#me giving every character i love chronic illness: im coping.

[cherubchoirs]

yo ive got some songs that i think are fallen gabe songs!! with titles so you can look them up instead of clicking the link if you want

Gen'ei (Phantom/Shadow/Mirage) by Harumaki Gohan (it's in japanese so you gotta turn captions on)

DEATHBODY by GHOST and Vane

oooooooh thank you so much for sending these bc i think they both really hit on relevant themes that i want to explore with him in future pieces....and they give me the opportunity to talk about them now!! (this will cover some heavier topics dealing with identity and...literally death and body-related issues, so please be aware before proceeding!)

mirage - this is likely self-explanatory, but after falling the central internal conflict gabriel experiences is piecing together who he is and what his identity is to be. initially, he thinks of himself as a shadow without its body, as a void made material that lingers as gabriel's sin and stands as a testament to his choices. his mind is weighted with contradictions, at once feeling a deep remorse and shame for the crimes he committed under god's direction, but knowing as well that this had been his purpose, that he was forged as a weapon to be wielded against any enemy of god's kingdom. so what is his truth then? is his true self what god intended for him, is it the mold he was born into and felt such pride for in all the millennia that had past until so recently? or is he made of the doubt that had always been in the back of his mind, is he truly the autonomy he had found and the ramifications of that he now reckons with?

he both hates what he had been and envies it, sickened by all the images he sees of his past as the archangel that plaster hell as though to mock him...because for some time, he thinks that was him, that was his reality, his inherent being. the image of gabriel as he was haunts him, stalks him though he feels himself now as the ghost, he is reminded constantly of the gabriel that harmed so many but was so beloved, so favored. so prized by god. logically by then he knows god was wrong, god forced him to betray himself over and over, but there's nothing easy about leaving eden. gabriel has fallen from the highest station, he has taken the lives of other angels, he lives now in pain, in exhaustion, in hell. yet at the same time, that past was one of ignorance and denial, it is one he could never go back to now that his eyes are open. and besides...the adoration he felt was distant and conditional while the devotion he had was mindless and expected. not like now, not where love is given intimately and his worship is chosen. he comes to understand that he was gabriel, that he can't abdicate his responsibility for the atrocities he committed...but that what he's become as a fallen angel was always a part of him, an almost inevitable conclusion (if he still fully believed in fate). he lived such a long life lying to himself, contorting who he was to be the perfect image of an archangel, and it only pains him that it took him so much time to act on his doubt.

deathbody - AUUUGHHH.......this one gets it because gabriel is actually struggling a lot with his death as he had taken his own immortality as a granted - and when the light was ripped from him, his belief was that he would simply cease. that itself wasn't an easy thought, but he never considered rising again, coming back in a body that's aching and weighted. and with the information that hell is orchestrating a lot of what's occurring in game, i like to think it was the one to bring him back and something in him knows that. in a day, he's gone from being the brightest angel in god's choir to a corpse resurrected by hell itself. he can feel whatever's become of his soul is sullied and he knows that anyone else who's left can see it too, even something inorganic like v1 - his blood, once carrying the odor of sanctity, now smells of rotting lilies. his body is also distinctly more physical than he's ever felt, the light and flame gone from him to leave a shell of matter behind, something that was once more like a skin becoming his entire being. his movements have lost their elegance, his feet must now tread the ground, he feels the effort of muscles and he feels the weight of his armor. he had known something like physical exhaustion from particularly demanding fights, but this is an animal sensation, one that sets in with so much less effort. in fact, it's constant, easing with rest but following him now forever, feeling always as though he's dying despite already being dead.

AND LISTEN....i got plenty of sappy stuff about how he learns to adjust to his now non-ethereal nature and all the ways it solidifies his relationship with v1, BUT i'll spare everyone since i've gone on long enough (and i'm too corny for even myself sometimes!!!) just know it's likely to come up in some doodles eventually!!

[hopeful-hugz]

knowing your partner well can potentially make writing a lot easier, repost, do not reblog. meet the mun.

— basics

name: Egg, Riley or Rookie pronouns: She/Them reference of communication: IMs here or Discord (Or Texts if you have my cell #) single/taken: Single atm

— three facts

I have a little brother who goes by Pegg online. He’s the light of my life and adore him to bits; I could go on for hours about him.

I’m selectively mute.

I recently started my personal mental health journey; it’s got mixed results so far.

— experience

Overall I’ve been RPing from around 13 - 15 years at this point. This year (or next idr) is going to be my 10-year anniversary on Tumblr in specific though.

