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night-unfurls-its-splendour · 1 year

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My Favourite Moments from Chapter III of When the Longing Returns

◇ It seemed telling, she now thought, that her first truly peaceful rest in months should come in an attic dormitory replete with intrusive sunlight, and after she had secretly cast off her promise to a virtuous man of exemplary character and nobility in favor of one to a half-disfigured rogue whom all the world cursed for the very Devil himself.

I'm not sure this is my favourite but it's definitely the part I'm most proud of in this chapter. I just love the wording here, and I think her observation is quite profound--only after defying the conventional idea of what is "right" for her and accepting her "utterly wrong" love for Erik can she sleep peacefully.

◇ But she regarded this ring—this warm gold and its solid, tenebrous gem, shimmering with unfathomable depths and enigmatic hues—and all she saw was him. It was a sort of mesmerizing thing, but it did not make her head feel cloudy or intoxicated; rather, she felt clear-minded when she held it and looked at it. It fortified her.

You all know I have an unhealthy obsession with Erik's ring, so of course this was gonna be in here. This is our second hint at what the stone in the ring is (revealed in Ch. 4). Also this ring description is pure, florid Lovecraftian syntax and I love it without shame.

◇ Raoul was gone, and then his ring was gone, and as the Phantom himself disappeared, she knew, deep in the pit of her stomach, that there was a very real possibility she would have followed him, if she'd had time to regain her nerve—if he'd given her the chance. Perhaps he'd seen that in her eyes; known that she'd already begun to waver. She'd realized when she saw him shaking, saw the change in his entire demeanor when he looked at her, not only the hold he had on her, but that she held sway over him as well.

I recall seeing a post a while back that talked about how the Phandom is forever fixated on the power Erik has over Christine, but we also need to talk about the power she holds over him. I think this is one of the aspects of the Eristine dynamic that Gerard Butler understood in his bones--he illustrates it so vividly and nowhere moreso than at the Masquerade.

The idea that Raoul's efforts to catch Erik only push Christine closer to him was also so delicious to me.

◇ Over the course of their attachment he was forever coming and going, giving her gifts and presents—jewelry she could not yet wear; candies, most of which ended up being eaten by Meg; and endless bouquets of luridly bright hothouse flowers for which she had no room, and which clouded her in thick perfumes that caught in her throat—but never staying long enough to exchange any thoughts but whispered expressions of love and idealized dreams of their future. Three months they'd been engaged and, though he doted on her, she could hardly think of a single subject over which they had deeply connected, other than reminiscences and fantasies.

This is actually lifted straight from an interaction I had with @MadameDestler on one of her fics. Talking is one of the best ways I find inspiration. I like the idea that Raoul has no idea how to satisfyingly woo a woman, so he's following the example of his peers and just buying her tons of gifts. Which in effect makes it just seem like he's doting on his mistress. His thought process goes no deeper than "isn't this what you do?" And in turn it feels shallow and cheap, whatever his intentions.

◇ She fought not to allow the image she'd described too much space in her mind, but she couldn't help picturing how the other girls would shriek in terror if the dreaded, cloaked Opera Ghost flew out of some dark recess, seized her with an arm around her waist, and hauled her helpless, swooning form into the shadows like one of those intentionally ghastly pulp cartoons the street vendors sold. Maybe it was callous of her to indulge such a farcical scenario at the expense of her peers, but it did fill her with a kind of satirical mirth.

This might be my favourite, but I almost considered cutting it. I wasn't sure if it quite fit tonally--like maybe it's too much, or doesn't quite match the rest of her mood here, but I like letting Christine be a little cheeky with the concept of her "villainous" lover. "They don't know that he would take me back to his lair and then we'd kiss, teehee". I think it's important to remember that, as much as this is about Christine coming of age, she's still a very young woman, and now head-over-heels for her Phantom: it's okay for her to be a little bit immature.

◇ What does he look like when he sleeps? she now wondered. Did the lines of care fade from his face? Did he often have dreams of her, as he had haunted her dreams...? She was certain that if he did, they must never interrupt his slumber as hers had. He could have no reason to start awake sweating, for he was in no denial of his feelings for her.

