son of bi-” * Tikki jump on her laps*

Luka is also a stramer mostly music related, but he some night doing game stream. He also have a youtube channel dedicate to music. He is call The Viperion Silencio.

“what the fu- !” *fall off her chair with Tikki on her, Tikki laying on her*

Luka and Marinette dated for a year and a half before realizing that they were better as friends that as couple. Their get along even better after they break.

Hours :

Tuesday night: 8:30 p.m. to midnight, play video games

Friday evening: 8:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., review and play with Marinette at Minecraft

On twitch he sing or do some music reviews that viewers recommend. And if not play

He always showed his faces.

On youtube he does covers, original songs, has critical videos. All the videos are directed by him and edited by Juleka, him or Rose.

He also have odd jobs

Saturday: 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., sing, some reviews and a the end he play video games

Nino, Alya and Adrien, are TTOM players, and Adrien is a huge Ladybug fan along with Alya.

He has always been close to Marinette and helped a lot especially for her eating disorder. It helps her eat and regain a healthy relationship with her body and food.

Nino and Alya hang out in each other's apartment in turn

Nino is not a big fan of Ladybug but likes to watch her lives sometine.

Nino and Alya live close to each other and are dating

On the other hand, he's a huge fan of what Luka does.

Nino meets Adrien on a dating site, he made a account for joking (before he dated Alya) and the two got really well, and they started exchange discord, and phone number, playing together, and they already saw each other.

Sometine, Alya and Nino go to Paris and sometime Adrien go to Bordeaux.

Nino and Aly live in Bordeaux.

Alya joined them and the three are very close and have already met in Paris.

Nino, Alya and Adrien are 20 years old, soon 21.

Inside joke between Adrien and Nino, on the fact that Nino “cheats” on Alya with Adrien or vice versa.

Too many “bro” between Adrien and Nino, and too many bro joke

Like, I imagined, Alya hant out at Nino place, the three playing at TTOM.

Nino die

Adrien it’s like “Noo bro, you’re my whole world bro, you can’t live me broo”

Nino is like “ Broo I hace to leave, Bro my end is close, I love you soo much broo, live my life broo”

And Alya his laying on her stomach on Nino bed, head buried in Nino sheets and she growls and insults both them and call them "drama queen"

Alya is a huge sore loser and a salty loser.

In the evening and especially when he is tired Nino is a big game trollers.

Alya is a Ladybug Twitch Admins, she was one of the first on Marinette's channel and she quickly was in her Discord. She chats a lot with her on Discord. And she helps Marinette to make special videos where there is real editing. Other admins do it too.

Adrien, Nino meets Marinette thanks to TTOM because Marinette has created a beginner party where no one knows her, she becomes friends with Nino (whom she quickly destroy) and TIN TIN TIN group chat between the 4 (with Alya in it).

Kim is Nino's childhood friend and he started playing TTOM to spent time with his bro, and ended up in group chat (with Alix because he drag her in the game too), he's not good at games and and just a cannonball but he like let off frustration by beat out the hell of the enemy

Baby step by baby step, the group chat add more people

He live with Alix in Toulouse, their roomate.

Alix plays a bit at TTOM but plays a lot of flash and horror games.

Ivan and Mylène have 22 years old and are a couple, they don't know Ladybug much, but they've already received a lot of donation from her for their environmental association and Marinette has advertised for them for free

Alix likes Ladybug but she is not her favorite streamer.she understand Marinette's struggle on her eating disorder because she had eating disorder since she was a child, Kim helps her a lot with it

Nathaniel lives in Auvergne with Marc, the two work together on comics but Nathalie also works as a freelance illustrator and he has already made the banner and stickers for steamers and youtubers, including Marinette.

Ivan and Mylène do vlogs and have a site and an environmental association that Marinette really appreciates.

Max is a little streamer well known to be one of Marinette's best rivals, especially on Ultimate Mecha Strike 3.

He also does video thumbnails and cover video illustrations for a lot of youtubers including Luka.

Nathaniel started chatting with Marinette because of this (Marinette commissioned him for her website, and her channels) and the two became very good friends.

He lives in Strasbourg and works in engineering stuff.

He does very little live but has a very loyal audience because he's a goddamn god on some games.

And some compilation of their best roasted and sassy moment are on youtube.

The two fight each year for the prize of UMS3

The two like to throw shades at each other when they playing together.. Very big sassy and roasted moment.

* A bit like RuPaul's Reading season 5 between Alaska and Alyssa Edward * (Yeah i’m kinda in some fever of RPDR right now)

Like :

There is a roasted meme running in their respective communities, because Max had been champion for two years when Marinette arrived and took that cup from him.

“Hey Bug In ! Here Ladybug, I'm with our dear friend The Gamer, undefeated champion of UMS3 oh whait -

They talk on discord

Okay I finish to translate everything, and shame on my I finish juste by copy paste from google translate.

* gasp then clap * bravo, it was a good one, Miss [insert thing that Marinette lost or meme of her]

And their conversation is basically shades and meme.

Bruh I wrote a lot :o

I don’t know if I’m going to do some update on it. Give me your opinion on it ! Also you can take some idea just tag me and let’s me see what you have do ^^ !

Good Night

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self-critical-automaton · 6 years ago

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Whats Been Going On With Me Lately

So basicly the TLDR is:

I’ve been super ill in weird and new brain ways since about mid-december, when withdrawal from my antidepressants resulted in strange intense psychological events, and I’ve been dealing with the fallout and day-to-day distress ever since. I’m terrified that i might have suffered permanent alterations/damage to my mental state, but who can say.

Details under the cut for anyone who wants to know how ive been doing, or wants to hear about what happens when you quit a high dose of fluoxetine cold turkey after five or six years.

Or for anyone who is going through something similar and wants some info/hope, since withdrawal experiences seem to be super idiosyncratic and variable and its almost impossible to find detailed descriptions.

I’d really appreciate it being read, esp. by people in my life, but dont feel compelled or whatever idk i dont make the rules but srsly please read it if you can it took a lot of time and effort

PS: this and several other articles on that blog were a huge help to me getting through the first couple phases, if you’re having trouble with withdrawal please go read PPS: fine to reblog, in fact please do

In 2017 I started getting painful physical side effects from my antidepressants, which gradually got worse until in lateish-2018 I decided to stop taking them outright. Everyone ever says you shouldn’t quit antidepressants cold-turkey, and they are right, but I’d been taking them inconsistently due to the pain, and I was beginning to suspect they’d stopped helping me anyway, so it seemed the best option.

I quit in probably mid-October and for a couple months felt much the same as usual, but then around the 13th of December it all kicked off. At first I had no idea what was happening, and I thought I was suffering a sudden and intense flu coinciding with a bad depressive spike, but after a couple days I figured out that withdrawal can be offset by weeks or months in rare cases, and decided this is what must be happening. That first round of Withdrawal Time had a few soft-edged but distinct phases (lasting about a week each), and I went through by far the worst experience in my entire life, closely followed by the second-worst and then third-worst.

