#my brain is to tired to create coherent expressions of my emotions but

[the-eye-guy]

I caught up with Malevolent. And things Certainly Happened.

Send help. I am not Doing Well

[anemonenemerosa]

The Spare- Chapter 9

Hello fellow people,

here’s the next one. Thank you for staying with me and thank you @lumosinlove for creating this world =)

This is still dark so please stay safe.

Chapter 9

Reality returned with a bolt of pain in Regulus' leg and a clatter in front of him. Some guy who looked like a maintenance-man stumbled over the mop he just dropped while hurrying over, turning off the shower and kneeling down beside him in the puddle of water, soap and blood. Regulus heard the man speaking but the sounds didn't connect to words in his brain.

He was still sobbing violently as he watched the shard being carefully pulled from his leg and replaced by a cloth that got pressed on the cut.

Eyes wide, Regulus just stared at the man in front of him. He was pale and slender, much more delicate than himself, probably in his mid-twenties. A lot of light brown hair was piled in a messy bun with a severe side cut on his left and there were tattoos. Lots of them covering on both of his arms from his wrists to the sleeves of his worn-out sweater, bunched up to the elbows.

Je jerked as he felt a soft tap on his cheek and looked the man in the face for the first time: His nose was straight with a ring in the right side and he is gnawing on his thin lips. The look in his green-hazel eyes lacked the calculation, malice and sneer Regulus was used to. There was just concern. Concern about Regulus, having a complete meltdown in the shower.

As Hays, it said on the tag on his chest, carefully wrapped his arms around him, mumbling soothing nonsense and just holding him like no one held him in years, he dissolved in another fit of sobs. And Regulus hated it. He hated that his, normally strong, control of his emotions failed him completely in front of this stranger. Embarrassment burned in his cheeks while he couldn't stop sobbing and crying into the other man’s shoulder.

After minutes, hours or years -who knows- his sobs faded into ragged breathing and Hayes tried to disentangle himself from the death-grip around the other one´s chest. Regulus did not even remember putting his arms there. He was still deeply embarrassed but also unable to let go of this source of warmth and comfort, so he only grabbed him tighter, forcing a huff out of Hayes lungs.

"Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere, just let me have another look at your leg"

Regulus started crying again, hearing only what he supposed was genuine concern and kindness in the other man´s voice. Slowly, he lightened his grip.

"Hi Regulus, I'm Ben", Hayes said while carefully lifting the cloth to inspect the wound. The bleeding mostly stopped and the cut looked rather nasty. Brilliant. His sacrasm resurfacing, Regulus felt better already but his eyes narrowed immediately as he realised that Hayes knew his name.

He opened his mouth.

"You are an NHL-player, mate. There is a gargantuan poster of you with your name on it in the entrance-hall I just happen to clean every other day." Hayes -Ben- supplied dryly before Regulus had worked anything out of his sore throat.

"As this does not seem to be a regular hobby of yours, I will not ask if you alright because you are clearly not" Regulus snorted at the deadpan expression and tone.

"I should get you to the hospital. Someone should have a look at this." Ben continued, nodding at Regulus' still slightly bleeding leg.

Hell, no! Horror surged through Regulus and tied a firm knot in his stomach as he frantically shook his head. His parents mustn't find out how weak he was.

Ben eyed him thoughtfully while gnawing on his lip, got up to retrieve his phone from his pocket and Regulus felt his eyes widen in panic.

 Merde! He's going to take a picture...that's it. I'm done for.

But Ben just pressed a reassuring hand to his shoulder as he dialled a number and put the phone to his ear. Regulus was silently freaking out and dreading the consequences of his emotional outburst but after a calm conversation to someone in, what Regulus thought might be Spanish, Ben tied the cloth on Regulus leg and gently pulled him to his feet.

Oh sainte, he is so tiny. Regulus could easily look over the other man’s head.

"You think you can manage to dry-off a bit and put some clothes on while I clean up the blood?"

Regulus stared.

Only then he realised that he was stark naked and that he was just as naked as he held this stranger in a death-grip... While crying on his shoulder... Sitting in a shower... Wouldn't it be for the new wave of embarrassment burning through his guts, Regulus would marvel at the hilarity of the situation. Instead, he silently nodded and limped to his stall.

He felt dizzy, his head bursting and empty at the same time. Even simple coherent thoughts seemed to slip from his grasp. He was tired and a numb version of sadness settled in his stomach. Head pounding and feeling sick, Regulus had neither energy nor capacity to think what to do about it all. He just sat there.

Ben joined him some undefined amount of time later, sat down beside him and, again, put a hand on his shoulder. Regulus couldn't help the flinch in automatic expectation of punishment. As no such thing followed, he relaxed a bit.

"If you want, I can drive you home." Ben offers and Regulus vaguely realises that he has no such place and he tells Ben so.

"Earlier on the phone, I talked to my boyfriend. Mateo is an EMP." Ben explained calmly after a moment of silence. Regulus notices Ben speaking so casually about having a boyfriend is very unlike everything he has ever known but has no energy to mull that over.

"He wants you to get your leg checked. His shift ends in about an hour and he wants you to remember that, if you come over, he is not allowed to tell anyone why you are in the hospital. You are over eighteen so even your parents have no right to know what happens there."

Regulus stared at him warily, only just comprehending what the other man talked about. Someone had replaced his with cotton wool.

"If you want, we can manage to get you into an examination room through the backdoor, so you do not have to sit in the waiting area, being recognised and stared at."

He looks into the open and friendly eyes of Ben, the encouraging smile on his face, and just nods. It was probably about eleven in the evening by now and he was sure that the Malfoys were too busy celebrating the harm he caused his brother to even realise he’s not there. They barely did on normal days. Ever since moving there, Regulus made it a habit of remaining silent and invisible in the house.

                                                     oOo

They arrived at some dodgy delivery entrance. While Ben guided him quietly through the Kitchen or something, the wheels Regulus brain slowly began to turn again.

 Why did I step into the car with that guy? Shouldn’t I have learned by now, that trusting people is a horrible idea? Where the actual hell are we even going?

But whatever Regulus anticipated, he did not expect to just be sat in an examination room to fill out some forms in peace and wait for an endless amount of time until a man entered the room.

Dr. M. Alves it said on his tag and Regulus vaguely suspected that this must be Mateo. The fog in his brain had started to properly clear up a while ago and he assumed that he could think clear again.

The man in front of him seemed a few years older than Ben and smiled professionally but there was also a genuine warmth in his dark brown eyes and wide face as Regulus stands up to shake his hand. While generally broader than Ben, the man was even shorter, his black, slightly shaggy hair only reaching up to Regulus' upper lip. All these tiny people...

                                                     oOo

"Regulus, you are just the tiniest little baby brother!"

"Sirius, get a grip. I'm eighteen and actually 6'2." Regulus huffed exasperatedly. Sirius was six years older. How was Regulus the mature one?

"But I am bigger."  Sirius sing-songed.

"It is just an inch!" - "Still."

Regulus felt a fresh pang of guilt at the memory of what seemed the last of the very few careless conversations they had after his brother was drafted, shortly before his own draft.

                                                      oOo

"Regulus," Dr. Alves said, the warmth not leaving his eyes. The artificial light made is dark tanned skin look a bit queasy and accentuated the bags under his eyes.

"Ben called me and explained to me how he found you" Regulus grimaced at the memory. Dr. Alves seemed to notice and continued gentler, if that was even possible

"First, I want to check your leg and then we see how to proceed from there, OK?" Regulus just nodded and pulled down his sweatpants before he sat down on the examination table, realising that he forgot his underwear in the locker room.

Alves did not bat an eye. His, now gloved, hands carefully removed the blood-stained cloth and softly prodded the cut, eliciting painful twitches from Regulus' leg.

"The cut was caused by a glass shard?" The doctor asked and continued after a curt nod from Regulus.

"I need to make sure there is no glass left." He mentioned for Regulus to get up and ushered him into a second room. Luckily, he checked the cut for glass with an ultrasonic device, as two little chips were still in the wound and needed to be fumbled out with a pair terrifyingly long tweezers. Splendid.

Back in the examination-room, Alves began tapping his nose with his finger while staring blindly at Regulus leg. He looked up into Regulus' face and seemed to recognise the insecurity there as he smiled again his warm smile.

"You play hockey, so we need to think of the best method to close the cut", he explained. "Regular stitches might pull to much during strain but glue will most likely come loose with too much movement." He looked up again, expectantly, but as Regulus had no idea what the doctor wanted to hear he just shrugged noncommittingly.

"I think the best option are butterfly-stitches that you can replace by yourself when they come loose." After tending the cut and showing Regulus how to correctly disinfect the area and replace the stitches, he sat down across from him.

"Now," he began carefully, "it is time to tell me what happened." As Regulus' face shut-off instantly, he continued "I am not allowed to tell any soul about what you tell me in here."

Regulus only looked at his feet, not sure what to do with the second person this night to seem to care for his wellbeing. Not to get him back on ice quicker, not to gain useful information... only for the sake of him feeling better. But could he really trust him? He trusted other people before. People he thought he knew. And look how well that worked.

But this guy was not allowed to talk and breaking medical confidentiality would have very bad consequences for him. Unlike Slughorn, no one would protect him. So maybe, just maybe he could risk it. Also, there was no one here... not his cousins, not his parents. That was what he had hoped for since Thanksgiving. He was sitting in front of an uninvolved human being offering to help.

And for the second time this night, his eyes welled up. For the second time this night, he was embarrassed for his feelings. For the second time this night, he hated his lack of control. For the second time this night, he cried into the shoulder of a stranger, overwhelmed by the thought that this is how care feels, how his family was supposed to treat him.  

For the first time in his life, he spilled out all his carefully guarded feelings. And spilling, he did. Once he started, everything came out in a flood. He talked about his brother, his abuse and loneliness. The expectations of his parents and the shame he felt for how he treated his brother in his pathetic attempts to escape Sirius' success pressing down on him. He talked about his wish to please his parents, the abandonment and loneliness he felt himself, the envy and desperate longing for support and affection and his feelings of being undeserving.

Before he came to the part of how he accidentally outed his brother, he could stop himself. Mateo was a queer, too and might take this rather personally. Regulus could not deal with more people hating him right now.

Although he felt a bit bad for keeping quiet about the incident that had finally sent him off-kilter, he couldn't remember the last time he was so relieved, so at ease.

With the words "My shift ends now so I close up. Ben waits somewhere outside." still in his ear, Regulus stepped outside in the night, breathed the fresh air and had no idea what to do with himself. He checked his phone: No messages, so no one noticed his absence.

This thought elicited both elation and disappointment in him but before he could really think of it, Ben rounded the corner of the building with Dr. Alves in tow, both smiling at him.

"I know that sounds like a weird offer from strangers but if you want, we can take you with us to stay at our couch for the night." Dr. Alves offers still smiling warmly. This smile stared to unsettle Regulus a little. How can anyone be that friendly all the time? Where is the catch?

"No, thank you Dr. Alves." After a second, he added, considering his previous meltdown in the arms the two guys, looking at him expectantly. "That would be inappropriate."

"I am not at work anymore, so its Mateo. I am not than old" Dr. Alves countered cheerfully, completely oblivious to what Regulus had actually just said.

"You are known enough for someone to notice you missing eventually, so you don't have to fear us murdering you and selling your organs." Ben chimed in with a failed attempt of a joke.

How very wrong you are... Regulus thought, considering the lack of messages on his phone.  

Now that he's calmed down again, he began to take in just how ridiculous his situation really was. These weirdly empathetic people didn't know him at all but offered him to stay on their couch?