I think this is such a sweet moment; and also Christine, sweet, pure Christine, has not yet grasped that there could be reasons other than fear that dreaming of someone might make you suddenly wake up sweating 🤭🤭🤭

◇ She'd enjoyed holding his arms; they were not very muscular, but plenty firm. They'd been strong enough when he picked her up in a burst of youthful exuberance, spun her around the rooftop, and then held her afterward. What blushes and flutterings she had experienced, to feel the firmness of a man's arms around her! It was a sensation she'd tasted for the first time not very long before, and she had dearly wanted more.

Not these arms, though, pleasant as they were, and not this man; but she had stubbornly denied the deficiency of the substitute.

Oh sorry, I lied: THIS is my favourite part.

Let's be honest: Patrick Wilson was FOINE in this movie. Like. I am not unaffected. Far from it, I was THRILLED the first time I watched it. He's in quite good shape. Too good, for Raoul, frankly. So I decided to split the difference between Movie!Raoul and Book!Raoul. I had to acknowledge that there were little, superficially attractive things about Raoul that kept Christine going during their engagement. Still not quite good enough, though...

◇ "Was it very terrifying? At the masquerade? When he was so close to you?"

Christine trembled harder as Meg's questions brought the memory to the surface again; how absolutely overcome he'd been at the sight of her... the sensation of his leather glove brushing her cleavage as he snatched away Raoul's ring...

"Yes, it was." Christine said solemnly.

Sublime, delicious terror.

This is the... third? Time I've brought up a detailed sensory description of Christine thinking about Erik's leather gloves? I'm starting to wonder if she has a glove thing to go with Erik's stockings thing? Or, idk everyone loves to give Gerik a foot thing so I think it would be funny if Christine had a hand thing.

Anyway this is Meg as I love Meg best; of course she's saying "Was it terrifying?" but we all know what she's really asking LOL.

And Christine’s internal response... I'm very proud of that line, honestly

◇ They got their pastries; piping hot, flaky, buttery pastries filled with rich cream cheese and sweet plum compote—a treat that could make you forget anything in the moment. Afterward they had washed their sticky fingers clean by spending the afternoon gathering snowballs in the Bois and throwing them at each other, and other such wholesome winter exercises as can and should be enjoyed by anyone of any age.

So this is what you get when I'm on a Dickens kick lol. This is just a lovely little slice of life moment. I want to live in this paragraph.

#phantom of the opera #poto fanfiction #phantom of the opera fanfiction #phan phic #poto fanfic #christine x erik #erik x christine #eristine #e/c #poto e/c #erik/christine #when the longing returns

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afinepricklypear · 4 years

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Mother’s Day and Mental Health Awareness Month

**Warning - This post talks about depression, mental disorder, and an attempted suicide. Please do not read if you are sensitive to these topics. The events described here are real and true to the best of my memory.**

I went to make a post May 1st and Tumblr was kind enough to inform me that May is Mental Health Awareness month. It isn’t without irony for me that Mental Health Awareness month occurs the same month as Mother’s Day.

My relationship with my mother is a difficult topic, it’s usually only one I can talk about with my sisters, but it’s this time of year that people most want to talk about moms. When I was younger, I didn’t know what to say when people brought up their moms and mom-like behavior in general, mostly foreign concepts to me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned I don’t have to say anything at all, like in my work meeting this morning when our supervisor reminded us all to call our mom’s this weekend, you know, “if they’re still alive”, since most of our department are near retiring age, but I don’t always know how to feel. Here comes the guilt: do I call, do I text, do I take the risk that she’ll be in a good mood or will she turn it around, again, like the year I sent her a gift and she used my gesture as ammo to attack my “ungrateful” older sister that’s still trying to untangle her own complicated relationship with our mother. I’m ten again, twelve again, sixteen again, walking on eggshells around a house where the air is so thick with the constant fog of her misery, I can’t see farther than a minute into my future.