— sub-genres

I’ll do p much anything sub-genre wise. Though romantic, sexual and heavily dark themes (torture, death etc) need plotting.

— plots vs memes

Improv is always my go-to on Tumblr but I’m no stranger to plotting either. I don’t do it much nowadays unless it’s something that significantly impacts a character. But that’s because most times I try to plot it’s me presenting an idea and my partners just going along with it or accepting it as fact, rather than trying to bounce off the idea and improve it. My plotting style is very much that; taking ideas and building off of them. If I’m the only one building on them, chances are I’ll lose interest quickly and just stick to improv and memes. Since that partner seems more content to just go along with whatever comes along. That being said- When I do reblog memes it’s usually cause I desperately want people to send stuff in (ESPECIALLY when I’m begging in the tags), so don’t be afraid to reach out. Every ask I get makes my life a little easier to cope with.

— long or short replies

It depends on the context and how much I have to work with. It’s not about post length, but the potential in the reply and the context for it.  You can have something wordy and filled with exposition on your character’s thoughts and feelings, but if they aren’t physically interacting with the other muses they are writing with then there’s not a lot of room for my muses to do anything in return. My muses can be pretty intuitive sometimes with people they connect with, but they aren’t mind readers. If you give them little to think about or work with physically, typically my replies will be shorter.

— best time to write

Entirely depends on the day. I struggle with a lot of chronic illnesses (to the point where going outside is a legitimate danger for me) and am starting my own mental health journey. Not to mention my folks like to spring stuff on the family last minute a lot of the time, or my father in particular will tear down my mood. Usually if I’m on, I’m on; usually either doing opens or memes while chipping away at drafts in the background.

Taken from @justiceburst​ (Love you Dusty) so feel free to take it from me <3

[melforbes]

seaglass blue annotations

hello! i just posted the last chapter and thought i’d put together some ~fun context~ for that fic. it got way way more attention than i ever expected and for something i feel i didn’t put that much effort into i think i did in the end put a lot of effort into it so i might as well talk about it and answer some potential questions.

my favorite book of all time is the sunlit night by rebecca dinerstein (yes, that one) and something i find really compelling about that book is how sparing the prose is, forcing the reader to fill in certain gaps, and i think having to fill in those gaps makes the book a really acquired taste with which either you love it or hate it and there’s not really an in-between

i also really adore how in that book the natural world backdrop comes to life, something i find really challenging to write. recently i even read into thin air, the book about the 1996 mount everest disaster, and even though the writing was superb, i still had to google what the hillary step was because i couldn’t picture it on my own. i don’t know how people write nature because to me it feels damn near impossible, but this sparing approach really worked, so i thought i might try it out. i tend to be longwinded (gestures vaguely at this post) and wanted to have certain parts of this be a lot smaller and more contained without negating impact. whether or not i made it work is anyone’s guess. definitely not my normal style, so to speak

based on the comments i’ve received i think this might be everyone’s favorite part. in my mind age of consent by new order was playing in the background. in pretty much every fic i have a scene like this one and all of them are based on the poem first base gold by rh*annon mcg*vin from her book branches (censored because she has a tumblr and i don’t want her seeing this haha)

i absolutely can’t do the poem justice by describing what it’s about, but the simplest, most basic interpretation of the poem is that there is no better place to kiss than right here, right now, because of the past. i really like that imagery and tend to use it a lot. she as a writer has been a big inspiration for me and if you’ve read my fic true minds i should add that the nonfiction inspiration for that was directly as a result of one of her youtube videos. i particularly love how the last paragraph (stanza? im not a poet) is one big run-on sentence that’s jovial and tongue-in-cheek and colloquial and straightforward. it feels triumphant in a quiet way to me and i love how it’s done. obviously my attempts at something similar are nowhere near as insightful, but still, the most basic image of this is that there is no better place to kiss, and that’s how i felt about the two of them finding pudding in the supermarket

this part is autobiographical; while writing this last year, i went through six months of intravenous drug treatment, a month and a half of which involved long days of doctor visits on every weekday. when you’re on stuff like that for a long time you end up with a central line for better access (potential plot hole in all of this: scully never had one) but for a month and a half i got poked almost every day and strangely enough it got harder over time. the first couple you never feel, but a week or two later you start flinching, and if the needle goes in the same vein each time, it hurts the more it gets prodded. i reached a point toward the end of the in-office visits in which i would bleed a lot every time i got poked, and i can’t watch anything like that happen to me so i was looking away each time, and when i felt that the nurse was done, i would look back over, and sometimes i would be looking down at a pool of blood that i hadn’t expected to see. it’s weird, you don’t actually feel yourself bleeding, i would’ve expected a hot bloody feeling but instead it felt like nothing. and when i say a pool i mean that it would drip down beneath my elbow, stain the sheet they’d put underneath, and i wouldn’t get all of it off until i showered. i didn’t necessarily find it scary, but it was surreal and kind of pulled me out of normalizing the experience i was having. for a very long time needing iv drugs was my greatest fear and i was surrounded by that then and fine, and then, there was blood all over my arm, and like, haha, this is actually not fine. you’d think something else would’ve been scarier, but it wasn’t. and now looking back at this paragraph i wish i’d edited it differently but hey that’s life