Well admittedly, Mateo probably knew him very well now but Regulus was not in the mood for rational consideration. Who does that? What is the goddamn catch? What did he have, that they want?

Again, they seemed to sense something was going on in his brain. Regulus had always prided himself with his poker face. He could fool anyone. Or, so he thought. Are they like, psychic... or did I lose all my, composure over the night? He couldn't afford to be read like an open book when he got back to his life.

The older men exchanged a look.

"We just try to give you a place to stay for the night as you don't seem too inclined to go to your usual place now." Regulus was impressed by how Dr. Alves -Mateo - avoided the word 'home' after all he heard and, in addition to so much tact, still tried to comfort him well past his shift. That is devotion.

Then, Regulus recognised the looks on their faces for what they were and felt cold again. He found the catch.

"No, thank you. I do not need your pity. Please find someone else to rescue and elate your conscience or what-ever you try to achieve with that."

What happened next was not what Regulus expected. He expected them to look blank, caught maybe or calculating. He did not expect the hurt in both faces, Bens expression quickly turning into anger.

"Now listen up you little shit!" he spat. "What I saw this evening was a desperate and very hurt young man sitting alone in a shower, crying and shoving a shard in his own leg! Of course, I am concerned, of course I try to help you out, it is the decent thing to do."

"Ben –" Mateo tried calmly. "No, Matty, that’s going too far! I know nothing about your upbringing, Regulus and Matty is not allowed to tell me anything but we are trying to help you! Yes, there is pity, and yes, we would both feel better if we knew you stayed at a safe place this night. But do not dare to accuse us of any ulterior motifs or calculation behind that, except giving warmth to someone who seems to desperately need it! So, get a grip, you fucking little menace, get in the car and have soup on our goddamn couch."

Reg could only stare, gaping like an absurd portrayal of a fish. No one except Sirius had ever had talked to him like that.... Plainly insulting him into feeling better. What. The. Fuck.

[slink-a-dink]

What's your opinion on some of the more popular ships in the fandom? Yes, this includes rave

Putting under a readmore since I ramble im so sorry

Stickvin: AH A CLASSIC! I think it’s good! They’re just bros and I think they’re a very nice pairing, I’ve started to draw less of it but I think it’s a lovely pairing nonetheless. It’s that ship in the fanbase tho, where it tends to get a lot of young fans who tend to be really insistent on stickvin content or being rlly weird, like fucking. fujos. unfortunately. but i shouldn’t let that taint the ship for me, its very lovely and acted as a comfort ship back when I first joined, its not in my brain as much but. iTS JUST GOOD!!

Rosemin: Does this count? I think so? if not IT SHOULD!!! Rosemin has recently started rotting my brain and I feel like it deserves more recognition. They are a power couple! Toppat King and Right hand lady Ellie?? WTF THEIR POWER!! The inherent romance of being a right-hand!! TT/TR/PP/CG? Absolute power duo!!! And in TCW? I think people should start thinking abt Enemies/Rivals to Lovers TCW Rosemin!! Like think about it!! They never had the chance to talk it out, and maybe they realize their argument is doing more harm then good, they slowly come to realize that theyre not so different after all and grow to forgive, or something I JSUT! I CAMT THINK BUT THESE TWO ARE SO FUCKING BISEXUAL AND I THINK THEY SHOULD KISS AND I WANNA MAKE MORE ROSEMIN CONTENT!!!!!!!

Polythreat: VERY VERY GOOD!! Whether its a perfect triangle (everyone dates eachother) or just henry dating the two or some other combo, I love this ship; its just a really wholesome ot3 and their dynamic in game shows just a lovely ship 💕💕🥺

Copperright: I WISH I HAD BRAINROT FOR THIS SHIP. Like it’s so lovely!!! I want brainrot too!!! The potential, the IN CANON EVERYTHING ITS!! SO GOOD!! THEY ARE SO FUCKING MARRIED THEY ARE MARRIED AND IN LOVE AND WVERYONE MAKES SUCH GREAT CONTENT OF THESE TWO!! I do get a little fickle at times with reg being presented as helpless without rhm, but other than that? great ship I WANT TO DRAW FOR IT BUT HRRGRGRG NO BRAINROT!!!!!

Curtisson: A CUTE PAIRING! They talk once but its okay and thats a lot mmore than pther ships i have. I love the inherent dynamic of Talks in Essays x Tired and doing his job, i just, theyre a funny duo, i dont have much strong feelinsg about the pairing its so fucking wonderful and Like. Its just so good.

Dr. Rose: WAMEN.!!! I THINK THIS COUNTS! I’m unfamiliar with other social media but i think its popular and im so happy about that. people who love women have it sO HARD IN THIS FANDOM!! WHERE ARE THE WOMEN!!! but yeah these two? I adore them so fucking much. They can be such a power duo and I think there is so so so much potential, especially since both ellie and dr v have so much unknown about them, i just. I feel like theyre such an interesting dynamic to explore, especially with the multitude of different dr v variations. ik for my ask blog i wanted to build up this pairing, but idk if ik going to keep my askblog, but i just, i cant express the emotions and thoughts they give, they are kust a loving duo, who are so powerful, the brains and brawn and both r beauty. i just UGH!!! I HAVE THOUGHTS BUT NO WORDS!! so yeah anyways one of the best ships in this fandom I LOVE WOMEN.

Panprice: OH A VERY GOOD DUO. Dave and Rupert is such a good ship and like. I really love their whole dynamic with rupert getting the good card and dave getting the bad card, like any opposite dynamic like that is rlly cool. and i thunkthey should reunite and rupert should be there for dave, bc hes rlly been througj it.. and i just. they are good dynamic!! ex-coworkers to lovers babey!!!

galetrov: I CANT FORM A COHERENT THOUGHT OTHER THAN GO GRANDPAS!! its a VERY GOOD SHIP WITH LOTS OF POTENTIAL AND STORY AND MMMMM GO GRANDPAS

Rave: Oh rave. I have a lotta feelings and emotions on this ship but man I DONT KNOW HOW IFEEL ABT IT NOT BEING A RAREPAIR ANYMORE,,? Like i dont know other social medias so I don’t know how popular it is in its entirety buT I AM GLAD TO BE ONE OF THE PEOPLE TO BE CAPTAIN OF THIS SHIP BC MAN... I think about it so much. Like Rave is a comfort ship of mine unfortunately, I’ve latched onto to Randy and Terrence and I’ve created these two characters from nothing (they’re basically ocs) and then gave them a wholeass story?? man i just. the foundation is these two awful leaders being in love and rainbow x greyscale, which I think is an epic starting dynamic. Like I feel like. I could go for literal hours about things, but the thing with Rave is because Randy and Terrence have so little information, there’s so much that can be done, and in my case, I think these two just tried their best, wasn’t good enough, and eventually settled down, being Henry’s fathers. bc i believe in NICE TERRENCE PROPAGANDA

so yah. im sorry i ramble

[rosy-wooyoung]

Let’s get emotional…

I know no one will read this but i’m still putting it out there!

today is my account anniversary!! 🥳🥳

I created this blog on the 14.12.2019, and a year later, nothing really changed. It’s just me, still sitting at my desk, my whole back hurting with cold hands and my pathetically low self-esteem. It was one boring evening, I remember, I had just eaten dinner and I rushed to my computer to come back on Tumblr to read more ATEEZ content because I was fascinated by them, their talent and stage presence. (I still am, don’t worry) And then, I thought damn, I wanna write for them as well. You know what?

Fuck it. Imma do it.

I put the task of finding a username aside and start feeling inspiration flooding in my mind. I spend the entire evening writing as the words come, not caring about the coherence, the grammar nor the consistency of my writing, I just type and type until my fingers are cramping and my brain lagging. It’s just an amazing feeling when you don’t have to rack your brains to find ideas or words, I just had to think of an ATEEZ member, and the imagination would immediately submerge my mind. 

I truly aspire to find back the motivation I had a year ago.

The next morning, I even skip breakfast because I wanted to create, brainstorm, rewrite and correct the works I had produced the night before. I completely ditch my uni homework - don’t do that kids - until the end of the afternoon, where I post a note, introducing myself to the atiny Tumblr community. I was very anxious and shy before posting my first imagine, but I was immediately welcomed with likes, 20 on the first day to be exact. It was HUGE for me. 

I’m someone extremely self-conscious and very hard on myself, so it was kind of a struggle to post content out on the Internet for strangers to read. I’ve always feared judgement, I’ve bathed in it since the day I was born and I can’t seem to get rid of it. 20+ fics are still rotting in my drafts, I’m just too insecure to release them, so I ignore them and always search for new content to write about. I’m also scared to disappoint, but that’s another story. Aside from that, I’m really grateful because I’ve never received this much love and support in my life since I started this account. Whether is keyboard smashing in the reblog section or just someone saying “uwu that was so cute 🥺”, my day is automatically better. I have never received support or compliments from my parents, siblings or friends that I thought were the closest. Never. And it’s a weird yet great feeling!!

The first two months were amazing. By the beginning of February, I had hit the 200-followers milestone. It was something unbelievable for me. You may think that I’m exaggerating, but I was really thinking that I would only get like maximum 50 followers, and I would have still been happy about it. My account was doing great, but at this point, it was my health that started going downhill.

The pandemic and the stress from it aggravated everything, weakening my heart to the point of needing urgent surgeries (2, almost 3 in October, where there was a risk for me to d*e. Great when you’re a young woman who only spent her twenty first years of existence studying and worrying about her future :/). I get stressed out extremely easily and my doctor diagnosed me with severe anxiety and depression a few years ago. And guess what? They were acting up of course, so nothing was by my side. I was lost about my future and my career – I still am haha (pain) – and it was a hard time for me, for us. I’m still not at my best, but at least I’m trying, that’s what matters the most, right? This blog and the people I met there were my source of comfort and light, my safe place, it helps me a lot to just read or laugh at what I see in my dash to make me forget about everything that is bothering me. I met wonderful, supportive people on there and I can’t find the right words to truly express how I am feeling. And here I am right now, a year later, Tumblr being my solace because I can read really really good fics and wips, as well as exchanging with other atinys and people from other fandoms.

I still have those moments of doubt when I’m about to post something like, will this be appreciated? Isn’t it too cliche, too bad, too fluffy, grammatically correct, cool enough, aesthetic enough, cute enough, did someone already write something along those lines without me knowing it? Will I get accused of stealing or plagiarising? 

I can’t stop overthinking, but I’m trying to work on it, I really am, even if it’s hard. It’s really not something easy and I get defeated quite quickly, but at least I’m trying.

Even if I lost loved ones during this year (friends that ghosted me for other people, my grandpa passing away from cancer, watching and knowing acquaintances dying bc of covid…) I’ve got to know beautiful angels on here, my mutuals and my followers!! Even if we don’t talk 24/7, I really love and appreciate every single one of you. I know we’re just internet friends, but you really count for me. Please excuse me if you’re tired of seeing me being constantly apologising or being weird and absolutely not funny, I’m trying to become a better person. I absolutely adore when you mention me in tag games or send me love and support via asks or private messages, it makes my heart go really warm. If it were possible, I’d give each single one of you a hug and a big kiss on the cheek because you all deserve it and I love you.