There were good moments, of course, like any home. She was always the more encouraging parent when it came to my writing, my father would pick it all apart – in the long run, both approaches helped me become a better writer. There was the time she was given two tickets to see Mama Mia at the casino where she dealt, and she chose to take me. We got dressed up, she leant me this white faux fur jacket and some of her jewelry, curled my hair and did my make-up, she was riding high on her emotions. She took me to a fancy dinner at the Hard Rock Café before the show. We didn’t get spoiled often, and to this day, Mama Mia and ABBA hold a special place in my heart. I always think of her singing along to the radio in the car, she has a nice voice, and maybe in another life, she could’ve been a singer.

There were moments when she was trying to be sweet and it still leaves me with conflicted emotions. Like the time the German shepherd she took off the hands of a coworker who was afraid of him violently attacked me. She bandaged me up, laid in bed with me and comforted me, it’s the most motherly I ever remember her being. She kept the dog for a while after that, I still have scars on both my arms from the attack, I’ll have them the rest of my life, just like my little sister will still have her scars from when it attacked her, and my friend who came to visit will still have the scar it gave her…my older sister was only lucky that it was muzzled when it went for her face. My mother was convinced she had a special connection with this dog, that in his heart of hearts he believed he was protecting her, so I get it, she didn’t want to get rid of something that she felt loved her unconditionally.

Sometimes it’s hard to conjure these kinder memories, they become overwhelmed with the harder, darker ones that feel infinitely more numerous. There are the moments that seem innocuous, when you could say I was acting a spoiled child, like the time I was in middle school and I wanted to keep my hair long, but my mother decided I needed bangs. My dad tried to stop it, but she had made up her mind. I cried and pleaded with her but she commanded the reluctant stylist to chop the hair off. Armed with a brush and blow-dryer, she attempted to show me “it was cute” that night and things escalated to the point my dad and older sister were stepping in, arguing with my mom to let me be. I went back to that same hair stylist with my friend who was getting her hair cut the next day, and the stylist apologized, confessed that she didn’t want to cut my hair, told me it was so healthy and beautiful too, and she felt terrible doing it. Years later, when I was an adult and decided to cut my hair short with sideswept bangs, my mother would throw this memory back in my face, “sure, now you want bangs”, still incapable of understanding that it wasn’t about her, but about me wanting to define my own body and style. She did the same to my older sister in high school, dyed her hair blonde – it took so much bleach to lighten her naturally dark hair color that the hair looked fried afterwards and we were all amazed it didn’t fall out. Never mind that my older sister never wanted blonde hair to begin with, it was antithetical to her personality, and she won’t even go near the hair dye aisle now.

There are the moments where my mom was so unreasonable that everyone felt helpless, like the day I was alone in my room, my sisters in the living room talking and watching television – doing I don’t know what – and my mom was sleeping in her room because she worked graveyard shift at this time. Suddenly, inexplicably, my mom came into my room in a rage, “how dare you call your little sister stupid,” she scolded me, she continued to berate me for being cruel and mean, even as I told her, baffled, I didn’t know what she was talking about, even as my sisters argued with her, “no one called anyone stupid. She wasn’t even in the room with us.” My mother wouldn’t listen, she knew what she heard, she grounded me and, matter settled, left back to bed. My dad got home from work not long after, and I was in my room still bawling, inconsolable and unable to work out what I’d done wrong. He asked my sisters why I was crying and they explained, and, again, my mom comes storming in my room yelling, “how dare you tattle on me to your dad!” I don’t remember much of what happened from there, my dad stepped in, they argued the rest of the night, and he would later assure me I wasn’t grounded. It was the only thing he could undo from that day.

There are other, harder to define moments. The nights my mom would argue with my dad, we’d be in bed, school in the morning, and she’d turn on all our bedroom lights, rip the covers off our beds, and scream at us to get out of her house, that she was putting us all out on the streets and it was our father’s fault. I remember vividly the fight between my parents that happened in the day, everyone awake in the house, I collapsed in the kitchen as my mother ranted that we all hated her so she should leave and we won’t have to deal with her anymore, and I cried and trembled, overwhelmed with the thought, I don’t want anyone to leave, I don’t want to lose my family. I had to get out, so I did, walked right out of the house, not sure where I’d go, and my mother panicked and raced after me, put an arm over my shoulders, coaxed me back to the house. The moment the door closed; she was yelling at us again for not loving her enough and I realized I couldn’t leave, I was trapped. There was the gambling addiction, every Christmas we would be prepared, “mom lost a lot of money at the casino last night, we might not have a Christmas this year” – we had learned not to expect anything anyways and that every gift came with a quid pro quo and years of ‘remember I did this for you’. My older sister and her then-boyfriend, now-husband, watched my mom gamble away more than a month’s mortgage and spend the entire night chasing it back.