Round One Start! Phase One: intense existential dread

It kicked of very suddenly, around the 13th december, getting rapidly worse over a couple days. I was paralysed with fear as my mind sunk into thinking in infinite circles, unable to do anything other but endlessly contemplate and debate morbid philosophical topics, forced to confront the inevitability of death, emptiness of life, terror of oblivion, impossibility of afterlife, and so on. I also suffered sensory experiences similar to those ive heard described by people who take drugs like LSD, or very severe fever dreams. Sensations of expanded perception, becoming trapped in imaginary scenarios on other planes, that sort of thing.

In this phase I ate almost nothing, and over that week lost 4 or 5 kg. I also had some flu symptoms, mostly as fevers and chills, and could ony, really sleep in short bursts of a couple hours each. There was very little I could safely occupy myself with, as almost all media (books, games, film, fiction and nonfiction, everything really) would in some way trigger me into thinking about an existential topic, and then the terror would resume. I spent what time I could working to fix the problems with my life that I had suddenly become aware of (my social isolation, my medial issues, my mental health, etc), so I made a lot of phone calls, doctor visits, and applied to some mental health counseling services. I also started looking for avenues to make friends and acquaintances online and in person, and did a lot of research on antidepressant withdrawal.

Towards the end of this phase, the dread got more manageable and began to ease off, and I found I could play simple puzzle games to help occupy myself during the day. Listening to certain podcasts also was a source of relief and distraction. However, things remained bad in the morning and evenings, and I ended up referring to these times as ‘morning hell’ and ‘evening hell’. Also, I began to keep a basic daily log of my symptoms.

Phase Two: generalized anxiety

As I segued into this phase, the existential dread mostly withdrew during the day, leaving instead a sense of severe generalized anxiety. I’ve had issues with anxiety in the past, but it’s always been event-related or social, so Generalized Anxiety Disorder style anxiety was an interesting addition to my mental health cocktail. I still suffered the existential dread, but primarily during the Morning and Evening Hells, and as occasional spikes during the day. Mostly, I felt like it was off to one side somewhere, and felt anxiety about thinking about existential topics.

I got little done, but was able to occupy myself with podcasts, housework, simple games, and (oddly enough) Star Trek: The Original Series. Almost anything else I tried would worsen the anxiety, and threaten to trigger existential dreads. During this time I started sleeping more normally, but also began waking every night with chest pains and leg pains, which of course caused a great deal of anxiety about heart issues and blood clots. I also began to feel like I had begun to ‘wake up’ after having sleepwalked through the past year or so.

Phase Three: misc badfeels and weird sensory effects

As phase 2 segued into this one, around christmas day, the anxiety started to recede during the day. I’d get a window of safety varying from half an hour to a few hours, usually starting in the early afternoon. I began to leave the house more, going for walks with my partner, which could occupy me safely during bad feeling times. During those windows, I often still felt bad, but it felt like a ‘normal’ bad, like depression and ennui, rather than the very active generalized anxiety or severe dread. I also began to be able to read again, and to play games more widely. I committed to attending some local social events (some board games/RPG things, and a support group) and mostly tried to get on with life.

I was frequently quite sluggish and slow, and didn't usually get much work done, even napping occasionally. As my days improved, my nights worsened, with bad sleep and bad dreams. I would also have odd brief sensory effects, such as hallucinations and waking dreams. For the first time since withdrawal started, I began to worry that I was slipping backwards and getting worse again. Up until that point, I had felt like, as awful as I was feeling, there was a slow but consistent improvement.

By early January I was having inconsistent bouts of the existential stuff and the generalized anxiety in the day, but looking back probably not as intensely as in the earlier phases.

Phase Four: inconsistent rehash

Phase four was similar to phase three, except without the consistency that phase three had (at least earlier on) of ‘morning bad, day safe, evening bad’. It also lasted longer than the ‘about a week’ of previous phases. I had ups and downs of general bad feelings throughout the day, with occasional spikes or longer bouts of existential fear or generalized anxiety, and I developed an aversion to going to bed (as most mornings would feel worse than evenings). I usually slept badly, and I started waking up during what I’m pretty sure were sleep-panic-attacks an hour or so after going to sleep. Chest pains and so on were very common and worrying, so I talked to the doctor a lot and ended up on some cardio waiting lists.

I had some depressive episodes which felt very much like the kind of depressive episodes I’ve had over my life, and about the same topics, though more intensely. It was almost comforting, in a back-to-normal sort of way.

Frankly, this whole phase felt like a random jumble of previous phase symptoms and pre-withdrawl mental health stuff, almost like dimming lightbulbs on an old electrical system, fading in and out and going on and off randomly and unpredictably.

Towards the end of January, I had a bad bout of flu, but during that time I felt a lot better in mental health terms. I don’t know if this was due to the distraction of a big obvious ‘thing to survive’ or if it was a natural upswing as part of the arc of that phase. After I got over the flu, I had a couple days of existential stuff reasserting itself, and I was worried that it was a second bout of Phase One, but I stopped recording my log on the 5th of February, so it’s hard to recall anything past this.

Interstitial Period

I’m pretty sure that for most of February, I felt ‘back to normal’, and was feeling more-or-less how I had been before withdrawal kicked off. That said, my capacity to occupy myself has not really recovered. I’m occasionally able to play games or read, but I often have a bad sense of ennui. This may be my natural yearly Seasonal Affective Disorder, or a natural depressive episode (I have consistently if infrequently had times where I’m unable to occupy myself and suffer ennui, just as part of being a depressed person), but I’ve not had one this long before.

I have a strong fear that my cognition/way of being/mental state has been permanently altered by that first phase, that it in some way ‘opened my eyes’ and now I will never be able to go back to how I was. I’m scared that I might never be free of this existential dread lurking in the back of my mind, but also trying to dissemble, forget, or distract myself feels like a foolish naivety. Its something we all have to face, so postponing the inevitable is pointless, but also I can’t overcome or accept it, so I’m trapped in a limbo.

Round Two?

After feeling mostly ’back to normal’ for a while, I’ve been having some bad times again. For about a week or so (end of febuary/beginning of march), I’ve been having existential fears and the ‘big mix of generalized bad feeling’ again, on and off during the day, and especially in mornings/evenings. I was very afraid that it was the beginning of a downslope into a full repeat of this entire cycle, but it’s been pretty consistent so far, rather than getting worse.

I’m hoping that this is indeed Round Two, and that its just a lot less bad than Round One, which would be consistent with what I’ve read about this stuff.

Final Thoughts

Phase one was the worst thing ive gone through in my life, but on good days I feel somewhat optimistic that it’s had a ‘rock bottom’ kind of effect, that I can find some positive things to come out of it.