Thank you @atbzkingdom, @closer-stars, @barsformars, @trashlord-007, @ateez-little-star, @tinkerbellwoo, @chrryhwa, @ateezlips, and everyone that I missed that follow me and support me, I luv you all sm :-]

Sorry if this post doesn’t make sense, I just wanted to try and express my gratitude as well as my love for everything you gave me. I hope 2021 will be better, kinder for all of us, and I wish everyone reading this to be(come) happy and healthy.

with all my love, rosy ♥

[behrooz-musigns]

+ Innovative, warm, witty, kind, protective, geeky +/- Intellectual, observant, horny - impatient, unreliable, outspoken, easily distracted

++ BASIC INFORMATION

FULL NAME: Behrooz Hakim Najm PRONUNCIATION: Beh-roes MEANING: Lucky ZODIAC: Pisces ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Bi SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Poly CURRENT LOCATION: Epineios OCCUPATION: Student, IT

++ BIOGRAPHY

Behrooz personally invented the saying ‘I guess luck is just on my side’, or so they would have everyone in their school believe when they got another high score in one of the games they played in the back of the school. They would do guessing games, with people asking them a number which they had written down, and Behrooz would always guess right. 

Sadly luck rarely followed them home. They were raised by their grandmother, who forbade them to hang out after school, and certainly ensured they would never be seen hanging out with girls on their own. She would remind them time and time again of their father, a gambler who had made it big winning game after game, then one day showed up with a baby, only to drink himself to death a year later. She would remind them that they were the family’s burden, and they would have to behave in order to not bring another burden upon them. 

And as they grew older, luck left them more and more often. Being a practicing Muslim was already a hard sell, but with the world growing more extreme around them, they found the community stifle their ambitions daily. It confused Behrooz that while their religion gave them anxiety, praying chased the demons away. It was almost as if they couldn’t have the one without the other. 

Life was a constant . Bad people walking in and out of their life, bullies, racist teachers, judgemental neighbors, judgemental extended family members. Behrooz tended to lock themselves up in their room every day, listening to music or playing games of chance. A knot seemed to live inside their stomach all the time, a fear of being plucked off of the street and never arriving home. 

When that actually happened, it wasn’t like they had imagined. 

Being mostly interested in digits, numbers, code, etc. Behrooz hadn’t paid much attention to history class when Ancient Greek and Ancient Rome were being discussed, and as they saw a creepy creature with goat legs walk up to them, they really wished they had. There was a whole speech about being in mortal danger, gods, strange creatures on the loose, yada yada. Behrooz had a headache by the time the goat legged creature told them to follow him. Very close to sparking some lie about soccer practice or prayers, their head snapped back to attention when the creature suggested they had a mother who was a God. 

The only thing driving them forward was the possibility of learning who their mother was, something in their brain sending out constant messages of: gotta meet mom, gotta meet mom, gotta meet mom. Rather than forming coherent sentences. They disappeared into some cleared out old train tunnel, and emerged on the other side of the bleedin’ ocean. All Behrooz knew to say was: “thought your accent sounded funny.” Before being swarmed by the strangest assortment of kids, some younger than their fourteen years, others older, everyone excited. Was this the right time to say they were Muslim and watch everyone slowly disappear like they had done back in school? 

Nobody really seemed to care however, over the years - in which they discovered their godly parent, never got to meet her, discovered she was probably the most difficult goddess to find, got a large portion of the camp to join them during Ramadan - Behrooz stayed at the Camp the whole year round. They didn’t wish to return to the UK, and followed online lessons to keep up with their education. Of course they were bleedin’ lucky, and with time they learned how to use that luck to their advantage, and to that of those around them. Yet, Behrooz started to appreciate the balance of it all, the bad and the good. 

To them, code was good. Watching others struggle with programs and computers, just made them more interested in it. Algorithms fascinated them, they could spend hours looking at code trying to figure out how it worked. When the time came for them to move out of the warm nest of Camp Half Blood, Behrooz had already set their sights on studying Programming at the University of New York. 

++ HEADCANONS

++ Horny as hell, and often very lucky in love, although they can never seem to hold on to anyone for long. 

++ A skilled programmer with a love for code and numbers and digits. They can stay up nights on end trying to figure out some new program or write an algorithm of their own.

++ Despite their interests in the digital, Bez spends most of their time outside if they can help it. They love forests, trees, the fresh air. They take walks a lot, driving the metro to the park and helping themselves to a huge thermos of coffee. 

++ Religion is an important part of their life, without it they would be nowhere. Whenever they feel lost or anxious, they tend to be eager for it to be time to pray, something they do five times a day. 

++ They’ve read the Quran, although their grandmother never taught them Arabic beforehand, so they’re currently reading it in English in between classes, thesis writing, and walks. 

++ Bez is a very kind individual, who will help others whenever they can - mostly with IT stuff. As a job, or a way to get money mostly, they help teachers or partake in arranging anything that needs a programmer. They’re a regular Upwork user. 

++ In fights Bez uses their ability to generate luck to get other Demigods out of trouble and make the damage less. 

++ They love bunk beds.

++ Wears very loose-fitting clothing. 

++ Drinks way too much coffee and black tea. 

++ Doesn’t like it when people constantly nag.

++ Extremely messy, will end up finding coffee mugs everywhere. 

++ Is always running from one place to the next because he has too much planned on a daily basis. 

++ SKILLS & ABILITIES

PHYSICAL STRENGTH: Above average  OFFENSE: Lacking  DEFENSE: Main attribute  SPEED: Above average  INTELLIGENCE: High ACCURACY: Descent AGILITY: Good STAMINA: Fine  TEAMWORK: Speciality  TALENTS: Luck manipulation SHORTCOMINGS: Easily distracted, no overview LANGUAGE(S) SPOKEN: English  DRIVE?: yes  JUMP-STAR A CAR?: not really  CHANGE A FLAT TIRE?: absolutely not  RIDE A BICYCLE?: absolutely  SWIM?: decently PLAY AN INSTRUMENT?: piano and guitar  PLAY CHESS?: no  BRAID HAIR?: one day maybe  TIE A TIE?: yes  PICK A LOCK?: yes

++ PHYSICAL APPEARANCE & CHARACTERISTICS

FACE CLAIM: Viveik Kalra  EYE COLOR: brown  HAIR COLOR: brown  HAIR TYPE/STYLE: semi-long, wavy, thick GLASSES/CONTACTS?: no  DOMINANT HAND: right  HEIGHT: 1.75m WEIGHT: 65kg  BUILD: lean  EXERCISE HABITS: jogging in the morning, some sparring during the weekend  SKIN TONE: brown  TATTOOS: none  PIERCINGS: none  MARKS/SCARS: none  NOTABLE FEATURES: three-day beard on account of forgetting to shave  USUAL EXPRESSION: concentrated or dreamlike  CLOTHING STYLE: loose clothing, soft fabric.  JEWELRY: two rings on their right hand  ALLERGIES: incense

++ PSYCHOLOGY

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral ELEMENT: earth MENTAL CONDITIONS/DISORDERS: Dyslexia, slight ADHD  SOCIABILITY: normal  EMOTIONAL STABILITY: average, let’s not talk about it.  OBSESSION(S): code  COMPULSION(S): gambling, drinking coffee and forgetting coffee, hyper-focus PHOBIA(S): fear of people being Islamphobic  ADDICTION(S): caffeine DRUG USE: none  ALCOHOL USE: none PRONE TO VIOLENCE?: no

++ MANNERISMS

SPEECH STYLE: quick, active, excited  ACCENT: London British  QUIRKS: licks teeth, uses swear words HOBBIES: coding, walking, jogging, drinking coffee, is Starbucks a hobby?  HABITS: forgetting to sleep, running from place to place  NERVOUS TICKS: tapping feet, sighing a lot DRIVES/MOTIVATIONS: meeting their mom, finishing their education  FEARS:  fear of being neglected or ignored SENSE OF HUMOR: yes, mostly dark British humor. DO THEY CURSE OFTEN?: a lot, though they use ‘bleedin’’ and several other more British less terrible words.  CATCHPHRASE(S): “must be my lucky day” “I was born lucky”

++ FAVORITES

ACTIVITY: walking/hiking in the forest ANIMAL: raven BEVERAGE: coffee  BOOK: Thief Lord by Cassandra Clarke CELEBRITY: Tom Hanks  COLOR: Green DESIGNER: ??  FOOD: Sharma FLOWER: Lotus  GEM: Emerald  HOLIDAY: Eid al-Fitr  MODE OF TRANSPORTATION: Bike  MOVIE: The Internship  MUSICAL ARTIST: Sigur Ros QUOTE/SAYING: “No person knows what he will earn tomorrow”  SCENERY: forests  SCENT: freshly grinded coffee  SPORT: soccer SPORTS TEAM: Manchester united  TELEVISION SHOW: I, Robot  WEATHER: overcast and drizzly VACATION DESTINATION: -

++ ATTITUDES

GREATEST DREAM: to create their own algorithm that can help people choose what they want the most  GREATEST FEAR: being targeted or discriminated based on their religion  MOST AT EASE WHEN: at home, in their bed, with coffee, coding, or hiking in the forest, or at a mosque praying  LEAST AT EASE WHEN: in a crowded place, discussing religion  WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD HAPPEN: being killed before finishing their degree  BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT: getting a scholarship on luck alone  BIGGEST REGRET: never having known their father MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT: grabbing a girl by her boobs in a hug from behind by accident  BIGGEST SECRET: sometimes wishes they weren’t born a Demi-god.   TOP PRIORITIES: finishing their thesis

[isa-ly]

HOW TO EMOTION?

TW: mental health, therapy, repression, dissociation

Today’s just one of those days where I’m questioning whether or not I’ve completely lost the ability of functioning like a normal human and kind of feel like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. You know, casual Friday. 

I know this is a written blog, but since I am also very much a woman of images and metaphors, I shall once again try and elaborate the issue of today’s post by making it into a well-known, kinda dead and yet very accurate pop culture meme:

I am not kidding, this is what I look and feel like in most of my therapy sessions. I’m pretty sure Kerstin would agree with me here, as the topic of feeling, or more like my inability of doing so, has been pretty much been the red string winding itself through my mental health journey so far. I mentioned it briefly in the last post, but I figured since today is just one of those pesky overthinking ones, I might just dive in a bit deeper and try to detangle my knotted thoughts into something a bit more coherent.

I’ve talked about this before to some of my closer friends and honestly, every time I tried to explain it, I just felt like an absolute mad psychopath. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I’m not, but it’s kind of hard to get people to understand what it feels like to just ... not feel. Okay, that sounds a little bit too dramatic, let me try and re-phrase it in a way that makes more sense.

I talked all about the metaphorical elephant and it’s even more metaphorical stake last time and this is kind of the extended version of that issue. The Stake Supreme, if you will. Basically, one of the earliest coping mechanisms that I picked up when I was very young, was to simply swallow down any feelings of anger, rage, sadness or hurt and pretend that they just weren’t there. Now, that’s not really something very unusual, as we generally live in a society that doesn’t leave a lot of room to healthily express or work through our emotions with the crushing weight of professional, educational, financial, social and personal pressure constantly weighing on our shoulders. So, again, I’m very well aware that me pretending that my bad feelings don’t exist, does in no way, shape or form make me a special snowflake.

It does, however, make me a very emotionally repressed and mentally inept snowflake. And that’s not really great either.

It took me many therapy sessions to figure out that what I had used as a necessary protection mechanism for all my childhood and young adulthood, had slowly but certainly turned into the root of pretty much all my current mental health issues. And here I was, thinking that mommy and daddy issues were just a try-hard-to-be-relatable brand that pseudo-depressed people on Twitter liked to use to excuse their shitty personalities. Oh no, am I one of them now? Alright, back to the point.

I’m just going to try to explain, both to myself and you, what happens in my head whenever the aforementioned process of ~A Feeling~ occurs. Where normally, I would experience something that elicits an emotion that I then experience and feel, lately (and by that I mean ever since some of the more severe of my mental issues started happening) I instead feel like the actual emotion gets stuck somewhere between having been produced and actually reaching my consciousness. In a way, to get back to that earlier visual, it feels like I’m the Tin Man. The feeling gets dropped into my empty tin chest and while I try my absolute hardest to actually feel it, it just sits there. Not really arriving, not really unfolding, just existing while remaining completely detached from me. And I continue to feel how you would imagine a man made out of tin and air would feel: hollow.