I’m thinking about all of this more recently, I think, since I started writing some fanfics for the Bungou Stray Dogs community. One of the main characters of the show is named after and inspired by author, Dazai Osamu, a man that died prematurely from a double suicide. This is treated tongue-and-cheek by the anime and its original manga through Dazai’s many failed suicide attempts and his odd flirtation strategy of asking ladies to commit double suicide with him. I kind of like this approach to the topic, it might on the surface seem insensitive to make a joke of something so serious as depression, but humor can be therapeutic and give us an easier way to broach otherwise difficult subjects.

I was in high school when my older sister and I were allowed to be in on the conversations about my mother’s mental disorder, both undiagnosed and untreated. We’d all speculate, my father and his sister, my mother’s sister, my sisters and I, the favorite theory was bipolar disorder, but we may never know. My mom refused then and refuses to this day to seek help. There were little things about her past before marrying my dad that we were allowed to know as we got older, too. Like, how she’d been put in a hospital that wanted to keep her there for further treatment – they knew something was wrong but didn’t know what, this was during a time when bipolar disorder was unheard of and they called similar diagnoses ‘manic depression’ – and she had to threaten legal action to get released. When she was eighteen, she had married a man knowing he had a terminal illness in order to help him get his green card, he died two years later, and she still considers him the great love of her life. We’re told by the media, movies like A Walk to Remember, that this is romantic, but in reality, it’s an unhealthy fixation on a relationship that was doomed from the start. She idolizes the memory of it, puts it on a pedestal as the standard for all of her other relationships to compare to, but it isn’t realistic. It was a relationship with a known expiration date, it wasn’t a real commitment, nothing had to matter because it would all come to an end soon, and they never reached the hard parts of a marriage – children, growing old, changing bodies, financial struggles, loss and disagreement. She went through a deep depression after he died and it reached a point that her sister had her placed on a suicide watch and thus began her long and sordid history of depression.

There are a lot of fanfics in the BSD community that explore a darker tone to Dazai’s depression, to varying degrees of accuracy. I mostly steer clear of them. There is one writer in the community that I won’t name, they’re an amazing writer with beautiful technical skill, and they do an impeccable job of showing depression exactly as it is for those who live it and those who live with a person that suffers from it. I left a one-word comment on one of their stories, the only positive thing I could say, and I couldn’t write anymore without the comment turning into an emotional lecture, I don’t know that author’s personal emotional state, but I also won’t read any more from them. It wasn’t the accurate depiction of depression that turned me off from the story, but the depiction of Dazai’s depression being known by all the characters in the story, including himself, but he won’t seek treatment for it, and all of the characters are shown to enable his depression and put up with his abuses that stem from his disorder. In the story he was placed in an intimate relationship with the character, Chuuya, and Chuuya is painted as the patron saint of boyfriends, willing to overlook Dazai’s every episode, draw him back from the ledge and bandage up his scars with an endless patience and gentleness. I couldn’t move passed the romanticizing of this relationship dynamic. Chuuya is shown to be noble and celebrated for his self-sacrifice and unconditional love that compels him to stay beside Dazai despite everything Dazai inflicts upon himself and Chuuya, and more importantly, despite Dazai’s refusal to get treatment.

My mother’s emotional state was constantly our responsibility growing up. She was sad because we didn’t love her. She was angry because we were ungrateful. She was miserable because we couldn’t see all that she did for us. If she hurt us with her words, if she lashed out at us irrationally, it was our fault, because we didn’t do everything right. Never mind that what was right could change within a minute in a day. Too often when someone in your life is suffering from a mental disorder, you’re made to shoulder the blame, either unintentionally by them as they suffer from their illness or intentionally by well-meaning individuals outside of the situation that don’t know better: you just need to give them love. If they take their own life, it’s your fault, you didn’t love them enough.