i’d never really understood the purpose of religion as a self-driven part of life until i took anatomy in college. i was raised catholic and though culturally i understand having a religion and being raised with one, i’ve never really reached for religion when i wanted answers, and i haven’t personally understood why that’s someone’s first option. and i know there’s been plenty of commentary on the hypocrisy of dana scully as a catholic who believes in science, yada yada yada, i think everyone has read all of that by now. but what struck me while learning anatomy is that there is a kind of neuron we don’t know the function of. there are four kinds of neurons, and one of them is still a mystery to us. and then, there’s all of these different parts of human bodies that exist in a certain perfect way, but why do they exist like that? to support life, yes, but why is it that we can make comparisons? why were irises not the same color? and we name valves of the heart after religious figures. we are so hell-bent on meaning that something literal will never be enough. and all of that made me think that dana scully has god to fill in what science won’t answer, at least not yet. and there’s definitely a bigger conversation about science as denial of indigenous cultures that i am nowhere near qualified to start. after taking those classes, i think i would be more shocked if she wasn’t religious. you can ignore pretty much all of the paragraph above but it was important to me that at some point in this fic she willingly conceded that she didn’t know what would happen and that she didn’t have answers. with illness, there is no logic, there’s no thinking your way out of it, and i think that would plague her for a long time. to me, she only would accept her death when she could say she had no idea what would happen, she has no answers, there’s nothing filling in her gaps anymore, and she’s comfortable with that. and i put all of that in a paragraph about my thoughts on god because it made sense to me. there are times that just feel like you’re in a movie and there’s no one else you can say caused them. it’s not enough to build belief on but it’s enough to bring a certain kind of wonder. also one time my parents insisted on watching stripes because it was so funny and when watching it none of us found it funny at all and my parents grimaced and were like what were we on that made that good back in the day so that’s in here now haha

and now, the biggest question: does she die at the end? when i came up with the idea for this fic, i knew the beginning and ending but not the middle, and i posted this as a smaller project (ie: chapters below 3,000 words) while illness made my bigger projects harder to work on and essentially flew by the seat of my pants the whole time. i wrote the last line a long long time ago and have always seen the ending as written as the concrete ending. when i started writing this, i never intended for there to be a definitive answer to whether or not she dies. i like premature endings (the ending of girls burn brighter comes to mind) and i think that this works better without saying whether or not she lives. and i also have a hard time with giving a definitive answer because this fic very much is about death and having her die would, of course, be traumatic, but showing her living instead i think ruins any takeaways people could have. i’ve never had cancer but as a chronically ill person i think i can speak to how you never actually win with illness; the best you can do is tie, and sometimes, no matter how much effort you put in, you “lose” anyway, you lose spectacularly, and all of your effort was for nothing. i wholeheartedly believe that humans can’t emotionally or logically process natural disasters or illness, hence why much of the talk about illness in this is from mulder’s perspective as he experiences her terminal illness secondhand; that way, he doesn’t need to (but still likely will) find logic or reason or meaning for death from a terminal illness, so his discoveries and his coping mechanisms aren’t as urgently needed. had i written a chapter that describes how she lives, i think that the discussion of death in this would be voided altogether. and i also don’t believe the ending would be much different whether she lives or dies; there’s still the need for death acceptance and talking about dying, whether or not she lives, and none of the story in this fic would have happened had the characters known she would live. the whole point is not knowing.

for a little while i toyed with writing an unofficial sequel of sorts in which i spelled out what i think happens after the ending, but after realizing that that would end up being longer than the original fic and would also have some massive plot holes, i decided against it. i do have my own version and i don’t want to share that version because i never really intended for my version to be some kind of genuine sequel in which every question gets answered and everything is wrapped up and happy ever after and whatnot. it was just where my brain wandered in the same way it wanders when i watch an open-ended movie. all of that to say, if you think she lives, then she lives. if you think she dies, then she dies. it’s your decision. i’d much rather you choose than me. i never marked this as “major character” death on ao3 because, well, she doesn’t die in this fic. whether or not she dies after the fic ends, that’s for you to decide. 