I’m trying really hard not to make another load of self-deprecating jokes here, as sharing and trying to explain this makes me beyond uncomfortable. Instead, I’m just going to keep going because that’s kind of the point of this blog. When I told my therapist what I typed up there just now, she explained to me that this strategy of processing (or lack thereof, actually), is commonly referred to as repression and dissociation. And that with my history of handling emotions (or, once again, lack thereof), it actually made quite a lot of sense for me to struggle with this.

She then went on to explain that one could imagine it like this: Whenever anything triggers an emotion to be formed (which, you know, happens quite a lot, since that’s kind of all that human brains do), my self-taught mechanism is to immediately replace it with a so called ‘non-feeling’. I know, that word seemed strange to me too in the beginning. What it means is that by having constantly invalidated and swallowed down my own feelings of anger and sadness through the course of my youth, I unintentionally created this perfect, well-oiled machine of repression that unquestioningly does its job without me even noticing. In a way, I somehow mastered the art of literally, fully and completely detaching myself from my emotions and simply viewing them as separate entities to my own mind.

Now, while that sounds like a sick villain superpower, I’m gonna be honest: It kind of fucking sucks. Especially on days like these, where old habits resurface and I once again find myself looking at my own emotions as if they were statistics on a computer, knowing that they are there, knowing that they exist within me, but for the life of me not being able to actually feel them.

That’s yet another thing I also learned in therapy. There are miles, literal continents, if not even multiverses, between rationally knowing you should feel something and actually feeling it. I’m not completely insane and oblivious, I very well know that I am capable of having emotions and that they are there and being produced by many funky chemicals working together in my brain. However, simply knowing this on an intellectual level is no where close to satisfactory if you cannot actually feel it too.

It’s like looking at ice cream, knowing that it’s there, seeing it with your own two eyes, remembering and being able to imagine the taste, the texture, the sweetness and yet never really actually being able to eat it. Never really feeling it melt it in your mouth. It remains an idea, a concept, close to smoke in thin air that you can very clearly see, and yet never really grasp.

And that, as you might be able to imagine (or even relate to, if you’ve experienced it before), is just not a lot of fun, to be quite frank. Emotional repression? Yeah, no, that one definitely gets a bad Yelp! review from me. Wouldn’t recommend. Zero stars out of five.

In addition to accidentally failing to process my own emotions (are you proud of me, mum?), there’s also the other half of the problem which is, as my therapist already mentioned, the dissociation. Now, I want to be clear here: While I’ve gotten quite a few medical diagnoses in my time in therapy, the actual condition of dissociation or dissociative disorder, which is actually a personality disorder, is not one that I ever received. The dissociation my therapist talked about, ergo the one I am experiencing, is more situational and linked to the repression. Funnily enough, it is literally happening at the current moment, while I’m writing this post.

Actually, it’s been there for every post I wrote. It is also there during almost every therapy session and whenever I attempt to talk to someone about my problems or feelings. If you ask me how I am and we get talking about my mental health, you can assume that I’ll be dissociating about two minutes into the conversation. Usually, it’s not something that is very noticeable. At least that’s what I like to believe, maybe it’s also super obvious, like my soul leaving my body, and people are simply confused or kind enough not to mention it. Who knows.

My therapist, however, did notice it, as she let me know after a few sessions, when I first tried to describe what dissociating felt like to me. “Oh, yeah, I can tell whenever it happens. I just thought I’d give you your space until you wanted to talk about it”, was what she had said. Oh, Kerstin. You’re a real keeper.

So, what does it feel like to dissociate? (I once again pretend that someone is asking so I don’t feel like I’m talking to myself about myself). It’s a little hard to explain but here’s what I have told some of the friends I have talked to about it before: Imagine from pretty much one second to the other, your entire head is filled with cotton, kind of like you’re really tired and exhausted and everything that you see or hear doesn’t really get through the thick wool that seems to have replaced your brain. Forming thoughts and staying in the moment gets harder with every minute that passes. There’s this weird pull at the back of your neck and the front of your forehead that kind of just wants you to close your eyes and drift away. Far away to somewhere where it’s quiet and cotton-y and there’s no one or nothing else around you.

It’s not just mental, it’s physical. It feels like your brain hit the shut down button without your consent, like it’s slowly closing the blinds as it gets darker and darker and you just want to fall asleep. Speaking seems to become almost painful, thinking coherent thoughts is close to impossible and following what others are saying is a million times harder all of a sudden. It’s like the world has gone out of focus and you’re trying to sharpen the lense again, to no success.

Actually, I think that a lot of people have experienced dissociative symptoms before. Not to play Dr. Freud here, but it happens quite a lot, for example during panic or anxiety attacks. Some of my friends have told me that it felt like they had suddenly left their body and were watching themselves as from across the room. That’s why often dissociating is also described as an out of body experience. Because in a way, it literally is one. 

As my therapist explained to me, and as I experience it too, it’s comparable to your brain throwing a metaphorical fuse because it’s in danger of short circuiting. My dad would be so proud if he saw me making electrician references (yes, he is a trained electrician, okay). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: Often, when I’m exposed to emotions (and that includes talking or writing about them), my brain will run a little too hot like an old, wary car engine, and before it gets too close to exploding into a fiery death, it simply flips the switch and disconnects itself from the body and the emotions that are happening in it. Just like the repression, this is yet another safety mechanism that my brain came up with in reaction to me never really learning how to correctly process emotions. So, whenever some of those stronger feeling resurface or leak out, it tries to protect me from them by cutting the connection between the both of us.

In almost every way, it feels like I’m being locked out of my own head and can no longer really use my own brain. To someone who’s never felt that before, this might seem a little terrifying. And I agree that, objectively, it is. Knowing that the grey goo behind your skull has the power to shut out what in the ever-loving fuck is considered your conscious self, is a bit worrisome, to say the least. However, to me, it’s something that I have a) gotten very used to by now and b) in the moment don’t actually experience as something scary at all. I’m disconnected, remember?

Which is also why it’s sometimes very, very hard to get grounded again and find the way back into my own head. Like a bird that’s accidentally escaped its cage, proceeding to go fucking rogue in the living room, then crashing into a wall, all while trying to figure out what the fuck is happening while it’s on the verge of blacking out. I’ll often feel so dull and dizzy that all I really want to do is curl up and stare at a wall until eventually, my mind and body connect again and things are back to normal.

To kind of circle back to the whole theme of this post: This whole dissociation thing is very strongly connected to my tendency of emotional repression. It’s somewhat of a vicious cycle, which is why days like the one I’m having right now, can be a little tricky. It starts with me feeling empty and hollow, bim-bam-Tin-Man, and is usually followed with feelings of isolation and depression, since I cannot seem to get joy, satisfaction, or any emotion, really, out of anything. This then often leads to me trying to force some sort of emotion into myself, struggling to dig through my subconscious in hopes of finding something, anything, and eventually becoming even more frustrated. Aha! Frustration! That’s an emotion, right? It’s there! Can you feel it? I think you can, oh wow, there it is! Oh, wait, no ... no, now my head is getting heavy. Everything’s blurry. Is the feeling still there? Maybe. Who cares, just close your eyes now. So sleepy, hm ... floaty float.

Okay, sorry, that just turned into a weird combination of a badly written slam poem and a pretentious high school theater class rendition of some old play no one has ever heard of. I’ll just use the fact that I’m still dissociated as hell as an excuse for now. Wait a minute ... if I’m this spacey and zoned out right now, how am I even managing to write this post? Huh? Isa? Explain yourself!

Well, I haven’t been in therapy for nothing. It’s been over eight months of Kerstin and me figuring all of this out, finally putting a name and label to it and therefore understanding why it’s there and how it works. Which has helped me a great lot in actually handling it. That’s kind of the whole point of therapy after all, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong: These days where I feel repressed, empty and dissociated, can still be hard and they’re rarely ever fun. They honestly make me want to bash my head against a wall in hopes that that will make it go back to normal.

But since I don’t really favour having a concussion on top of feeling depressed and detached from my body, I have learned to use other counter-measurements to help the process of finding my balance again. Rebuilding that mojo, am I right? This post is already pretty long, so I won’t go into even more detail on all the different methods and mechanisms of bouncing back, but I’ll say this much: I spent a good portion of therapy trying to learn when to push and when to rest whenever I’m feeling dissociated. And yeah, it’s a fine line and I still haven’t fully figured out how to walk it without falling from one extreme into the other.

But take this blog, for example. I know that writing it, actively facing my problems and the very strong, repressed emotions connected to them, will make me dissociate like hell. A few months ago, that would have been reason enough for me to not do it and simply ignore it again. Now, however, after working with my therapist and on myself, I have learned how to push my own limits just far enough in order to, in this case, continue to write even though it feels like my brain is about to burst into a cotton explosion. It’s a give and take, a sort of push and pull I’m playing with my own mind and head. But as time progressed, I figured out the game plan a little better, I learned my own rules and the secret short cuts and cheating methods (because come on, who really plays fair, that’s for boring losers) and the resting time it takes for me to restore my strengths again.

So, today for example, I woke up as Mr. Tin Man, progressed to being a lost, numb and rogue dissociation-bird (man, I really gotta work on my metaphors, this is just getting worse by the minute) and then decided that the best way to counter-act all of it, would be to sit down and write my lovely new blog. Has it helped? A little, yeah. It took my mind off the right things, made some others a bit worse and intense but now, I feel a little more stable and like I managed to talk some sense back into my spiraling, detached brain.

Kerstin, please tell me you’re proud of me. Because as we all know, therapy is about impressing your therapist and not about getting better for your own sake. Pft, who needs that. What do we want? Validation! When do we want it? All the time, because we never got it as a child, so now it’s the only thing we crave in life!

Yikes.

Alright. So, here we are. Since I’m still feeling a little zoned out and dopey, I’m not fully sure if everything I wrote made complete sense. But hey, while this blog is for others to read should they feel like it, it’s still mainly there for me to sort my own racing thoughts before they can spiral out of control. And I think I managed to do that just now. And I know that that feels kind of nice.

Actually, I feel it too.

P.S.: I just had to. A little self-deprecation doesn’t hurt anyone.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

[artlessictoan]

this time it’s an ao3 req, for inosaku running into each other after years apart when butch!sakura has grown into herself more! y’know my original plan was like a silly ‘childhood friend moves away but comes back Hot’ bit of fluff, but then Shower Thoughts hit me like a fucking sledgehammer and now there are more emotions than i'm fit to deal with tbqh. canon-verse, except sak left konoha sometime after the chunin exams and she also has wood release bc unlike kishi I’m not a coward

(requests open)

(ao3 mirror)

---

Shit, shit, shit!

Ino’s breathing was ragged as she launched herself off the wet, muddy ground and up into the trees. The chakra coating her feet kept her steady on slick bark, but her reserves were dwindling and her concentration was split between tracking her enemy and formulating a plan on the fly.

This was supposed to be a simple mission; she was going to murder Shikamaru when she got back to Konoha.

But thoughts of home could wait, right now she had an S-rank fugitive to lead as far away from her terrified genin team as her battered body would allow. They were safe enough for now – Yui was injured, but she at least remained conscious and she had Haru and Risa with her to care for her, Ino could only pray that they’d followed her orders to head for the nearest village and gotten there safely – but Ino herself was running out of air and energy, her broken arm jolting painfully in its crude sling with every jump she made.