It was the Friday before Mother’s Day, I was in my early twenties, finishing up my degree in Anthropology (after changing my major, I don’t know how many times). My parents were long since divorced and my mom lived alone in the house where I grew up, still shrouded in all of those dark memories. My mother’s sister had recently left town after a short visit, she had called me a few days earlier to let me know my mother lost her job that week and was struggling to get out of the depression. In retrospect, she’d been sinking for a while now, after the violent dog and so many other incidents like it left us all with too many scars to overlook and we didn’t know how to walk back into that house, how to feel safe there. She’d covered herself in tattoos, cut her hair short, wore different wigs to work every day, she’d gained a lot of weight and was chain smoking so much there was a permanent haze in the house. None of these things should be thought of as red flags for everyone, it should be taken on an individual basis, but for my mother they were all signs that she was spiraling. She didn’t like who she saw in the mirror and was desperately trying to cover it up, find someone she did like. I had promised her I would come over, make her a dinner for Mother’s Day, and I would take her to see a movie. I was on my phone with my aunt when I pulled up, snowballing ideas for what to do if things got serious and if we needed to think about placing her on a suicide watch, how that would work. I rang the doorbell; it was outside of the gate she put around the front yard for her dogs to go in the front yard.

No answer.

Rang it again.

Still no answer.

She knew I was coming over.

I opened the gate, went to the door, the door was cracked open, my aunt was on the phone in my ear, “what’s going on?” I opened the door fully and my mom’s dogs came to greet me. The house was in disarray, furniture toppled over, papers scattered across the floor, so many of the details are blurred out of memory, I remember distinctly a ceramic statue broken on the floor but I couldn’t tell you what it was a statue of. I could hear a low intermittent moan coming from farther in the house. I followed it down the hall to my mother’s room, into her bathroom, where she was collapsed, naked, on the floor of her shower.

I told my aunt I had to go, I hung up and dialed 911. In the moment, I didn’t know how panicked I really was, my voice unnaturally high, my body warm and shaking and electric with adrenaline. That feeling hits me again, sometimes, when I don’t expect it. There was white like foam around my mother’s mouth, her eyes stared wide and blank at the ceiling, her every breath was that guttural moan as she attempted to draw air in, an autonomic action, she was completely unresponsive. Her body was on autopilot, and so was mine. I’d been rehearsing for a long time what to do in that situation, it’s the only way I made it through everything that needed to be done. I gave the dispatcher the address, answered her questions, “I think she did something to herself but I don’t know what…no, there’s no pills nearby…no, I don’t see anything in the trash…she’s been severely depressed…she has a history of depression…”, between pleading with my mom, “please don’t leave me, please stay with me, mom,” and wrestling her dogs into the front yard and out of the house. The dispatcher told me the ambulance was on its way and asked if I wanted her to stay on the line and I begged her not to hang up, not to leave me with nothing but the moans of my dying mother, she didn’t say anything during that time, was just silently present as I talked to my mom and waited for the paramedics. They couldn’t come in until I got the dogs out back, I cursed and screamed at the unruly mongrels and felt an irrational anger that my mom never got them properly trained.

I took a seat in the kitchen, let the paramedics work and my brain shut down. I called my aunt back, told her what happened. The paramedics came to ask me questions, I tried to answer them but I didn’t know and my aunt was correcting me over the phone, so I handed her over and let her talk to them. They took my mother away to the hospital and I was alone, in that childhood house, that held so many horrible memories of my mother’s untreated disorder, and every aspect of our lives that it colored and perverted. Every Mother’s Day was always fraught with anxiety, I think it was my mother’s least favorite day, her mood was always sour, and no matter what we gave her or tried to do for her, it wasn’t enough. Even the year before, the Mother’s Day when she told us exactly what to get her. She was so happy with her present, a sterling silver ring with our birthstones imbedded that cost us all a pretty penny – I was paying my own way through college, my older sister was paying rent on a Starbucks salary, and my little sister didn’t have a job – but a week later we were ungrateful brats again. There was one Mother’s Day when I was maybe ten or eleven, we’d set her up roses and two cards – one from my father and one from her daughters. I was watching television and waiting for her to come home from work to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. She came in and years of practice had taught me to recognize she was in a dark mood, a cigarette on her lip, her posture tense, muttering under her breath about how nobody loved her, nobody cared. She stalked to the desk, ripped the cards in half without opening them and threw them on the ground in front of me without sparing me one glance or word, and stormed to her room, slammed the door behind her.