thank you for taking the time to read my writing. i never expected this to blow up (it blew up for me at least, for a while it was my most popular fic ever, with i think thousands more hits than anything else i’d written) and the response has been mind-boggling and wonderful. i don’t respond to comments often because it makes me feel like a pompous jerk (”thank you for enjoying this! i, too, enjoy this thing i have written! oh ho ho!” is how it sounds to me in my head, whereas when other writers respond to comments to me it just looks like thanks man have a good day, feel free to call me a weenie) but i’ve appreciated all of them very much. THANK YOU! i hope your new year is a Whole Lot Less Shit than 2020. i don’t plan on writing more msr because i don’t really have any ideas for them. thank you for making my last time special <3

[himbosims]

uh complaining under the cut dont read if you dont wanna know potentially tmi stuff or dont wanna read anything triggering towards mental health and alcohol/drugs

im just SO FUCKING DONE. I work full time, not by choice, but because I have yet to be put on a part time schedule. I also am a full time student. This means the 168 hours I have in the week, 80 go to work and school, potentially more depending on the week. But im also trying really hard to take care of myself because last year when the last thing happened i fell into a really really really bad depression, relapsed, turned to alcohol and pot to cope, which i mean, isnt a bad thing, nothing wrong with a drink or two or having a blunt, but it became more of a every weekend kind of thing. I didn’t want to be sober because everything was just too hard and too much and it seemed alcohol made it better. I was really in one of my worst places in my life around October of last year to February of this year and I really don’t want to fall into that place again, so im trying hard to take care of myself. Im going to therapy, taking my medicine, caring for my health as much as I can, but its just, so hard sometimes. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety earlier this year, which I already knew, but now that Ive started therapy and treatment I’ve been diagnosed with BPD (or at least, semi diagnosed, she didnt have time last session to give me a proper diagnoses, but she says it is highly likely thats my main “issue”) and idk. Im having a hard time coping with it I guess. I mean, ive kinda known for awhile. I could go into papers full of the shit thats happened in the last year to make me think this was a possible diagnoses, but theres a difference between just thinking it to yourself and being told “hey this is what is wrong with you.” (im just now realizing some of you dont know what bpd is so uh, if you dont, think hot and cold, thats how i am about everything, if you wanna learn more just send me an ask or a message, ill share what ive learned based on what my therapist told me). And right now is a really triggering time for me based on past trauma and current things happening in my life, that plus the fact that my depression gets worse in the winter, im really just straight up not having a good time. 

Tumblr also hasnt been great for my mental health, and this is where it gets to the part where you are going to judge me so please just dont because i will probably just cry and log off for months again. All of those posts that go around that are like “sim stories to read” or “blogs I love” really fucking did me in this week because i kept waiting for someone to add me and everytime i saw a reblog where i wasnt on it i felt terrible. I hate that part about myself but i cant change it, i told my therapist about it and she said, again, its the bpd, but its just very annoying. I always find myself so fucking sad on this platform because i never feel appreciated, which is stupid because i know I am, but my brain cant turn off for five seconds just to be happy with what i have. Instead i have to convince myself no one actually cares about me and soon everyone will forget about me and my characters and ill go back to what my blog was when i started it four years ago getting one note per post while my mutuals just get more followings. I hate this. I hate this so much and if there was a way to change this part of me I would because its bullshit. 

That plus the fact that I havent felt good today (i have chronic digestive/stomach issues and have since I was a kid, yeah me) so i worked all day basically just being in pain because i ate something new and my body had a very negative reaction to it.  Which made me in a terrible mood since I got to work. 

I really wanna work on stuff. I got in such a big mood to write yesterday but i was too tired to actually do anything and thats basically been my entire life recently. I sleep all night and as much of the day as possible and when im not asleep im tired and in a shitty mood and i know theres not much i can do about it because im not in control of really anything. Basically im just vibing, but not the good kind, more of the “i hate everything and life isnt fair but im too spiteful to die” kinda vibing. 