The sound of snapping branches behind her was growing closer. She kept her gaze on the path ahead, but had to bite her lip tightly to keep her head clear.

She could recall most of the vital information from the man’s entry in Konoha’s Bingo Book; a former Kiri-nin, fled his country over twenty years ago, known to use lightning jutsu and experiment with chakra amplifying techniques, something of a lone wolf, suspected of multiple counts of kidnapping and human experimentation.

On any other day, she could easily take this guy, but they’d stumbled into an ambush and she’d had three young, unprepared students to protect. He got off a lucky shot and she had been forced to flee long enough to get her team out of harm’s way, before doubling back to lead him far, far away from them. No way was she letting some filthy low-life get a hold of her kids, nor did she intend to let him get away and hurt anyone else.

Now she just had to make a plan to beat him.

She didn’t get long to plan however, when a bolt of lightning streaked past her and severed the branch she had just been readying to land on before she could get there. Too late to change course, she could only brace herself for a rough landing.

Her broken arm screamed as she hit the ground, even her best attempts to shield it not doing anything to stop the tremor that spread through her entire body when she landed heavily on her back. No time to waste thinking about pain though; she sprang to her feet just in time to dodge his follow-up attack. He landed behind her and threw a jutsu-enhanced punch at the back of her head, she ducked, leg spinning out to cut his out from under him, he jumped, flipping over her to land at her back again, growling, she rolled forward and – with a chakra boost – launched herself forwards, darting between trees and trying to gain some distance.

Maybe she could create a few clones, send him on a chase while she hid and prepared one of her family’s techniques, she didn’t want to take the risk of mind-body switch in this scenario, but maybe mind distur-

She just barely dodged the fist of lighting aimed at her already-injured arm, her breathing ragged as she ducked away from his constant attacks, never giving her the chance to counter.

Her foot caught a root as she backed away and she could feel herself falling. Fuck.

A shrill, ear-splitting screech cut through the air, leaving Ino both jittery and dazed as she tried to work out what the hell he’d just done. But, when her eyes landed on him, he was already leaping away from her, dodging out of the way of the tree crashing down where he had just been standing, his own eyes wide as saucers as he wildly looked around.

Less than a second after he landed, another tree began to scream its descent.

Someone else is after him? She barely had time to act on that thought – instinctually searching out for chakra signatures nearby – when, in a flurry of leaves and petals, her opponent was ensnared in twisting branches of a sapling cherry tree.

Her stomach twisted violently. His vain struggling against the chakra-strengthened branches went completely ignored by her, as the third party finally stepped out of the forest.

Ino didn’t need to see her to know; the painfully familiar touch of her chakra was more than enough.

Pink hair – the same shade as the tiny flowers dotting the wooden prison – was cut close to her head, arms as thick as tree trunks and darkened by sunlight were left bare, as were the well-muscled legs clad only in plain, practical shorts. The years had been good to her, she looked stronger, and not just physically.

She didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to draw the woman’s attention, didn’t want to discover that she had been forgotten.

The word escaped her lips regardless.

“S-Sakura?”

Those eyes, older, a little tired perhaps, but still sparkling in the dappled light filtering through the leaves high above them. “Ino!”

Before she could formulate a single coherent thought, she was lifted in crushing arms and spun wildly around. Under different circumstances, she might’ve found pleasure in being held tightly in warm, sturdy arms, but as it was, she had a broken arm trapped between their bodies.

Her sharp hiss quickly stopped the exuberant greeting and she was carefully dropped.

“Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just got so excited,” Sakura said, hands flapping vaguely near her injured arm as though it might drop off any second, “here, let me-”

Fighting every aching desire within her, Ino jerked away, glancing over her shoulder to check on the criminal still trapped within Sakura’s jutsu – and the bombshell that the girl, no, she was a woman now, had somehow learned Wood Release in the years they’d been apart was something she would just have to unpack later – examining his chakra to ensure he was truly unconscious and not just faking it, before turning her back to her oldest and dearest friend.

“Ino?”

She withheld a shudder, concealing the motion as she stepped forwards. “I can’t exactly stop and catch up; I’ve got to find my students.”

“Oh, I think I met them already,” Sakura said, jogging ahead to cut her off, “three kids, the tall girl had a wounded leg and the boy was wearing a hat? They’re the ones who told me their sensei still needed help.” 

Her good hand flew to Sakura’s shirt, gripping tightly. “Where are they, tell me you didn’t just leave them alone-”

The low chuckle simultaneously made her want to punch the woman and swoon.

She settled for glaring.

“Relax, they’re with Tsunade-shishou and she’s already healed their wounds-” the relief must’ve been obvious on her face, because Sakura’s lips quirked up slightly “-it was actually a bit of a struggle getting them to stay behind.”

Sakura once again reached for her arm, Ino shrugged her off and turned away. “I should still go see them, make sure they’re alright.”

“Hey, stop worrying for a second and let me help you.” Placing her hand on Ino’s uninjured shoulder, Sakura slowly pushed her to sit on the spongy moss covering the ground, then, with the gentlest touch Ino had ever known, she pulled her broken arm out of its sling and set to work.

Ino stared at the expression of pure concentration on her old friend, the hard lines of her profile softened by the light green glow emanating from her hands. She had been ignoring the pain fairly well until now, but the sudden relief that flooded through her nerves left her feeling a little light-headed, which was perhaps why she decided to open her mouth.

“Since when can you do that?” She winced at how bitter she sounded. Shit, she really had intended to stay calm and civil, but her idiot brain was ignoring every pleading wail of her fool heart to just accept the gift and dig her fingers through that short, messy hair and kiss the beautiful, wonderful jerk already.

If Sakura noticed her tone, she didn’t say so and her eyes flicked over to meet hers for only a second before returning to her arm. “Not long after I left, I guess.”

“And… that?” she asked, glowering at the man held limp in his prison.

“That... was a more recent development, took me ages to figure it out, but it’s pretty cool though, right?” If she hadn’t been busy with her healing, Ino had the awful suspicion that she would’ve flexed her arms, or waggled her eyebrows as well.

She snapped her arm away from Sakura’s grasp the second the healing was complete, absently twisting her joints to regain some feeling in them. “That’s one word for it,” she muttered, pushing herself to her feet and staring into the forest. If she really stretched her senses, she could pick up the three familiar chakra signatures of her students; she started walking towards them, tossing a glance over her shoulder. “I assume you can take our friend there to the necessary authorities.”

“What?” Once more her path was blocked, this time by a rapidly sprouting sapling. “Ino, we haven’t seen each other in so long, why are you so desperate to get away?”

“Because I’ve got a team to take care of. I don’t have the luxury of shirking my responsibilities.”

Clearly Sakura was done ignoring her not-so-subtle cattiness, judging by the hint of frustration to her voice as she said, “Are you mad at me for something?”

Ino stared at the flowers blooming in front of her nose and hated the little part of her that got excited at seeing tiny purple buds mixed in with the pink. She immediately shut her eyes against the sight and tried desperately to hold on to the ball of anger deep in her chest, threatening to dissolve into shadows and slip through her fingers any second.

She had imagined this day for so long now, played out so many different scenarios and responses – anger, joy, grief, love – but now that Sakura was here, real and close, the potential she’d fallen for as a girl, finally realised, bolder and more beautiful than she ever could have dreamed…

“It’s been over fourteen years Sakura! You can't just show up out of nowhere and act like nothing’s wrong!” Ino was on the verge of tears and even she couldn’t tell whether she was aiming to sound furious or distressed, but she pushed on, refusing to open her eyes, or turn back around, because she just knew that the second she looked Sakura in the face, all would be forgiven. “Where the hell have you been? Why did you leave?”

The long silence that followed her outburst was crushing.

Something silky and soft brushed against her cheek and, if she wasn’t intimately familiar with the texture of petals and leaves from her work, she might’ve leapt out of her skin. Instead she just let the flower wipe away the tear that had slipped free of her eye.

When Sakura finally spoke again, her voice came from just a few inches behind her, low and calming, “It wasn’t a decision I made lightly and I can’t pretend I don’t have some regrets leaving the way I did… but I don’t regret leaving.” Gentle calm, quickly turned to barely restrained excitement and Ino smiled at the enthusiasm in her old friend’s voice despite herself. “There’s so much out in the world, so much I’ve learned, ways I’ve grown, if I’d stayed, I never would’ve had the opportunity to learn healing from Tsunade-shishou, or develop my own kind of Wood Style! Konoha… it held me back, maybe not deliberately, but now that I’ve been outside it for so long, I can see just how much it needs to change.”

Opening her eyes and slowly turning around to face the woman, Ino had to accept that she had lost whatever battle she was fighting with herself.

Really, she’d lost the second Sakura showed up, eyes and soul blazing.

“I guess I can understand that,” she said, rubbing at the damp tracks across her cheeks, “but you didn’t even explain it, when you told me you were going away to train for a while, I thought you meant for a few weeks, but I kept waiting and you never came back and I didn’t even know what was happening, if you were even still safe.”

Sakura at least had the grace to look ashamed. “Yeah, that was pretty shit of me, I probably should’ve at least written to you more, but I just… you were more than a best friend to me, you were my idol, everything I wanted to be. And I needed to become someone you could love.”

She scoffed before she could stop herself, before shaking her head. “You idiot, I always loved you.”

A soft blush settled on her cheeks, but Sakura’s smile held not a spec of embarrassment, just a soft, subtle kind of melancholy. “I know, but…” She looked down at herself, hands fidgeting with the fabric of her shirt before she continued, in a voice that shook, just a little, at the edges, “But, before I could love you – as a person, not an idea – I had to learn how to love myself.”

Ino bit her lip and hesitantly reached out, laying her hand gently over Sakura’s. “So, do you? Love yourself I mean?”

She glanced down at the hand encasing her own, before slowly following the line of her arm back up to her face. Her gaze was tender, but assured. “Yeah,” she said with a short laugh, every trace of sadness lifting from her face in the wake of her bright smile.

It was crooked and a bit too wide, showing off teeth that had probably been knocked loose more than once, and it was the most beautiful Ino had ever seen her.

“Yeah, I really do.”

“And-” she didn’t care that her hand was trembling against Sakura’s as she stepped closer; close enough to count the freckles dusted across her nose and marvel at the myriad shades of green in her eyes “-do you love me?”

Sakura stepped forward herself, tilting her neck slightly to look her in the eye. “You even have to ask?”

Before she could think of an adequate response to that, she was tugged down and warm lips were pressed against hers in a feather-light kiss. Ino pressed closer, sliding her free hand behind Sakura’s neck to hold her in place as they giggled into each other’s skin. They stood like that for what felt like an eternity, kissing chaste but oh-so-sweet, occasionally stopping to just lean their foreheads together and share in their equally wobbly smiles.

Eventually though, they had to wake up from their fantasy come to life, when the long-forgotten prisoner began to stir and immediately started cursing them both.

“C’mon, lets get back to your team before Tsunade starts teaching them gambling tricks,” Sakura said, pulling away to tear the jail from the ground and sling it – trunk, roots, criminal and all – over her shoulder.

Ino was not at all ashamed to admit that she swooned.

“And… maybe I could come back with you? I’ve been away from home for way too long.” The question was a little uncertain, as though Sakura was still worried that she might be rejected.

The hand Ino offered was taken without question and they both began walking toward home.

---

[irwintry]

Like Candy

Warnings: swearing

Author’s Note: stomp on the ground (sea bears take it as a challenge) i kinda wish i could rewrite this part but at the same time i dont wanna 

Word Count: 1.9k

part one

Ashton's life felt like clockwork. Everything fit together just perfectly, and he had it all planned to a t. He knew exactly what kind of life he wanted to live during and after fame. Of course, there were a few roadblocks here and there, but his life remained steadily consistent.