It’s given me some perspective, and it’s helped me come out of a sleepwalking time in my life. I feel what i’m missing in my life much more keenly (social isolation/ lack of friends, lack of passion, lack of purpose/drive/meaning in my life), but I’m also able to work on them to some extent for the first time in years.

That said, I know these take a lot of time and work to fix, but it’s hard not to look at the glacially slow progress i’ve made as ‘no progress in basically three months’, and sink back into the things-will-never-get-better-so-why-try kind of depression.

I’m gonna keep trying, though.

#mental health #Withdrawal #mental #health #depression #anxiety #antidepressants #ssri #recovery

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anatraart · 6 years ago

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When You’re Gone Part 2

Read it on AO3 HERE

Alexander awoke the next morning to a knock on the door. Groaning, he rolled out of bed, slipping on his sweater before opening the door. Nobody needed to see his scars yet. He didn’t want anyone to know that much.

When he opened the door, he was greeted by an equally tired-looking John. “I was chosen to come let you know to get ready. George figured we could all go out to breakfast, then go shopping after.”

Alexander nodded. “Alright. I’ll be down in 15.” John nodded in response and wandered off. Alexander went over to his bag and grabbed his only other set if clothing, walking in the bathroom to take a quick shower and wash his face. Alexander ended up throwing his hair into a messy bun, letting a few stands free so they framed his face.

He did one last onceover, deciding to keep the sweater on in hopes to keep the little respect he had from these people. When he decided it was okay, he left the room, shitting the lights off. Alexander made his way downstairs, recalling the few times he had been through these halls. It was so odd to think that this was his home.

That’s when it hit him. This was his life now. He’s probably be kicked out sooner or later, either from his sexuality or all the medication he takes. He’d be with another family soon enough. Everyone said it always happened.

Alexander took a breath to calm himself before heading down the stairs and making his way to the voices he heard, which happened to be coming from the living room. When he entered, all eyes turned on him, so he decided to look down.

The first person to speak was Martha. “Dear you know it’s warm outside right now, right?”

Alexander nodded. “Mhm.” he didn’t want to deal with it. They couldn’t know. He had to be careful if he wanted to stay.

Alexander watched nervously as John and Lafayette gave each other a look, almost as if they knew something. Lafayette whispered something to John, who nods and stands up, walking to Alexander. Without warning, John grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out of the room, earning curious looked from George and Martha.

As soon as they were out of earshot, John let go of his wrist, arms crossed. “Would you like to spill the truth?”

Alexander stopped and stared at him. John’s face and posture held no real anger or aggression. “Not exactly.”

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have snooped, but I saw you were on antidepressants. Now sure, it said nowhere it was an antidepressant, but unlike everyone else here I know one when I see one.” Alexander’s eyes widened, and he admitted defeat.

“I just… You shouldn’t have…” John shook his head.

“I won’t say anything if you tell me. Please.” John looked at him with pleading eyes.

“F-fine…” Alexander shakily pulled up one of the sleeves. He closed his eyes, waiting to be yelled at, but without a moment’s notice he felt someone pull him into a hug. Warily, he opened his eyes, noticing it was John, who had hugged him.

“Hey, It’s okay alright?” Alexander nodded, and John pulled away from him. “Please though, come talk to me if you feel like doing this again? I know how it feels more than you’d know.”

Before he could ask what he meant, John walked off, back into the living room. Pulling the sleeve down and wiping his face to make sure he hadn’t spilt any tears, Alexander followed him back inside, plastering a smile to his face.

“Alright, well if everyone’s ready let’s get going.” George said when Alexander walked in the room. Alexander nodded and quietly followed everyone out.

Alexander ended up being next to John in the far back seat of the car, choosing on sitting there and enjoying the quiet over conversing, only speaking when someone would ask him a question directly.

When they arrived at the mall, Alexander let himself be dragged out by an overly excited Lafayette, followed by a smiling John. Alexander wanted to complain and ask where they were going, but seeing how excited Lafayette was, he let it slide.

The first place Alexander was dragged into was a Macy’s. It started out okay, but once Alexander looked at one of the price tags he begun to freak out a little, constantly asking if they were sure they were fine with spending so much on him.

Considering he had grown up with barely enough money to eat, he was appalled at the prices. 40 dollars for a pair of jeans seemed excessive to him. The entire time, John and Lafayette kept telling him not to worry about it. At one point, John even felt the need to pull him aside to remind him that it wasn’t an issue for the Washingtons. Alexander decided to just let it go, figuring it couldn’t be that bad. When they were done, Alexander, Lafayette, and John were able to get away, deciding to go get lunch.

They went to a place called Panda Express, which confused Alexander as he had never heard of the place. It turned out, it was Chinese food, which Alexander also discovered was delicious.

“So, I’m kinda curious. Someone mentioned you had an older brother. Where is he?” Lafayette asked while they are, looking genuinely curious. Alexander wanted to yell at him for asking about James, but ultimately decided against it. Lafayette probably doesn't know what happened.

“He… he died in the hurricane.” Good. It wasn’t rude, and it hopefully will shut off all questions.

“What was he like?” John gave him a small smile. Shit.

“Oh… He was amazing. When our cousin committed suicide, he was the only person I had left. He actually convinced someone to keep it a secret as to keep us out of the system.”

“The… system?” Lafayette looked at wim with a mix of confusion and curiosity.

“Foster system.” John answered for him. Alexander shot a smile at John, who returned it with a nod.

»»————- ————-««

John wanted to scream. He was trying so hard not to flirt with Lafayette’s new foster brother, and it was so hard. He didn’t even know if Alexander liked guys.

He has mentioned his little dilemma to Lafayette, who had thought he was joking. But holy shit the little immigrant was adorable. He was trying, and had hoped Alexander hadn’t noticed the looks Lafayette would give him whenever he would say anything that could remotely be seen as flirting.

He felt bad when Alexander’s brother was brought up during lunch. He had noticed the brief flash of sadness overtake him, assuming Lafayette didn’t as he continued the conversation.

John was grateful when George and Martha came up to them, quickly extinguishing the conversation. Turned out they had added Alexander to their phone plan, telling him they needed to be able to contact him. Alexander kept telling them they didn’t need to, despite George being insistent.

Alexander ended up giving in, and John added his number into Alexander’s phone.

“I’m so adding you into the group chat.” Lafayette said, smiling deviously.

“Oh my god Laf, no. Not the big one. Let’s not kill him with everyone’s bullshit yet.”

“It’s fine, John. I’m kinda curious anyways.” a few minutes later his phone dinged, and opening up the notification he wanted to scream.

Baguette has added Hammy to The Squad™

TurtleBoi: Oh god Laf. you're going to kill him. Pegs Play nice

PegLeg: I haven’t said anything yet!

BurningThings: Wait, Laf is this the new foster brother you mentioned?

Baguette: Yep!

MyPantsAreHot: Ahh. So you’re the one John mentioned.