We would later find out that my mother drank antifreeze, a method that has about a 5% survival rate. She was in a coma for about a month. It was another few weeks before they took the respirator tube out and her throat recovered enough that she could talk in small sentences, and not without effort and pain. She told us she filled a cup with the antifreeze, showed us with her fingers set apart how high she’d put it in the glass, when she finished, she washed the cup and stuck it in the dishwasher, hiding the evidence. She’d always heard antifreeze was flavorless but it tasted awful – they add flavoring to antifreeze to deter people from accidentally ingesting it. She’d thought it would be quick, but it’s really an excruciatingly painful and long, drawn out way to die. She’d stripped in her deliria and taken a shower because her body felt so awful, feverish and almost on fire, as it was shutting down and her nerves fried from the chemical reaction. I wrestled for a long time with the ethical delimma of my choices in that moment after finding her, and there was a thought that stuck with me through it all: What did I get my mother for Mother’s Day? I saved her life, and it was still the wrong gift.

It isn’t noble or romantic to stay with someone who refuses to get professional treatment for their mental disorder. There is no amount of love or patience or understanding that will heal them. In most situations, the harder and braver thing to do is walk away. None of us is a perfect person and none of us should have to bear the burden of another person’s unwillingness to get help when they need it. It took me a long time to come to terms with the notion that there is no one to blame in this situation. It isn’t my fault that I can’t give my mother the love she craves. It isn’t my mother’s fault that she can’t see the love that her daughters wanted to give her. But it is her responsibility to get help. If she refuses help, no one can force it on her.

It’s been years now since this happened. My mother is now as recovered as she’ll ever be. Her mind isn’t as sharp, and she struggles with controlling her muscles and the devastating damage to her nervous system that will never fully heal. She remains undiagnosed and is not receiving any kind of professional guidance or treatment. There have been new, dark memories, added to the old ones, in those times when we tried to be supportive and “there for her” during her recovery. Episodes that remind us she doesn’t want to change and she never will. So, we keep our interactions to a minimum, answer when she texts, try to help her when she asks for it, check in every so often. She lives on the other side of the country with two cats and goes regularly to the neighborhood karaoke bar. In a weird way, she seems happier with this set up, this distance between her and all of the pain that my sisters and I seemed to bring her, that constant demand for love that we couldn’t fulfill, maybe it really was all our fault and we were the ones to blame, or maybe it’s because I’m not living with her depression anymore.

I don’t know if I’ll call my mother on Mother’s Day, but for anyone else out there with a complicated relationship with their mother, it’s okay if you decide not to call your mother either.

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docholligay · 6 years

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Fuck, canon, kill: Utena's obsession with ~

Oh my god this is all horrific.

Fuck: Juri’s obsession with Shiori. I actually think the last time we dealt with Juri and Shiori might be a turning point for Juri, though obviously I have to hang on through the last 9 episodes to really find out. And I think there really can be something valuable in the lesson of how a young lesbian gets caught up with a girl who doesn’t have feelings for her or care about her outside of manipulation, so I’d tweak this if it DOESN’T happen to be a situation where Juri really does learn to admit her feelings beyond “Shiori’s amazing” and onto “Oh, I’m just gay and was fixating on Shiori.” MAYBE SHE COULD ASK OUT A GIRL AT THE END.

Canon: Utena’s obsession with her prince. This is an incredibly annoying character trait of Utena’s to me, but I think it’s SUPPOSED to be annoying, and I think it’s going to fuck her over just as bad as Shiori’s obsession (which I think is actually the point of the Shiori stuff, is to point out Utena is ALSO carrying around a piece of jewelry containing someone she’s obsessed with that doesn’t seem to care about her and is probably manipulating her) and so it works for me as a character thing even if i want to shake her.