You played a big part in that. He was used to you, even though he was the biggest pest of your life. That he knew. He loved seeing you flustered, and a part of him wanted it to be because of other reasons. Except, Ashton couldn't have that. His plan didn't involve you like that, so he scrapped whatever pieces included seeing you. That meant no Scotty's, no sunny-side-up eggs, and no you.

He stopped holding parties, too. He feared you would show up announced so you could talk to him. If he was honest – which he really, really wanted to be, he would let you talk to him. He would stop the entire world to see you one more time. But, he couldn't convince himself to even drive by that diner that had every jam in the world but orange marmalade. It was okay because he didn't like orange marmalade.

"You're depressing," a friend of his pointed out one night. They were four beers in, and Ashton felt nothing.

"Don't say that," he told his friend (whose name did not matter). Ashton felt it was his duty to defend himself at every given moment. He wouldn't allow himself to feel vulnerable, even when he wanted to crumble. He wanted to admit he was weak. He wasn't the Ashton that you grew to hate at the diner.

One morning, he drove by Scotty's. The windows were gone, and the glass doors had painted red x's down the front. He accidentally honked out of frustration, which caused a parade of honks to echo down the boulevard. The diner had been cut out of his life for two months now, but it destroyed him to see it go before he could say goodbye. This also meant he had no idea how to find you.

He only knew your first name and that you had a pug named Horace. By this point, the only way of seeing you again was if you decided to knock on his front door. You wouldn't; he made it clear he didn't want to see you again after never going back to Scotty's. He could tell you weren't the type to chase after things, especially when they weren't even yours in the first place. But in a way, he hoped he was wrong.

That kind of made Ashton hate himself. Why couldn't he just be nice to you? He wanted to show you exactly how he felt, but he couldn't. He had become the definition of a stupid schoolboy being a meanie because he had a crush on a girl. The pure idea made it hard for him to live with himself. He wanted to take it all back. Ashton didn't like to apologize, but for you, he wanted to spend the rest of his life making sure you knew how sorry he was.

Maybe that was why he drove by Scotty's in the first place. He had to start somewhere.

Sometimes, he drove by that gas station off of La Cienega to see if he could spot you pumping gas. He would even stop there a few times to buy him a little more time... just in case.

Ashton felt really pathetic. To him, you were sweet like candy (you reminded him of a Hershey's kiss), but not a fucked-up Warhead like himself. If you kept him in your cheek, it would only burn a little less. Too much of him would be unbearable.

What he didn't know was that you wouldn't believe any of that. You saw right through his sour shell. You also felt bad for him, but you'd never admit that to the poor soul. After knowing him for as long as you had, you figured out why he built a wall around his feelings. His "likings" towards you were hidden behind cold glares and deep, unkind laughter. You wanted to forgive him for that, which is why it took you two months to shake off the complex emotions rattling around in your brain.

You were pounding on his front door at eleven o'clock at night– you were too tired of feeling this way. You were too tired of this open-ended story he wrote for the two of you, even if it meant rejection.

Ashton had been fresh out of the shower, his eyes droopy and exhausted from a long day of writing and brainstorming. A stained gray shirt adorned his chest, the heathered material tucked tight into sweatpants of a darker shade. He was just about to make himself a bowl of black raspberry frozen yogurt when he heard your rhythmic knocking.

Neither of you said anything as he opened the door with a tired smile – a smile that fell right as his eyes landed on your sad ones. He took you in, forcing himself to keep the damn door open because he needed to face his feelings. It was a miracle you were here; he wouldn't have found you if you hadn't shown up.

"I– "

"'m not gonna be mean," he said, his voice sleepy.

Already, things were off to a different start than you had thought. You figured he'd slam the door in your face with a roll of his eyes. You would knock again, and he'd shout something rude from the inside. Or, he'd let you in and fuck you over once again.

You nodded.

Ashton felt a bit of bile rise up in his throat, so he opened the door for you and swallowed it down while you walked by him. It was his body's way of pushing away any temptations to be as cruel and sour as he had been months ago.

"Can I get you anything?" he asked softly. He couldn't even believe he had enough strength to vocalize coherent words. "Water? Toast with jam?"

You chuckled to yourself. "'m good," you said. "I just– uh, I should've stayed home." You scratched your arm through the waffled material of your sweatshirt.

Ashton looked at you with wide eyes, and he let you continue.

"I thought it would be smart of me to come here and tell you everything that's been on my mind," you continued. "I thought I would waltz in and easily explain how you've made me feel. I mean, fuck, Ashton you played me. You told me you liked me, fucked me, and then left me there. I shouldn't have come because clearly you don't care, and you never cared." You started towards the door, proud that you had said all of that without shedding a single tear. When you reached for the door handle, Ashton stepped in between you and the metal.

"'s not fair," he whispered, it was quite wimpy at that. "Not fair what I did to you. I'd take it back if I could."

"Then why– " You took a deep breath. "Why did you do it in the first place?"

He sighed and instinctively reached for one of your hands; it shocked him that you didn't pull away. "A little messed up in here," he said as he used his other hand to motion toward his head. There was a light laugh that escaped from his lips, but it wasn't genuine. Seeing you and holding this conversation gave him the worst anxiety he had felt since his first stage performance.

You nodded but said nothing. You were waiting for him to prove himself.

It was like a bomb went off in Ashton's head. He gripped his hair, attempting to force the truth out of his mouth while every muscle in his face tensed as time passed. He had never been this awful at feelings, especially when the risk of you never believing him was so strong. Not only that, but he had no excuse to act the way he did around you. You knew he liked you. What he never told you was that he was absolutely head over heels in love with you and the idea of you. Most likely, it was the latter that drove him insane. He didn't know you, not enough to be in love with you.

"But you know me better than anyone else," he said out of the blue. He waited to see your expression change, yet it didn't. Maybe you agreed. "Y'know, I really don't expect you to understand anything 'm gonna say."

You raised an eyebrow. "Why? Because you don't think I'm smart, or something?"

"No!" Ashton had fucked up already. "Fu– no, that's not– I didn't mean to say it like that. You, like, really fucked my mind up. You know I like you, you know I– "

"Do I?"

He frowned. "I like you way more than I let out. I mean, it's fucking crazy how much I like you. You and Scotty's were my escape, and once I started going there for you and you only, I didn't know how to be nice. You were bringing out the worst in me, and to this day, I don't know why. I'm giving you no reasons to trust me or believe me. Literally no reasons. You have every right to be mad or confused, or to just fuckin' slap me if you– "

It was like a brick hit his face. He hadn't actually expected you to slap him, but he was glad you did. It stopped the word vomit from ensuing moments later, and it released whatever tensions you were holding back.

He breathed out, shutting his eyes momentarily so he could steady his emotions. "I wanted you more than I've wanted anyone in my life, and I didn't know what to do. I want you." He couldn't open his eyes. "I played you. I fucked you over. And I'll forever hate myself for treating you the way I did. I wanna make it up to you– I'd spend my whole life doing it, but I'd never blame you for walking away."

When he opened his eyes, he noticed your rosy cheeks. You appeared to have relaxed a little bit– even though your arms were crossed, and your shoulders were hunched over. You weren't looking at him.

"'m just confused," you whispered. You looked so small, and he wanted to do was wrap you up in his arms. "I've never met anyone who will confess their feelings to someone and then drop them out of their life like one of their hook-ups. I actually had feelings for you, too. Dunno how. You were fuckin’ cruel."

Ashton's face crumbled. He could hear his heart in his ears as he took a step back against the door. Had you ever told him how you felt before? He couldn't remember; like always, he had focused on himself.

After that, he didn't know what to say. The silence was burning into his skull after every passing moment and looking into your eyes was too overwhelming for him to focus on another thought. The situation he had put himself in created this. And yet, he no longer felt nervous. He felt every bit comfortable being this vulnerable in front of you– something that he never thought he would ever, ever feel.

"I'm so sorry," he breathed out, almost a little too hushed for anyone to hear.

But you had. You just nodded.

"It's late," he said. "Stay tonight."

"Ash– "

"Please."

You didn't react right away. This was the longest time the two of you had maintained solid eye contact, and it was too overwhelming to look elsewhere. You wanted to see those hazel eyes until colors failed you.

"Okay," you mumbled.

Ashton felt his heart skip. The universe was giving him another chance    

[sublimotion]

5 Takeaways from My Broken Brain 2 Docu-Series

https://drhyman.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/daniel-hjalmarsson-597537-unsplash.jpg?v=1.1

Broken Brain 2 was a way for me to share the latest innovations for healing and nourishing our brain-body connections, a process that helped me recover my own health—using these therapies I went from bedridden to vibrant and I’ve seen an overwhelming amount of others experience the same shift.

With the help of our incredible group of experts, I explored the depths of whole-body health and shared how you can incorporate this powerful emerging science into your own life in practical and accessible ways.

And the response has been mindblowing! My team and I have received so much incredible feedback from those that watched, on how this information has already begun to change their lives for the better.

Though there is an immense amount of information in Broken Brain 2 that I never get tired of talking about, I wanted to highlight 5 key topics that resonated most strongly with our audience for those of you that may have missed it.

Here are my top 5 highlights from Broken Brain 2:

Avoiding Mold and Other Toxic Exposures

In episode 2, we dive into the concept of toxicity. Considering that we have approximately 85,000 chemicals on the market, and only a few hundred of those have ever been tested for safety, it’s not surprising that our detoxification systems are overwhelmed. And then there are other types of toxicity, like electromagnetic frequencies and toxic mold exposure—the latter was part of my personal health crisis and often goes undiagnosed. Here is what Broken Brain 2 expert Dr. Ann Shippy had to say about mold toxicity in Episode 2:

“The fascinating thing about mold exposure is that it can affect almost every organ system in the body. There are some things that I really get suspicious about when a patient comes in and says, ‘Oh, I’m having headaches or brain fog,’ or, ‘I’m just feeling really exhausted.’ Or, if there has been an uptick in the amount of pain that they have in their body, either in their muscles or in their joints. If they’ve developed a skin rash, even newly diagnosed psoriasis, or eczema. Those are things that, most of the time, can trigger me to start thinking about mold. Some people actually have a big impact on their gastrointestinal system. They might feel nauseated a lot more easily, have bloating, or gas, or even more serious symptoms, like inflammatory bowel disease, that can come with mold exposure. The number one thing to address with patients is to make sure that they are not continuing to be exposed. Sometimes, we can get people to start to feel better by helping them to detoxify, support their livers, support their mitochondria in the environment. But the best thing is to figure out how to not be in that environment, at least until it can be remediated.”

Healing from Toxic Beliefs

Your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, traumas, and life experiences directly influence your biology. The mind influences the body, but sadly, most physicians don’t apply this knowledge in their practices. Since negative beliefs and self-sabotaging thoughts can do harm to our quality of life and physical health, we can utilize that process and flip it to our benefit—using our mind to heal the body. But the catch is that we have to be willing to dig into the toxic beliefs in order to grow. My very own coach, Shelly Lefkoe, joined me in Episode 3 to talk about this process:

“Our beliefs are mostly unconscious. We don’t even know that we have them. By beliefs, I mean, ‘I’m not good enough, I’m not important, I’m not lovable, I’m a failure.’ Those are the kinds of limiting beliefs that we have. Beliefs by their definition are limiting, because if something is the truth, then there’s nothing else possible. Generally, when you believe something is true, it limits the possibilities. Beliefs get formed from past experiences. Many beliefs come from our early childhood, particularly self-esteem beliefs. We come into this world and we don’t know anything. We don’t know if we’re good enough or not good enough. We don’t know if we’re important or not important. We don’t know if life is easy or hard. Depending on the environment where we show up, we look at our parents, and how they behave, and what they say, and what they do, and we form these beliefs. Beliefs not only determine our behavior and our emotions, but they determine our reality, what shows up. Again, people who believe life is hard, have hard lives. We did a few research studies with the University of Arizona and we did one on stress. When people got rid of beliefs, their stress was reduced by a minimum of 51% in every case across the board.”