Hammy: Wait, what?

TurtleBoi: Nothing. Don’t worry about it

NeverSatisfied: Guys stop it. John was right. You’re all gonna kill him.

BurningThings: Aww.

PegLeg: I think we should all introduce ourselves.

MyPantsAreHot: Ang, Liza is Peggy alright? She just said something smart.

NeverSatisfied: Idk might be sick

PegLeg: Hey!

Baguette: I agree with Peggy though. Alexander has no clue who anyone is.

TurtleBoi: Alright. I’m sure you’ve figured out Laf and I.

Hammy: Yeah.

NeverSatisfied: Angelica Schuyler

BurningThings: Eliza Schuyler

PegLeg: AND PEGGY

MyPantsAreHot: xD omg Peggy.

Hammy: I’m kind of confused what ‘omg’ means

TurtleBoi: Wait, have you ever had a phone before?

Hammy: Never had the money. Plus there were only like, 3 phones in my village.

PegLeg: Wait, ‘village’?

NeverSatisfied: Peggy be nice or I’m going to come and steal your phone.

Hammy: It’s fine.

MyPantsAreHot: So like where are you from?

Hammy: Nevis. Small island in the Caribbean.

BurningThings: damn.

Baguette: Je suis curieux de savoir s'il parle un français Angie.

NeverSatisfied: Ce serait bien. Je crois que l'espagnol est parlé dans les Caraïbes.

Hammy: Le français, l'espagnol et l'anglais sont parlés d'où je viens.

TurtleBoi: English. Nobody else speaks French.

Baguette: John parle aussi l'espagnol

PegLeg: English!

Hammy: Aunque ahora no tengo ganas de hablar en inglés.

NeverSatisfied: Shit. How many languages DO you speak?

Hammy: Three.

TurtleBoi: Finalmente alguien que habla español aquí. Laf y Angie tienen su francés.

Pegleg: Herc, Eliza, I guess it’s just us speaking English here now.

Baguette: Oui! Get Thomas in here and we have 4 French speakers!

NeverSatisfied: Laf, no.

Pegleg: Don’t kill him with Jeffershit yet.

BurningThings: Please, leave Thomas out of this group chat.

Baguette: Mes amies, come on. He’s not that bad.

MyPantsAreHot: Laf, this is the one time I have to disagree with you. Please don’t add Jefferson.

Hammy: What did Thomas do to make everyone hate him?

TurtleBoi: He’s a pretentious fuck who thinks he owns everything.

Baguette: Better he meets him here before dinner.

TurtleBoi: Fuck. I forgot Martha and George wanted him to meet everyone.

PegLeg: Oh, that’s tonight?

BurningThings: Yes, Peggy. I told you this an hour ago.

NeverSatisfied: These are not my sisters. I am not related to them.

Baguette: Fine. He’ll meet Thomas tonight.

TurtleBoi: Pegs you’re on glue duty.

PegLeg: Alright. It’s going to be amazing tonight.

Baguette: Now, as much as I’d like to continue talking, we’re pulling up to the house. Ttyl!

TurtleBoi: Bye

John turned off his phone and decided it safer to ignore the continued dings. He looked over to Alexander, who had started ignoring it long ago. As soon as the car stopped, John was out of the car, dragging Alexander along with him.

Alexander seemed to not mind being dragged around, and John was grateful for that. He felt bad enough as it is, even more so at the thought he was going to have to meet Thomas fucking Jefferson and most likely his even more pretentious parents.

“Well tonight is going to be interesting.” John said once they got to Alexander’s room.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if Jefershit is going to be here, at least one of his even more pretentious parents will be as well. I mean, the Schuylers will be fine. They’ll adore you. But the Jeffersons? They’ll tear you apart.”

Alexander sighed. “I guess, but I mean how bad can they be?”

John wanted to smack some sense into him. If he didn’t know Alexander wasn’t used to these kinds of things, he would have done so long ago. “Look, they already talk shit about me because unlike their perfect son, I don’t like going to all the events and shit. Nothing against you, but they’re going to be talking so much shit about you.”

“What do you mean though?”

“They only talk to ‘their kind’ such as families who come from old money, and who have their perfectly behaved kids.”

“Oh…” Alexander looked like he felt bad, which made John feel like shit.

“Look, I’m sorry come here.” John pulled Alexander into a hug. “Plus, they’re like, super homophobic. Literally, 80 percent of our little group is gay, bi, pan, or something similar. I think Angie is the only straight person, to be honest.”

When John spoke, he wasn’t thinking. He still had no idea about Alexander’s views on that kind of thing but feeling Alexander relax into the hug, he hoped he had said the right thing. Before either of them got a chance to speak again, there was a knock on the door. John pulled away, noticing how much more genuine Alexander’s smile seemed and went to the door.

Opening it, he saw Lafayette, standing there with a smile on his face. “I was told to tell you guys to get ready. The Schuylers are going to be here in an hour, since Peggy and Eliza wanted to meet Alexander before Thomas comes.”

“Alright. Thanks for the heads up.” John smiled and closed the door when Lafayette walked off, presumably to get ready. He turned around to Alexander, smile spreading. “Time to get you ready to meet the Schuyler sisters.”

#lams #lams fanfic #lams fanfiction #hamilton #alexander hamilton #john laurens

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hp42000 · 6 years ago

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I feel like i need to share?

hey, sorry for this, this is very personnal and i know it might be the right place to do that but i want to get everything out. so sorry for the long post, my english, and the mess that is this story, it’s kinda hard to tell everyting important at once so sorry and if you have the courage to read all, thank you