Kill: THE INCEST. THERE HAS TO, HAS TO be a better way to get across these ideas, Ikuhara, SERIOUSLY. Did you know??? It’s possible??? To show unhealthy manipulation within families without having them fuck each other??? SHOCKING BUT TRUE.

Please note I haven’t seen anything past this (episode 30) and am watching spoiler free! Please don’t confirm, deny, or explain anything to me! Even if I should be able to figure it out based on past episodes! Even if it’s cultural! Even if there is no answer! It ruins it for everyone when I get spoiled!

#labor day ask day #doc watches utena #themiscyra1983

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strawberry-milktea · 6 years

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Pt. 1 Hi. I am asking for a prayer request: that I find beauty & confidence in the Lord for my body. I started my fitness lifestyle around 2 years ago, and I started off great. I worked out everyday & ate right, and managed to lose some weight. I still had goals I wanted to reach though. Toning my mid-section has been a struggle. But even more so, I’ve been dealing with being influenced by the fitness world on Instagram. Everyone is obsessed with big butts now, and I feel I’ve become (c)

Pt. 2 © I feel I’ve become obsessed too. I started working out hard & eating more just to grow a tush, and I managed to gain my weight back with the extra eating, then lost it again. Now I’m just stuck in a rut. I haven’t gained anymore weight back, but I took a break to reset my goals. Instead of focusing on being healthy for myself, it became for guys. So guys would look at me and think I’m attractive. I think since I don’t have a huge bum, no one will look at me. If my stomach isn’t flat (c © no guy will find me attractive. If my hair isn’t long, I’m not pretty. I know none of this is true, but these thoughts still haunt me. It’s annoying cause I do want to love myself, but each time I try, there’s something to stop me. I haven’t been motivated to workout, & I have no clue why. So I’m just asking that all of you pray for me, and pray that God gives me clarification as to why I’m feeling this way. Sorry for these long messages! :) —No need to apologize! I understand what you are going through.. The enemy commonly uses body image to attack and I personally suffered with this for many years. I’m thankful to God that being born again and developing a relationship with Him helped me substantially in getting better with this. Before I was born again, the enemy had a field day with me and he basically got away with it because I didn’t even understand what was happening. I talked more about my experience with this in these asks if you wanted to take a look at them: 1, 2From what you are saying, it sounds like Instagram is feeding into this unhealthy mindset and giving the enemy a foothold to attack you. I would suggest to avoid Instagram because it seems to only be serving to harm you, or at least stop following people on there whose content influences you in this way.Always keep in mind that most of the images we are bombarded with that tell us “this is what you should look like” are enhanced/photoshopped/taken from flattering angles and are different from how that person looks in reality, including the images you see on Instagram. You will find yourself feeling terrible if you become an emotional slave to these images and let society’s fickle opinion of what we should aspire to look like influence how you see yourself. Also keep in mind that what is currently “in” isn’t what every person finds attractive. Since you are a girl, I’ll spin this from the perspective of what men are attracted to - not every man finds large backsides attractive, just like not every man finds large breasts attractive. Our media tells us one thing, but reality tells a different story. The body types men find attractive aren’t limited to what’s currently being promoted as the “ideal”. The same can be applied in reverse for any given physical trait/body type that guys may mistakenly believe all women want in a man. Preferences can vary a lot from one person to another and many times, those preferences don’t even matter when a person gets to know someone and finds him or herself falling for that person. Many times, people have their preferences but end up crazy about someone who doesn’t fit those traits. It’s of course not wrong to find someone physically attractive and for that to be part of what initially draws a person’s interest, but inner beauty is truly what matters most. Even though the world constantly shoves its fixation on physical appearance down our throats, we should be more concerned with the inner beauty of ourselves and others than what’s on the outside. “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” - 1 Peter 3:3-4I will pray for you.. please let me know if you would like to talk about this more.

#God #asks #anon #prayer requests #prayer request ask #body image #beauty

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