Supporting Heart-Brain Communication

Did you know the heart sends MORE signals to the brain than the other way around? The heart-brain connection provides us with exciting new perspectives on managing issues like anxiety and declining cognition, while also explaining how we can use gratitude to heal from the inside out. A technique called HeartMath allows us to tap into that connection, Rollin McCraty explains how in Episode 4:

“The simplest of the HeartMath techniques is called quick coherence, and this is a technique that’s really meant to be used in the moment, on the go, eyes open, in the flow of life. Nobody needs to know you’re doing it, right? The first step is heart-focused breathing, and you can put your focus of attention right in the center of the chest. Breathe in a little slower and with deeper rhythm. Find the rhythm that’s most comfortable, typically four or five seconds on the in-breath, four or five seconds on the out-breath, but it’s not about counting. It’s really finding that comfortable rhythm, which starts the process of shifting the rhythm, and just a little note there. We know that where we focus attention in the body, we can cause specific changes. The whole industry is based on this, called the biofeedback industry, right? Where we focus attention, we can learn to cause specific, measurable changes. In this case, we’re shifting the rhythm of the heart, so that focus on the heart is important. Then, breathing at that slower, casual rhythm. Step two is to activate a regenerative feeling, so it’s just care or appreciation for someone or something in your life. That’s really the step, but the key here is to actually have a heartfelt feeling. It’s not a visualization technique, necessarily. For some people, in the beginning, that might be foreign and uncomfortable. A helpful hint, for when you’re first getting started, is to recall a time when you really felt good, you really felt that appreciation. This might be the feeling you have for a pet. You come home and your pet jumps in your lap or greets you. Even if you yelled at them in the morning, they still love you and greet you. Be with that feeling you have. Or, it could be a special place in nature, but to recall and actually feel that feeling. You can actually kind of breathe in and breathe out that feeling. That’s the second step. That actually really shifts the physiology into a more coherent state, so now you’re sending a very different signal to the brain. The brain’s getting, ‘Oh, everything’s okay,’ right? And if we do that enough, that builds as our new baseline, so that becomes the familiar. The brain is going to want to keep doing everything in its power to maintain that as our normal state.”

Detox Your Brain

For years, the brain was thought to be separate from the lymphatic system. But now we know that’s not true, and that the brain has an incredible connection to the immune system, called the glymphatic system, that helps the brain detoxify and receive valuable nutrients. This brain-immune connection creates a new framework for treating brain disease and immune system dysfunctions like autoimmunity. In Episode 5, Dr. Robin Berzin explains more:

“When we talk about neuroinflammation, what we mean is the chronic immune activation in the brain that’s actually affecting brain cells, creating free radicals, creating oxidative stress and damage in the brain. Over time, this can lead to a number of conditions. It can lead to cognitive decline. It can lead to something called brain fog, and we can talk about that. It can even lead to Alzheimer’s disease. We’re understanding more and more about the role of the immune system of the brain, which are mainly cells called the glial cells. The microglia are our immune cells of the brain. We have others, as well. When these immune cells are, again, chronically activated, they’re perceiving that there’s a toxin. They’re perceiving that there’s too much sugar. They’re bombarded with heavy metals, or they are responding to inflammation in the rest of the body. We know that when there’s inflammation throughout the body, it actually creates something called blood-brain barrier permeability. Blood-brain barrier permeability is like leaky brain. You might have heard of leaky gut. We can also have something called leaky brain. When we have leaky brain, the lining that protects the brain becomes porous, and inflammation from the body, that’s systemic or chronic in the body, can begin to affect the brain, as well, and can trigger this glia or this microglia, these immune cells in our brain, to chronically turn on. That might be okay in an acute way, meaning in a short term way. When it’s happening all the time, that’s when you start to get symptoms.”

A Truly Personalized Diet

Advances in the field of genetics can tell us more about our individual health than ever before. The field of nutrigenomics utilizes this information to understand how different foods and nutrients impact our genetic expression and vice versa. That means we have the power to truly hone in on a diet that is specific to our needs on the deepest level. Dr. Jeffery Bland elaborates on this fascinating topic in Episode 7:

“When you have your genes analyzed, what the laboratory is trying to do is to determine how many of these one letter changes or these so-called SNPs you have, and have they been found through scientific studies to actually be meaningful in how you might respond differently? You might have gluten sensitivity, or you might have sulfite sensitivity, or you might need more vitamin B, or you might need more essential fatty acids or maybe vitamin D because the vitamin D receptor is changed. Or maybe the way we detoxify specific foreign chemicals, what are called xenobiotics, will differ for you because you’re detoxifying enzymes that are encoded within your genes are slightly different than someone else. All of these questions can be integrated now with the genetic testing and then the kind of new analytical procedures that occur through large database assemblies and comparison of our genes to somebody else.”

From cognitive decline to autoimmunity, anxiety, toxicity, mindset, and much more, so many conditions can benefit from this information.

There IS HOPE for those struggling will their health, Broken Brain 2 shares the secrets of regaining hope, happiness, and vitality at any age.

This is just a small portion of the many highlights Broken Brain 2 has to offer. I was thrilled to create this comprehensive series with my team and the generous experts that joined us so we could provide you with the latest tools in supporting the powerful links between mind and body.

Wishing you health and happiness, Mark Hyman, MD

[Read More ...] https://drhyman.com/blog/2019/04/15/5-takeaways-from-my-broken-brain-2-docu-series/

[ulrichfoester]

Men Who Chase Shadows: Secrets, Lies and Acting Out

“Why did I do it? I love my wife, I have so much to lose, why?!”

Many of the men I work with are seeking answers to questions like the one above. They’ve acted in ways they later regret and, at some point, they had to face the painful fallout of their actions: a devastated loved one who might end the marriage/relationship; the shame of behavior that conflicts with their values; the despair and humiliation of losing a job or getting into legal trouble.

In each instance through the acting-out experience, these men have built a secret reality where they escaped to again and again, a dream-like existence that allowed them to feel and experience things they couldn’t imagine feeling in their “real” lives.

Some have used their secretive world as an escape, an exit from an un-namable (and therefore un-manageable) malaise they cannot shake. Others sought relief from an overly constrictive sense of self, a self subsumed by fear and inhibition.

But the “solution” sought through acting-out isn’t realized (and therefore isn’t a solution at all). In fact, as many have discovered, often more harm is caused to self and others through acting-out; and acting-out ultimately prevents one from going inward in order to do the psychological work that is needed to make meaningful life changes.

What occurs during the process of acting-out for some men?

Chasing the promise of something different

By the time these men reach out to me, many feel like they’ve reached a breaking point, or even a point of no return. Many feel marred by shame, guilt and/or despair. Some are desperate to save their relationship/marriage, seeking the therapy as part of a non-negotiable condition set out by their partner.

Over the last two decades, as I listened to the hundreds of men I’ve worked with around acting-out issues, a theme has emerged in their struggles, a dynamic that they may not have been aware of when they first entered therapy.

The secretive world of acting-out contained for them a promise, a promise of something different, not necessarily something better or positive, but rather an experience that would ultimately lead to a dramatic shift/alteration of the self (their subjective-self experience).

The promise of something different that I am discussing is, of course, a maze with no exit. This elusive, inarticulable promise is never found . . . like in the myth of Tantalus, it always remains just beyond one’s reach.

And for those who feel convinced about what they are seeking (they believe what they are seeking is clear in their mind), what they end up grasping for does not emotionally satiate them. In these instances, they may double down on their acting-out attempts — more alcohol, more sex, more porn, more drugs, more risk, more danger, more more — only to ultimately find that their hunger is as fierce — and as unsatisfied — as ever.

Consumed by the promise of something different

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”  ~Nietzsche

Some men describe feeling gripped, being over-taken by the anticipation of what this promise of something different might offer, and in these instances it is the stirring of desire (above and beyond what is being chased) that consumes them.

In renewed wanting, these men become convinced that something awaits them in the world of acting-out (a world that is often cloaked in secrecy). Like a child overcome by anticipation for Santa to bring the ultimate gift they will never tire of, these men enter a state of wanting (and seeking) that alters and jolts them.

The following are a few descriptions men have used to describe this anticipatory state just prior to and during acting-out:

“There’s this buzzing sensation throughout my body.”

“I feel excited but it’s weird, it’s a combination of anxiety and excitement.”

“For me it’s a feeling of dread…but I’d rather feel this than nothing.”

“My heart starts to pound and I become more alert, more awake.”

“All my problems fall away, and all I have to focus on is what I’m about to do next.”

Enlivened by expectancy, these men may feverishly begin seeking for what they believe they want/need. As they close the blinds to their regular life (and everything that anchors them there), they become different. During this process, a dream-like shift in consciousness occurs; sometimes this shift is subtle, at other times jolting.

The constant across a wide range of acting-out behavior is that you become altered. Even unrecognizable to yourself perhaps.

And whether this shift is positive (excitement) or negative (anxiety, dread), the common denominator is that you momentarily experience a shifting from one state of being to another, a self-alteration that may be taken as evidence that the antidote to what is lacking in your life is out there in the acting-out world, waiting to be discovered.

Acting-out as attempts to work-through childhood wounds

What is sought through acting-out often has little to do with our current life circumstances. The current frustrations and challenges of our lives are painfully real, but these frustrations do not account for the self-alteration sought through secrecy and acting-out.

In therapy it is often the exploration of childhood wounds and early family dynamics that gives these men a better understanding of what is occurring and why.

To journey back into our past is an invitation to revisit a time when we were most vulnerable and helpless, a time when the intensity of childhood longings consumed us (especially) if they were not adequately tended to by our caregivers.

These early relationships had a profound impact on our adult capacity to connect deeply with our own needs and emotions; on our ability to hold in consciousness intense feelings and yearnings that may be in conflict with each other; and they shaped the ways in which we allow (or don’t allow) ourselves to be seen by others and ourselves.

There are certain experiences that are so overwhelming that they cannot be put into words. In these instances, we needed help from our caregivers to make sense of what was happening to us. Without this parental attentiveness and their efforts to help us identify and name what was occurring, our inner experiences remained alien and even dangerous to us.

Without the capacity to self-soothe, the force of our emotions overtook us, each feeling an inner attack against the self. In short, to feel became dangerous.

To survive this, we had to learn how not to feel, how not to be connected to our inner world.

This is the nature of traumatic experiences; we cannot make sense of them, we cannot achieve what psychiatrist Richard Chefetz calls a “felt coherence” of our inner experiences; when a felt coherence is lacking, our inner life can feel haphazard, inarticulable and mysterious.

The lost parts of us are trying to speak

These fragmented (and split off) parts of ourselves continue to influence the shape of our lives. While segregated from our awareness, they seek expression (and, ultimately, reunion with the rest of who we are).

But many of us are unaware that these self-fragments are active and in need of our attention.

In order to get control of acting-out behaviors, we must discover how these lost parts of ourselves are seeking expression, seeking a resolution from past injuries.

Secretive acting-out serves two functions in relationship to these lost parts of ourselves:

The secretive world of acting-out might be an unconscious attempt to create experiences that will help us reconnect/rediscover these hidden selves;

Or the acting-out may be a way to keep these self-experiences at bay, actions that replace remembering because we unconsciously fear that knowing about these lost parts would be overwhelming (what Freud called the repetition compulsion, repeating the dynamics of painful childhood experiences rather than remembering these experiences).