So to give context and to finally get everything out let's start from the begging i'm sorry if it's a mess there's a lot to talk about, so i'm the 3rd and last child of my familly, got two brothers (K and D). my parents came from broken familly, (you'll get why i explain that later) so my mother was beaten by hers and her father ignored it, my father was taken away from his alcoolic parents into an orphanage, then was unofficially adopted by a nurse that gave him a distant education. They met, got a child, D, all was going well, got a second one, K, things started to go wrong, unnable to have "control" over two kids my mother started beating them, my father working and not very close to his children didn't know about it. D took a lot more than K cause he was the most "curious" trying things then getting "scolded", K was emotionally abused, both got scars to this day, bad scars. then here i come the “almost abort but nah it's a girl", my brothers took care of me since day one they knew what it was to live in this familly, so my first memories are with them, teaching me everything like biking or to not do shit so i won't live what they had to go trough. it was so normal for me, i did not notice that soon only my brothers would take care of me, but let's not forget they were just kids only 7 an 9 years older than me. so when they couldn't be with me i was alone listening to the story cds my parents bought to save time on bedtime story. then i created a bubble from these stories, my familly loved me and everyting's normal, mother beating D? don't pay attention it's normal he must've done something he shouldn't. things were "good" for a while then one day i was 6, friends of my mother at my house, they had a kid who was 11, A, A was kinda troublesome he had innapropriate attitude with girls at school, but why should this worry his mother or mine if we play together? alone in my room? this day he touched me sexually, i didn't realize then and fuck i regret not punching his face. so i blocked it in my head (we'll go back to that later). so i keep growing up, at 8 i start to realise that what my mother does is wrong, that my father not knowing his children is wrong, so i try those 8 years old method to, first, get myself "safe" and maybe, when i could, speak up, i start to get out of my bubble, to look for a way to stop it all. one of them was to tell them i found a poster with the number of an organization who protect kid, i was sooo dumb, got the response "like i did anything wrong to you" from both parents, still they were "cautious"? idk why i like to think i scared them but we all know i didn't ^^ fast forward a little to when i got 11, damn from this things escalated quickly! D was kicked out of the house, K exploded when my father and mother joined their forces to destroy him mentally, he snapped and hit my mother on the shoulder. in the same time my parent divorced, i followed my mother who was all affective before we left to get me to "prefer" her. and shit started for real. 2012 first year of hell; my mother started taking antidepressant, and got more and more scary, having moodswings, insulting me, threatning me, then going back crying, apologizing, yes i bought it FOR A LONG WHILE. till things started to get bad at school too, got sexualy assaulted again by a classmate, didn't tell anything to anyone because i was disguted by myself not being able to defend myself, every morning looking in the mirror wanting to break it, to break me, getting to school, seeing him telling me "we should do it again", getting home taking whatever my mother would throw at me that she "shouldn't have chosen to have kids", cry a bit, sleep rinse and repeat. it was like that for a year then i got bullied at school lost my "friends" then we moved, different school, new life and yes, it was now that i look at it, it was. but my mother she never stopped, got back with my father a while and conviced (was not hard tho) to take his side, so got both on me for a while, these times i spent a lot of time with D, we got even closer it was so great we just had to look at each other to know what the other was thinking. but we had a arguement that led him to take everyting i told him against me, he blasted me to the ground cause i trusted him. that's the turning point to were i am now i think, every time i got home, when i was alone i had incontrolable burst of anger and felt like i had to hit something, got myself a punching ball and started beating the shit out of it bare hands, till i looked at my hands and saw them red and x2 their original size, what happened at this moment was one thing that terrified me a bit, i looked at my hand crying, laughing thinking "damn now you lost your mind", from this point i changed my way to view my life i started to think "why did my parents gave birth to me? why did they reproduced to fucking destroy their childrens? how can i go back?" i didn't think about dying at first, just i regreted to be born, because now that i was i lived, there was still good things. but things that i wouln't have experienced if i did not exist, the "nothingness" appealled me and i got stuck like this for a while. next come high school, my mother got with someone and wanted to live with them but to month later we left this alcoolic man and his house, homeless for a while i go to my grandmother's (side of my father) then choose to try to live with him, at this time i had two dogs (the nice thing in my familly is that we could have dogs! and i don't know what i'd do without them!) so one gave birth to 4 or 5 puppies and i sold them and got some money. so, i go live with my father who just moved with his new gf, i had high hope, in the 4 first month he borrowed me 1700$ to seem like a prince to his belle, was all nice to get it but then started to say the same things as my mother, i started to smoke and skip school to get some pressure i fest off i guess, this year i met incredible friends who helped me a lot but at the end of 1st year of highschool i got back with my mother who acted like she changed. i met my current girlfriend, the person that keep me alive till this day because the best is yet to come, so month after month i see she has not changed; she got crazy due to her medecine even worse then before, and i start to give up on highschool a little more every day, thanks to my gf L, i keep it together, kinda. then my mother starts to see her friend from when i was six and i realise what happenned there so i tell my mother, i got absolutly no reaction except "my uncle did it to me" she didn't ask me if i was fine or shit so one month later my mother's friend call her; her fucking son is banned from the region they live in for playing "jizzcuit" replacing the biscuit by A FUCKING CHILD, so my mother goes "oh i have a room he can live with me" this lasted 6 month i saw his face every day acting like nothing happenned and to this day even thought i tried my mother still don't get what's wrong. fast forward a little crying and shit and comes the final exam of my high school, since i skipped a lot and slept at classes due to my insomnia, i cried a lot wondering what i was going to do, then i got the most stupid idea, i just didn't try, i thougt that after it i'd be able to leave this place and start again. So i failed my exams then left again to my father's camping car this time (would be crazy to let me live in his house but i'm fine) it was supposed to be 3 month, the time to work and get enough money to live by myself, or i thought, i got fired at the end of my two month trial. reinforcing the idea that i fucking shit and right now even tho i have L, my friends, i'm tired of fighting, the frequancy of thought about suicide grow, and i think i need help, anything, if some of you guys have tips on idk how to be productive, how to live, i'll gladly accept anything. once again i'm really sorry, it's messy and it's not fun to read but i wanted to share... thank you for your time

#personal

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verminspit · 3 years ago

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I started therapy up again. i stopped going a long time ago cause i didn't trust my therapist. But, the new lady is nice. Although she honestly doesn't think the way I do yet so I haven't had much luck actually talking to her about deep stuff yet.

idk why but my brain never understood how medicine works. I also see medicine as a placebo simply because I myself never realize when the medicine kicks in. idk if my antidepressants are helping or not

I think I'm getting better at talking to people. I need to learn to stop treating my existence as nothing but a background gag and the way I portray myself as a joke 247 actually has an effect on how people view me. kinda tired of people thinking Im a dumbass but also why wouldn't they? i act like one, I don't tell people the real way I think simply because im curious on how they'd react to me doing stupid shit. I am so conscious of how people view me and is constantly trying to read people and their actions. im so tired

#personal vent #traumacore #tw vent

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jackieandwilsonbyhozier · 7 years ago

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honestly speaking i spent almost all of 2017 being stagnant basically laying in bed all year wishing i was dead and uhh wish i could say it was without consequence but i let a lot of things i loved slip away bc of that and theres nothing i can do about that now i just wish i had kicked my ass into gear sooner

i did have little victories and did a lot of new things this year even though theyre things normal people do/have been doing for ages (i got my permit, i learned how to use a washing machine, i rode a bus for the first time) they seem small but im still proud i did them even if it seems i spent the rest of the year doing nothing at least i did get a few new things done..

i also got a job even though its only part time and seasonal its a start and it was/is rly hard for me but im doing it anyway.....it sucks it took me so long to finally start moving but at least i am i guess. it honestly doesnt even feel like im making progress or getting myself together or whatever it feels like when youre walking down a hill but the hills so steep u start running and ur going so fast u cant stop and ur just sprinting super fast down this hill and cant stop. like id like to say im taking a step in the right direction but its more like im stumbling down a hill and cant stop

also i looked for the post i made last year with my new years goals but i could not find it :[ but i do remember having a set of small goals (only one i remember was getting my permit, which i did do) and like big goals i didnt NEED to accomplish but if i did that would be GREAT and one was getting my license (did not do, actually i cant remember the last time i drove i think it was like april or may maybe) but another was getting a job which i did do :] so thats good i guess

idk goals for this year bc last year i took my sweet time doing anything and idk how this years gonna go so idk if i want to give myself a time limit by saying i want to get it done by this year bc a year moves faster and i move slower than i think......but....this year or at least in the near future i would like to get a job with more consistent hours so i have a stable income and find a job i can stand...im not gonna complain abt my job or be picky about it or anything but retail isnt something i can imagine myself doing full time its just too much for me..for now its ok but id rly like to find something else i can do....and i would like to move out or at least be in a situation where i can seriously consider moving out. also maybe get a therapist or antidepressants or something but thats another 10-paragraph post i dont want to write

#also maybe.....make more art??#shelby.txt

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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what's your novel about??