[plaidshirtjimkirk]

i wish i had an awesome list of things i wrote in 2019, but there’s none to speak of. i probably hit 30k max or so. but i wanna talk about writing anyway. this is longgggg, sorry.

i have been and ever shall be a ridiculously passionate person. when i love something, i really really *really* love it. it takes over everything. it’s all i think about. i’ve always been this way. i had all of one friend when i was a child and i met her in preschool. we met up recently and she started naming all these series and characters i was obsessed with since i was 4. LOL the thing is, like... no one else liked these things, so she had to deal with me infodumping and reading my crappy fanfiction to her from elementary to middle school. (the fact that she still talks to me amazes me.)

my relationship with writing is complicated and im finally understanding why.

i started out with self insert stories when i was super young because there weren’t any other kids around besides my one awesome friend. i never felt lonely though because i had my stories.

i loved fictional characters. i self shipped. this led me to roleplaying. i found someone who was writing as a character i adored. we wrote together and then started dating. that was my first SO. not knowing any better, i remained in an abusive relationship for 7 years. my stories were my comfort and i can honestly say that writing saved my life. there’s a good ending to this situation. one day, i experienced a breath of fresh air and finally took the trash out.

i dabbled in drawing comics for a bit as i worked hard at my job. i met someone worth my love and effort. we loved each other so much that we maintained a relationship while living on opposite ends of the planet. as you can imagine, that was pretty lonely. writing helped me through it. i met some amazing people to write with during this time, including my bff @suitablyaggrieved.

the fandom we were in then was filled with toxic people however. my having an oc didn’t help things so i had to deal with harassment, even when i was minding my own damn business. got tired of that, took down my writing, and barely wrote a thing for about 3 years.

when i fell hard into trek, i decided i wanted to give fandom one more shot. i wanted to be in a community that loved the same things i did and figured it was worth the effort of trying. tbh i feel very lucky that my return to fandom was trek because yall are seriously some of the nicest people ever.

when i started this blog, i was just some rude dipshit who didn’t really think about the weight of my words. i said mean things but i didn’t care. it was whatever because it was my blog and i had 30 followers. the follower count grew though at some point, i thought about why i tested the waters of coming back to fandom and how grateful i was to splash land back in one like trek. i realized i wasn’t being the kind of person i wanted to be. i’m still a dipshit, just less rude now.

but the thing is that trek got me into writing again. and when i started, i felt like there were no limits. i wrote and wrote and wrote. i was telling stories about some things i’d been through and using characters as proxies. it was an interesting experience. i never wanted to stop...made me feel like i was doing something constructive when drama was going on in my work life.

everything was ok though because i had my words.............and then chronic illness caught up with me.

writing made me happy because i saw myself putting out lots of stories. but when it came to the point where i couldn’t write as much as i used to because i was in too much pain to even get out of bed, it started making me feel really depressed.

the truth is that i don’t have confidence in my work. i never did. i probably never will. it sucks when you spend all this time working on something, just to end up hating it. and with being the passionate person i am, the lower word count had me feeling like a complete failure. all or nothing. consistency or nothing. i know this is unhealthy. i also would never think anyone else was a failure for not writing as much. it was just...i had all these personal goals i wasn’t meeting.

at some point, i started feeling as though i couldn’t write ks anymore. there were a couple reasons for that but the main one was losing consistency. i didn’t feel like my work was ever anything special, but at least i was feeling productive. when that went out the window, i kinda looked back at all these words i put out and didn’t feel good about them.

i started writing for small pairings where the fandom was literally all of 2 people. i thought that maybe i could just post stories for a tiny audience, or even just for my own sake, and maybe being so worried about quality wouldn’t be such a big deal. i was kidding myself though. ofc it was. and it just made me feel worse about my writing. i didn’t know how to make it fun. instead of being pumped to start something new, all i could think about was how i’d suffer to put whatever story i was thinking of together and just end up hating. it felt like so much wasted effort.

i met some awesome new friends who encouraged me to make an oc again. it took such a long time but i did and i spent a few months privately posting fics about all of our ocs interacting. writing was slowly becoming fun again.

and that brings me to where i am today. i realize it’s been a crutch for me throughout life. i could throw myself into it, throw myself into stories that others wrote. with less energy to go around because of being in pain frequently, the amount i could do reduced drastically. i’m still trying to figure out how to cope with that, and how to not put so much pressure on myself to where i get stuck in an endless loop of self hating.

still, writing saved me. even though things got really complicated, im glad i had the experience of doing it and even though it sometimes stresses me the hell out, i want to keep at it...figure out how the same thing that helped me so many times before can do so again.

i’m not sure i can ever figure the confidence/self love thing out, but i think i can try to make words my friends again. people outside of fandom don’t get it and i guess i can’t blame them if they don’t have the experience. they think ff is some frivolous activity that has no merit, no quality, no bearing on anything. but it does on franchise, community, and individual levels.

anyway, sending good vibes to every content creator out there. let’s hang in there through the great times and bad. <3