In order for self-wholeness to occur, a wholeness that will loosen the grip that secrecy and acting-out have on us, we must learn to create relationships with the wounded parts of us that long ago went underground.

Until then, the mysterious world we create through the acting-out process may keep promising us things we feel compelled to chase.

Article References

Bacal, H. (2006). Repetition compulsion and the dread to repeat. In R. Skelton, The Edinburgh international encyclopedia of psychoanalysis. Edinburg, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Chefetz, R. (2010). Live as performance art: Right and left brain function, implicit knowing, and “felt coherence.”  In Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-Of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty. Edited by Petrucelli, J.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. S. E. 12 London: Hogarth Press.

—

Article original source:  RichNicastro.com

Men Who Chase Shadows: Secrets, Lies and Acting Out published first on https://familycookwareshop.tumblr.com/

[fashionoutfit6]

One Step-by-Factor Help guide Jot down an experienced Story Essay

One Step-by-Factor Help guide Jot down an experienced Story Essay

There are lots of sorts of essays you may well be allotted to full. Often, it could be confusing a big difference involving two equivalent documents. Story essay is typically mistaken for the descriptive a person. This short article will guide you thru all crucial techniques and make it easier to compose a very good bit implementing the actual formatting guidelines.http://sigmaessays.com/plagiarism-checker

What exactly is a Story Essay?

The primary objective of a story essay will be to show your reader about happenings, interaction, and expertise that may have taken place with the article writer while in the certain stretch of time. It continually provides a dramatic plan. Quite the opposite, the descriptive essay is created for supplying a photograph of an individual, the place, some working experience or even an subject while not showing a sequence of functions. The plan is missing or hazy.

To create a stunning story essay immediately, allow us to bring in the most powerful stage-by-action series:

1. Getting ready

Well before your resourceful practice basically begins, make sure you study a little more in regards to the common demands built into such a the cardstock, pick the matter, and get some applicable information and facts to utilize it as being the resource. ?

Points to Come Up With?

Your probable subject must be intriguing for you and the customers. The main topic of the story essay generally means the article author?s adventure and there is absolutely no want to use any details externally solutions. Moreover, you will find 3 signs and symptoms of a good label within your essay be it story or anything otherwise:

You could possibly hardly look at it on the internet;

It?s very filter than huge;

It really encourages looking through the 1st phrase with the pieces of paper.

What the heck is Needed of Me?

Questioning to create an extremely unique variety of school papers, instructors wear?t need for their trainees that you follow rigorous policies regarding other publishing responsibilities simply hand them over a straightforward system. The theory is not difficult: you are taking a narrative from the the real world and dwell on quite possibly the most vivid issues when it comes to activities are unfolding. The story?s materials really should be coherent and present a selected ambiance.

Wherever to locate Research?

You could drive them from a very own stories because you started out publishing it. Ignore the tiring online-researching and allow your remembrances dump on a pieces of paper.

2. Publishing Practice

Certainly, this level is regarded as the time-drinking. It could be significantly less for those who look at the right after:

Generating a Composition and Detailing

Split your plan into a couple of areas: a startup, the most crucial component and also a climax, in addition to a interesting in conclusion. From the release, you ought to catch a website reader and also make them study your entire essay. Spend the most important factors in the essay and identify every one of them temporarily in your system and finish up your account by having an unstable angle along with a beautiful impact lines. In the switch, detailing can help you locate the best info on the revealed problems within the story essay.

Delivering Information and facts in 1st-Human being

The story is really personalized, and that means you ought to underline the importance of the continuing situations to your personal identity. This is why it will be present with use ?I? claims with no shifting a mindset in support of somebody else. ?

Detailing the Personas and Regions

Although it?s not really a descriptive essay, make an attempt to stylize your narrative with vibrant information on important items stated inside the plan. ?Specially, that should go for individuals that impacted the actual end result with the total event; their individuality must be revealed as complete as it can be.

Talk about sites in the role of a spot of where by an motion is performed as it demonstrates the picture’s atmosphere. History which will customize the reader’s frame of mind to figures or simply into the concept of your plan must be also supplied.

Including somewhat Spruce

Thats a story without any liveliness! Decrease your soft passages which has a aspect that should move all the things all over. It really is antagonist personality who seems to be eagerly upsetting your uses, an unforeseen style and uncomfortable concluding or crazy humor and coincidences to kick your market out chuckling.

3. Modifying

Immediately after developing the earliest write, change it meticulously. You are going to most certainly pick one up, two or perhaps a very few harsh destinations when seeking via your essay. You should didn?t pass up any essential elements.

Suggestions for the flourishing enhancing:

Don’t start off to look for errors immediately after finish the essay. Take a relaxation and merely then have a healthy view it;

Convert substantial and sophisticated phrases into very simple styles so they are interesting;

Steer clear of usage of relation to numerous definitions;

Obtain all repeats of tips or disagreements and remove them;

Confirm all citations and formatting on the whole which has a handbook;

Paraphrase where by it can be not easy to knowledge the feeling;

Reconsider the dwelling of your essay.

4. Proofreading

All students consider that subtitles 3 and 4 in this particular guidebook are identical stuff. Yet it is definitely not so: when enhancing is focused on article content, fashion, and section system, proofreading is conducted to identify misspellings and sentence structure blunders. Also, it will be the finalized step with the publishing.

What Must I Do With This Procedure?

Examine sentence structure your own self or apply certain software programs like Grammarly.com and other solutions from Infographics beneath, but usually do not count on them seriously;

Take away increase space;

Change misspellings with right terms.

It will likely be more beneficial in case you trust another individual to reread your element: your pals, mother and father or university buddies. Some may observe errors you forgotten and promote their typical viewpoint within the essay. ?

Obviously, the story essay will not be tricky in any respect. It is just about the most relaxing varieties of composing duties as a result of superb participation of your respective temperament during the paper’s system. Perhaps the regulations and demand can’t enable you to get all the way down ? they may be nearly missing or are so simple as a cake if professor mentions a shape. Start up your creative thinking and commence writing a remarkable item implementing our tips.

There are actually various kinds of essay articles, but story posting is much more exciting. In contrast to other formats, story composing specializes in writer’s working experience. Quite often, this is a solo scenario with more than one scenarios, figures, timeline along with the dialogues within it. The essay conveys writer’s emotions, inner thoughts and ideas in this circumstance. Allow us to take a look at a lot of the crucial elements which makes your story essay, appealing to read through and have an understanding of.

Great tips on Story Essay Composing

1. Kind of creating

Attempt to commence the essay together with the circumstance in the history. Mainly, as well as time of waking time, time, spot and mood may help your reader to pertain to your situation. You possibly can produce the very first collection of the essay as ? ?At a sunlit morning, there had been a great deal of site traffic; I had been fatigued, around my institution, for example.? You may as well use 1st man or next individual viewpoint. Nonetheless, you want to keep 3rd man perspective as a smaller amount as you can.

2. Keep it simplistic

Frequently, college students attempt to create difficult key phrases or documents inside their essay. For anybody who is more comfortable with the terminology, there is no requirement to locate a several expression. It can be your sensing, helping to make your essay stand out. Your reader is keen on your history compared to phrases you utilize. So keep it simplistic.

3. Construct the narration

You should not bounce to history without having outlining the specific situation. The outcome produces a graphic in reader’s brain. So be sure you create the story. A modest amount of qualifications with the scenario may help. The essay really should demonstrate narration making, primary storyline and also the realization.

4. Information of figures and storyline

Without the right particulars on the type, you can not make the storyline. You will need to put many of the figures as part of your history and reveal each small bit of benefits. Consequently, your reader will connect with your account.

5. Usually do not exaggerate

It is crucial that you narrate the story plot since it taken place. Be as near as you possibly can using the info. Fail to create new perspectives to demonstrate on your own pretty much as good or display other individuals as awful. Should the predicament necessitates exaggeration, then its really good to exaggerate. All students desire to positive reviews their selves as well as to establish on their own pretty much as good. This is simply not the proper method. In place of understanding, describe the outcome, as being the condition per se provides what you would like.

6. Very clear and good dialogues

All too often, it is sometimes complicated to spell out specific situations with no discussions. In the event you sense this type of situation, use dialogues to warrant the job. The conversation really should be apparent and good. You should definitely consist of accurate strengthen and topic. It is possible to contain color by using anything as rage, a grin in the facial skin, wicked look, worn-out, etcetera.

7. Make clear the decisions thru dazzling verbs

Tend not to combination up verbs to make a problem. In place of give attention to physique terminology, movements, and tendencies of personalities, which describes the measures. Signify every one of them by way of adequate verb shape to boost the results. Identifying the concentration of operate can help the followers to evaluate the problem.

Bottom line

Generating a guide in your head on the account is a breeze but producing it at a papers is hard. That is certainly why you should give attention to all of the things previously mentioned to create a fantastic story essay on any predicament in your life. It truly is your history, so be sure you implement it the right way.

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Story essays are widely-used to convey to accounts. The submissions are typically about individual activities and may possess a crystal clear stage captivating the viewers. Whilst it is achievable to show an intricate notion with only a single even now impression, story essays also can explain to an excellent account, providing your viewers a vibrant visualize on the subject. In an effort to create the ideal story, reproduce on which you realize finest. When shopping for things to compose on, stick with just what you are satisfied with and matter concerns that you will be aware of. Issues that will be relate with your encounter will permit you to compose a prodding narrative that could be more pleasant.

The Accessories of Producing an incredible Story Essay

Normally, essays are low-inventive articles despite the fact that a story essay is really an consideration of activities which can be generally attracted from an publisher?s lifetime. A big difference from a private as well as a story essay is the fact that a personalized essay echos on critical details and more deeply details despite the fact that a story essay remains to be authentic and distinct from getting unbelievably special.

Story essays help a number of uses, and those who happen to be best show about three important personality characteristics which can be:

Helping to make a crucial place.

Have specific particulars in service from the position.

Are certainly sorted at some point.

When creating a story, it needs to have a pressing elegance. The story may very well be funny or even just really serious, but it must be authored in a fashion that lets your market to get in touch with the history. Probably your customers possessed a the same knowledge about the triumph or problems that you simply came across.

Subject Tips on Story Essay Creating ?

A narration explains a series of activities. This delivers the concern which occurrence is it advisable to discuss? Anytime a story essay is completed, it appears an easy task to produce but searching out the area to compose on would be the toughest portion.

What you are interested in is definitely a specific occasion you could recount within the essay that may be very well engineered and planned. Here are a couple tips on good information to jot down on.

The Very First Day You Visited Institution or even the Most Enjoyable Working day You Possessed in education

An Industry Excursion your Course Has Previously Applied

The Perfect Summer time Vacation trips

A Single Day You First Of All Received a family pet

Your Preferred Birthday party or simply a Special birthday which was Unsatisfying

The Time the energy Moved Out

An Accident You Have

An Arbitrary Respond of Goodness

An item that Was Upsetting that Previously Came about for your needs

An Exciting Memorial service or perhaps Wedding party

A Period Of Time You Decided to go Alongside Your Folks? Hopes

After You Have Terrified caused by a Major Hurricane

An Unusual Confront using a Total stranger Who Ended up being Your Good friend

A Situation that Caused the Failing of any Relationship

A Popular or perhaps Wonderful Exposure to a relative

There a great number of information to post on on the subject of story essays, however count on the ordeals you could have received. The essay is principally relating to your private knowledge, and this must have apparent tips that get involved readers.

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