Oh my gosh, nonny, thank you so much for asking!!

Okay, so the absolute shortest version — the, “summarize this thing and make it sound as shitty as possible” meme version — is, “Superpowered LGBTIQ neurodivergent and/or mentally ill mutant weirdos with emotional problems (and their self-appointed sidekick, who isn’t a mutant but is very enthusiastic about the work) investigate some seemingly unrelated incidents and accidentally uncover a neo-fascist supervillain club that’s trying to take over the U.S. on as many levels as possible — currently, by pulling strings to sabotage the lead-up to the still-upcoming 2016 election — and the neo-fascist supervillains are, unfortunately, very good at this.

“Also, our heroes start out as a ragtag group of misfits with superpowers [or, in Pete’s case, enthusiasm, wit, dedication af, adaptability, and a rather sizable collection of lime-green hot-pants], and progressively become both an actual team and a set of accidental rising stars in the superhero world. Is it a bit of a tired plot? Yeah, especially given how often superhero teams have to do some kind of song and dance like this — but: 1. it’s done so often because it resonates with people and, when done well, it can work; and 2. tired or not, it’s something that viewers/readers deserve to actually see happening, rather than just being told, ‘oh yeah, now they’re a team, okay? okay cool.’”

At least, that’s the plot of the first book, since…… I can’t make anything simple or less-difficult for myself, series are often more fun in general, and I just have a lot of characters here who I love, so the whole, “These incidents are starting to string themselves together in really suspicious ways, oh shit fuck goddammit, the election is being sabotaged” plot is just the start of things.* The bigger series plot would be more about trying to deal with further attempts by the neo-fascist supervillain club to wreak all kinds of neo-fascist supervillain Hell all over everything.

Then, the way I’m looking at this, structurally? Is that I have an ensemble cast, in the end. There are different tiers of importance among the different characters, because that’s unavoidable — I mean, I rail against JKR’s habit of treating her characters as plot devices first and people second, but even if you all treat your characters as people, you have to prioritize some of them over the others at different points, or else you end up worse off than George RR Martin, drowning in impossible goals and strangled by the giant pile of fictional people you made up to tell stories about — but I still view the cast as fundamentally an ensemble.

However, for the sake of reining in my horrible attention span and trying to avoid GRRM’s example, each installment has a focal character, whose own personal story of the moment gets to exist alongside the bigger plotty plot-stuff of each book (…I am a serious business writer, oh yes I am). As an approach, this has its drawbacks — balancing things without making it all too coincidentally intertwined is a big one — but I also love it because, to me, it reflects the way that life has several different levels to it that aren’t always intimately woven together, but still affect each other and need to find some kind of balance if you’re going to get anywhere

Anywho, the focal character for book one is Sebastian, because on one hand, he was here first. Like, he was originally for a game that my Sunday night RP group was playing this past summer, which was still the same-ish idea of mutant superheroes, except that it was more closely modeled on the way that Aya Brea’s powers work in the Parasite Eve games

Meaning, “the system is very openly based on Parasite Eve, it says so in the player’s handbook and everything,” rather than a motley hodgepodge assortment of superhero comics and movies/TV, speculative fiction in general, LGBTIQ theories and histories and cultures, “okay, I’d kind of like to be more active in superhero-related fandoms, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the stories I want to tell right now are not easily mapped onto characters who already exist, I won’t feel fulfilled in trying to change them so I can shoehorn Sam and Steve and Nat and Bucky or Dick, Jason Stephanie, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Harper into them, so I’ve got to just say, ‘fuck it’ and do my own thing”

and, “what if I did [something that is a big and very, very deliberate middle finger to either Marvel or DC, possibly both, for some reason or another]” — e.g., “what if I made a pair of characters who are a pretty blatant satire of/commentary on/response to/whatever Marvel’s perpetual, annoying as fuck Cherik-baiting, except that they’re actually married — and they will be literally married as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court rules on Obergefell v. Hodges in-universe — and also they are old lady lesbians, nah nah nah nah nah nah *flips off Stan Lee et al. with both middle fingers while doing a, ‘come at me, bro’ dance and generally being a Stunning Bastion Of Authorial Maturity Lmao Not Really*”

So, yeah. I had to rescope some things after my RP group dropped that game, but in the name of, “developing my character and giving Jake, my DM and high school friend, material with which to torment my character, and also, Double-Cross’s system actually makes character development and characterization pretty important elements to playing the game,” I’d already written way too much stuff to just let it go, and Sebastian had endeared himself to me in a big way, and I just went, “Fuck it, I’ll write my own thing with him in it, it’ll be fun.”

I don’t remember when he decided to look like Hayden Christensen, only that I tried to stop that mental image from solidifying, and trying to stop it only made it worse, so I just gave up and went, “Fine, whatever, look like Hayden Christensen, see what I care.” But then, more importantly than, “Sebastian gets to go first because in fairness, he was here first”? Well.

On a thematic level, I feel like this little mutant disaster’s biggest personal story of the moment (trying desperately to get his shit together after making it to 30 without his clinical depression getting noticed as depression, much less treated; trying to stay sober and find something to do with his life that feels even vaguely fulfilling, which for him would mean, “helping people, doing some kind of good in the world, trying to make someone else happy because he is fairly certain that he never will be, period”; trying to actually deal with the past and move forward, not forgetting it or forsaking it entirely, but also not being frozen and chained to the past, learning from it and building something new)…

…has the most common ground and overlap with the current round of big plotty plot-type stuff, since it’s all about things like, “whoo, the formation of a new team! whoo, the new team getting it together and learning how to work as a team and trying to figure out their team identity and values! oh no, emergence of previously unseen threats that have not actually come from out of nowhere, even though it kind of looks like they have, and are more complicated than previously estimated! oh no, we can’t just delete them from existence because they’re insidious and entrenched in more places than we entirely realize at first, so how do we even fight this! ohhh no, progressive realization that we’re fighting a symptom rather than the actual facts problem, but we can’t just NOT-treat the symptom or shit is even more fucked than it will be if we treat the symptom by not the actual problem, and in some ways we don’t even entirely know what the bigger-picture problem is yet! oh man, what do we do!”

—so, like. These two threads work together better than they would with different parts of the larger, longer story.

(And then there’s Pete, who is an admitted authorial pet of mine, just like GRRM blatantly favors Tyrion and JKR visibly projects onto Harry and Hermione, and who I feel lends himself better to a format more like, “Dunk and Egg”-esque novellas, or a collection of, “chronicles of side-kicking” short stories about his little side-adventures and myriad hijinks that aren’t always immediately relevant to the main story but that are really fun. But I also feel like that might just be an excuse to write more weird adventures for him that aren’t necessarily tied together in the right order, like novels generally need to be unless you have some kind of reason not to do that.

idk, man, I just really love my stale cinnamon roll Dramatic bb theatre kid with a heart of gold who will tell you that you’re wrong and he so does not have a heart of gold while he is digging around Seb’s kitchen and making dinner for himself and his Princess because an unfortunate side-effect of one of Seb’s superpowers — the toxin filtering part of his mutant healing factor — is that his body doesn’t only filter out poisons, gases, narcotics, caffeine, and alcohol… it also filters the antidepressants that he gets given a prescription for about ten hours before abruptly being thrust headlong into his newly-awoken mutant superpowers.

Which is a huge mess all over — though, yes, there is a huge part of this that is a pretty deliberate, “fuck you” to literally every piece of media that goes, “and then the hero found out they had superpowers or magic or the fuck whatever and lol suddenly no more mental illness or disabilities or any kind of neurodivergence or anything neener neener” — and anyway, Pete’s hypothetically just found Seb half-spaced out and listening to, “Careless Whisper” on repeat, and Pete is going to tell you that he doesn’t have any kind of heart of gold because he’s a heartless wretch shut your mouth……

…while he’s making them dinner and going, “okay, come on, Princess. Sit up, let’s try and get you through this. No, don’t argue with me. You did the same — or similar, anyway — for me in that entire ten-day stretch when you knew I wasn’t eating disorder okay but couldn’t get me to talk about it and we’ve been over this: if that’s what friends do for each other, then it cuts both ways, so come on. Dinner. Do you want me to put on Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Female Trouble, Ten Things I Hate About You, or some other thing until you feel like talking.”)

But anyway, as I was saying.

I look at the attempt to find thematic crossover between the plot parts of a book in the series and the story parts of a book as being kind of like how, in the first three seasons of Community, whatever class the Study Group had together was a of synergistic reflection of certain season-long themes and developments for them as characters and in their relationships.

Like, in season one, they were learning how to talk to each other and the basics of building relationships with and understanding each other, so they took Spanish, a language class.

In season two, they took Anthropology — in-universe described as, “the study of humanity” and which is presented as being so open-ended that shitty memetic youtube vids are as valid an object of study as humanity’s development and use of tools, and the different processes by which humans work together to do greater shit than we can do solo — and in that year’s shenanigans, the Study Group cemented their trust as friends, but also went through Hell together in several cases, and in the last two episodes (the cowboy/Star Warts paintball two-parter), they had to face the question of whether or not removing one of them for his shitty behavior (Pierce) would be better or worse for the overall health of the group.

And in season three, they took Biology, defined in-universe as, “the study of life” (which isn’t wrong irl, but the specific phrasing is important to me, here), and they spend a lot of time exploring and developing their lives, both together and individually, both at Greendale Community College and more importantly outside its walls. There’s also the season-long theme of evolution, because the Study Group have evolved as people and continue to evolve — which reaches its biggest culminations in the finale, not just in Jeff’s Winger Speech, but also with five of the big seven (Annie and Britta are sort of adrift but Troy, Abed, Shirley, and Pierce all have moments, and Jeff has the BIGGEST, most obvious moment).

So, with the books, I’m trying to do something kind of similar. Not quite the same, because…… well, TV vs. novels, school setting vs. a variety of settings but none quite as structured as a school (even one that’s as, well, Greendalian as you get on Community), a million other reasons besides — but having some kind of thematic synergy between the plot part of each of the books and the focal characters’ personal stories in each book…… idk, it gives me a comforting sense of structure to play with?

And aside from that, I feel like it’s probably a better choice for the sake of the whole stories because having those points of connection means they can more easily work to enhance each other, rather than distracting from each other. Like, one of the biggest issues that I have with shoehorned-in romance plots in stories that don’t need a romance plot? Even overlooking how they are almost invariably white and m/f and heteronormative and can be all kinds of, “uggggh” in several other ways besides, it comes down to whether or not they work, thematically and tonally, with everything else.

[this is where i had a tangent trying to illustrate my point by talking about pointlessly shoehorned-in white, m/f romance plots in otherwise no romo stories, then cut it after i started to feel moderately ashamed of how many examples and trends about this that i just have in my back pocket]

The point being: you can use dissonance and conflicting juxtaposed parts of the story to different effects, but it’s often harder to pull off and you do need to have some idea of what you’re doing, otherwise you’re going to end up with a huge mess and no idea where to start sorting through it (I say this based on having done this exact thing several times before)

So, in the interests of not doing that, I like the idea of trying to find the big points of synergy and connection between any given book’s focal char’s story, and the plot points of that installment and how it fits into the larger story. And, for the sake of book 1, Sebastian’s big story of the moment is the one that lines up best with the plot stuff, thematically.

Also, apropos of nothing but, he spends like all of two minutes coming up with his nom de spandex, and ends up with Pete being Unimpressed at him because…… Really, Princess? Princess, really. Like. Princess. Really. Your family is obnoxiously insistent on your Frenchness, even though you were all born and raised in fucking Baltimore and your Dad’s family hasn’t been in France itself since your ancestor sold the old ancestral marquisate and came to save the Revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette… and now you turn into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man…… and you picked out the official, “it is on your actual facts government-issued vigilante hero license” name of…… Gévaudan.

Really, Princess. Fucking. REALLY. Ugggggggh, you’re more creative than that, why did you pick the stupidly obvious werewolf name ffs, your family isn’t even FROM Gévaudan or anywhere in its general damn vicinity, why did you have to pick THAT name, it’s BORING.

And now I don’t know how to wrap this up so I’m gonna abruptly stop talking (apart from the footnote below, which I wrote a couple hours ago, whoops)

Thank you so much for asking this and giving me a free excuse to talk about my novel, nonny

*: Given my chosen subject matter, I feel like it has to be? Partly, yeah, it’s authorial self-gratification because I love my weirdos and their adventures.

But another part of it is the idea that it’s not enough to punch fascists in the face. Like, yes, by all means, we need to do that, too — but fascism is insidious and easily enabled by so many aspects of our contemporary societies. So, we need to resist the urge to simplify the discussion. We can go, “Fascism is wrong, period” while also trying to understand the different ways that fascism draws people into supporting it, how it can spread so far and so thoroughly in nominally non-fascist societies, and its different manifestations and ways of working, so that we can better fight it.

Additionally, we’re products of the same societies that create people who do become fascists and we can easily become complicit in both fascism and oppression more generally, so we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable while trying to fight fascism, instead of putting it off for later, because…… historically, and based on several different precedents? Putting off addressing the internal issues among ourselves doesn’t work; it just creates fertile ground for more problems to breed and makes it even harder for people down the line.

And there aren’t any easy answers here. There are some part of them that are easy or at least easier than others — e.g., agreeing on the statement, “Fascism is wrong and we should oppose it” — but unfortunately, not everything in life and resistance can be as easy as, “This thing is wrong, we should oppose it.”

Even getting into the questions of HOW to best and most effectively fight back against fascism gets complicated, to say nothing of situations where there isn’t an obvious Right Side or Wrong Side, no matter how many people try to turn those discussions into Right vs. Wrong and get into a lot of binary-thinking moral absolutism that ultimately upholds a lot of the shit we’re nominally trying to fight, and does more harm than good to everyone involved.

(ftr, those discussions are not things like, “Fascism is wrong, Y/N,” but more like disagreements between people, none of whom are outright in the wrong, but all of whom have different sets of values, different kinds of grievances with each other [some fair, some not so fair], different points of view on any given topic, and so on, usually about things like, “is it more important for people to be free but with more potential for people to abuse that freedom in hurtful ways, or for people to be safe but in ways that give us new ways to hurt each other in the name of safety,” however the Hell these issues are manifesting in a specific context at any given moment)

And, well. It’s a precarious line to walk on, as someone who wants to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be and as true to my handful of basic guiding principles as possible. Principles that I have because…… uh, I want to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be? And I want to always work on failing better, as @saathi1013 would put it?

so, if you’re going to do that, you kinda need to have something to stand for and try to be more aware of what’s going on in the world, more aware where the content you’re making fits into those discussions, and more aware of yourself and how you work so that you can try to find places of potential Unfortunate Implications or places where you’re not actually living up to the values that you want to put in your work — c.f., JKR’s handling of House Elves and Muggles in the HP series, or how she wants the books to be anti-abuse but gives Dumbledore a free pass on hardcore manipulating both Harry and Snape [to say nothing of how he doesn’t do shit to make Snape act like a teacher, not a bully, because of reasons], and gives Molly and Arthur a total free pass on all of their unadulterated abusive bullshit

—and part of all this is knowing what you stand for, knowing what you think and feel as much as you can, and being willing to actually interrogate your positions and adjust your views and stances as you come into new information, new experiences, etc. Call it a belief, call it a good idea, call it whatever you want, but for me? You have to have some kind of principles to stand for/by, if you really want to be ethical and/or responsible content creator, because if you don’t have your principles, then what’s guiding you in this, exactly? Principles are what separate people who at least try to be ethical and/or responsible content creators from fuckbishops like the Dadaists, the Marquis de Sade, and the creative team of Family Guy.

And one of my principles here is, essentially, “People are people, and this means, on one hand, that all people deserve basic human rights and civil liberties. But on the other hand, it means that many of our problems are, in the words of Pterry and Gneil in Good Omens, caused not by people being either Good or Evil, but by people being fundamentally people. We’re all a bunch of disasters to varying degrees, and most situations are not going to come down to Good vs. Evil, but to (as Richard Siken puts it) need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone has the potential to be doing wrong by/unto someone else, even if some of us are going to come out more wrong than others based on our actions and/or the context of the situation.”

Which all basically adds up to…… yes, “Fascism is wrong” is a simple and straightforward statement, but there are situations and debates that arise surrounding most simple, straightforward statements that are tangled up and complicated. In this case, for example, how fascism takes root and spreads, how to best fight it in which situations, how it takes advantage of structures and practices even within non-fascist communities and uses them to fester and draw people into supporting it + what the fuck to do about that especially since at a certain point all of us become complicit in it to some degree or another, by virtue of being people who are alive and take part in our civilizations, and what’s at stake for everyone in all these discussions + how best to approach the question(s) of priorities

(…see, what I mean when I say that yes, I have interest in contemporary sociopolitical goings-on for their own sake but also bring them back to the novel pretty easily and regularly? It’s kinda unavoidable when you’re living in the times we are now, writing about superheroes who have to fight very explicitly neo-fascist supervillains)

So, anyway, the TL;DR of my basic point here is that I do try to approach my writing with principles in mind, but I don’t believe in oversimplifying shit — based on what I’ve encountered so far, I believe that oversimplifying things in a lot of these discussions usually starts in an understandable sort of place, but only ends up creating more problems for everyone in the long run, because it too easily fosters binaristic thinking and moral absolutism, dehumanizing each other, creating arbitrary hierarchies that we always end up using to justify hurting each other, and so on — and I don’t want to be a preacher in my work. I’d be a lot happier if I inspired actual discussions.

……Unfortunately, I’ve been in fandom and literature generally for too long to think that this is going to happen without the risk of people playing the apologist cards, the [douchebag character] in Leather Pants card, and all of that good stuff, but…… well.

I’m just trying to tell myself that this is a risk I’m going to have to live with, and if I do everything that I can reasonably do to prevent that and it still happens anyway, then hey, I’m in good company with George Orwell (all the people who have read 1984 as a defense or endorsement of right-wing anything when Orwell was a Socialist, he just opposed fucking Stalinism), Dr. Seuss (the anti-reproductive rights brigade who co-opted Horton Hears A Who to make it a screed against abortion), Emily Brontë (everyone who thinks Heathcliff is romantic and awesome when no. NO. fuck ALL the way OFF, he is an abusive jackass who literally kills a puppy and torments a generation of kids into reenacting his and Cathy’s relationship, just to get back at her for dumping him, and whose author was a fucking abuse survivor, now can everyone please get off her tits and stop using her book to justify their own abusive garbage behaviors), and so many countless others

But that’s a whole other kettle of monkeys, and I should only be so lucky to maybe someday have enough people reading anything I write that there are actually popular misinterpretations of anything. Like, would it be ideal if the misinterpretations didn’t happen? Yeah, but that’s not how writing works and it’s not how reading works and it’s not how most contemporary socialization trains us to read and see things, and everyone who reads anything I write is going to come up with their own interpretation because I can’t tell them how to read it, so

*shrugs* The Author Is Not God, y’know? I can do the work to try and best actualize my vision of things, but there will be things in it that other people see that I didn’t intend or didn’t notice, and my version of the story can’t be the absolute truth because the readers’ input is just as vital to the life of a written work as the work itself. It’s an unavoidable risk of writing shit on shit, so we make do, the end, I guess?

#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #pete x seb #mine: asks #mine: writing #nonny hi you're my favorite today if ur still around #reaction gifs//#depression cw//#writing meta #Anonymous

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