#my life is a mess partly because my parents neglected a lot about me when i was younger and im trying to get it together

[gwyns]

can someone tell me i am inherently worth something just for being human. even if i don't contribute to society in the way that hussle bros think i should. please. even if you don't mean it. please

[sheep-from-rad]

About the Reader who became Jason's roommate and all. I wonder what if they were so cold and distant with the family, they made sure for them to know that they are not a family. (They already closed their heart).

It can be things like, in class they won't talk with Tim unless they have to, like having a project together and if they do they'll only talk about the project if he tries to talk about something else she changes the subject or shut it down. All with a smile on their face, the way they talk is too professional and they won't let him involve emotions. "We are only talking about what needs to be talked about" they say.

The less subtle with Dick, Bruce and Damian because they come to them as vigilantes. Waking up to Batman and Robin cuddling them. They snap at them. Because first, "when did dressing as a furry and making kids fight crime with you turned to doing that to stalking civilians? And you claim to be my 'family' yet what family breaks into the house of someone and touches them in their sleep? That's not like family behavior but one of creeps!!"

They also snap at Dick for coming to them in his Nightwing costume. "Are you trying to put me in danger by associating me with your vigilant persona? What a good hero- what a good 'brother' you are."

With Jason, what if the reader didn't snap at him till now and told him about the three show up as vigilantes to a civilian, using his protectiveness against them in that way.

I don't know how may readers treat Jason but I can imagine that they don't cook for him and they don't eat what he cooks for them. They keep personal stuff like tooth brush and all of the personal things in their room. If he comes with injuries they will give him a first aid kit and clean the mess he made but mostly won't help him unless it is something he really needs help in like bandaging his back. Stay in their room for most of the time they are in the apartment.

I can imagine reader apartment hunting after Bruce by there's and stuff but also what if Reader got a better job that can help in that? What if the Reader decided that they will pay Bruce rent because to them he is nothing but their landlord? What if Reader managed to find another place to live in and became the roommate of a friend?

If the fam asked them to hang out or visit the manor they'd use the same words who were used against them when they were in the manor like "not now" "I have more important stuff to do" "don't you have other things to do?" "Go bother someone else" "stop nagging me". So it's like how they used to treat the reader at the manor.

I also feel like what they are trying to do is swipe things under the rug so, I can imagine them reaching the point where they try to confront reader and they just say "after treating me like nothing in my most valuable times of my life you think you can waltz back in my life and play family and I'd welcome you whit open arms? What kind of delusion is this?" "You are not my family and made it clear from day one. You can't just take it back, not after all the damage you've done."

Original fic: Jason's sidecar (Yandere Batfam x Neglected!Reader)

Titling this as 'Batfam trying to reintegrate themselves back to reader's life'

Masterlist

Jason had anticipated it. He was a child of neglect as well not just from his original parents but also partly from Bruce. He blames himself too when it comes to you. He’s the smart one next to Tim and he had read a lot of books on how to end the cycles of neglect and emotional abuse and yet he wasn’t able to help you. He may not say it but he feels like he deserves the current treatment he’s getting from you. And honestly, he’s fine with it. He’s fine with the coldness, he’s fine with the emotional distance. He’s fine by just being the shadow in your apartment who tucks you in your sleep at night whenever Bruce and Damian are out. 

Tim is not satisfied with it. He will pull strings to make sure that you and him will always be on the same assignments and projects. If he’s not in the same group with you then he will quickly bribe the weakest link in your group to swap with him. Tim would also use his bad sleep habits as a weapon. It started with him passing out of the class and the professor having to call you to get him home and now the professor has you on speed dial (do people still use speed dial) whenever it happens. Most of the time it’s just a ploy for you to go home to the mansion because sometimes you can’t just say no to Alfred. 

Bruce and Dick were hurt but it makes sense. The cowl and the masks protect the cities but too much attention is just as dangerous. At the end of the day even when they are tired, they have made it a habit to change clothes before coming to see you. Bruce is saddened over the fact that his relationship with you became transactional but much like Tim he would find ways to outsmart you. Whenever you pay him rent every month, he would slip back a hundred or two in the less conspicuous places. Most of the time you end up thinking it’s just money you forgot about. If you have those physical piggy banks, he will surely slip the rent back little by little. Dick would make it a part of his routine to be on constant lookout on Gotham’s apartment rent and leasing. Everytime an apartment lowers its initial rent, he would immediately book it and give it to a poor citizen (he’ll do it in secret and help citizens pay for the rent and even find a stable job to keep the apartment). He is also on the constant lookout in other cities as well with help of his other friends. 

Damian hates it. He thinks you’re being a brat and that you’re doing it for attention. The estate is the safest place in Gotham and you left it for independence? Why would you ever gamble your life for it? He wasn’t in the whole ‘get you back home’ plan and he respects your decision on leaving even though he hates it. He wasn’t on it until he found his fist clenching hard as he stood inside your now empty room at the estate. He knows of emptiness and yet the feeling of you being missing in that very room felt like he’s falling down the abyss. Bruce holds you two tight every night but Damian will hold you tighter. Arms tight on your midsection and head on your chest. He’s partly glad those grip training worked off.

[fredfilmsblog]

We got such a good reaction to last week’s “The Summoning” postcard teasing a graphic novel series that I thought it was a good bet you hadn’t read the interview with creator Elyse Castro that was done in 2017 by the Frederator development group.

frederator-studios:

Frederator Studios’ Cooper Nelson checked in with Elyse Castro, creator of “The Summoning,” the newly released GO! Cartoons short on Cartoon Hangover, to ask a few burning questions. Let’s see if her answers are equally on fire.

Elyse Castro created “The Summoning,” about Claire, a witch, and her cat Edgar, on a quest for a missing spell ingredient. When I asked her our usual opening question—“Where did you study animation?”—Elyse just chuckled.

“Can’t answer that one,” she explained, “I didn’t!”

Rebellious against the ‘usual,’ Castro, of Brisbane, Australia, is a prolific creative, with experience ranging from playwriting to comics to taxidermy—she recently gave blacksmithing a go. Below, she doles out the deets on “The Summoning,” and leads us down her windy path to cartoon-creating.

So what did you study in school?

I went to uni for theater and visual art, but halfway through got really into the culture of tattooing, and became a tattoo apprentice. My Catholic parents were horrified. I was a tattoo artist for several years, then cooled off it—partly because of a hurt wrist, partly because I was tired of people’s shit tattoo ideas.

I can imagine. So then what’d you get up to?

I was doing freelance comics, some fine art, but also studied to become a drama teacher. I was frustrated about the neglect of arts and theater education in Australia, and decided to quit harping about the problems and lend a hand to the solutions.

Do you enjoy teaching?

I love connecting with the kids. And it’s creative—I teach at an all boys school, so I often write us alternative plays to fit them better, like our own version of “Robin Hood”. It’s a lot of laughs—I love making people laugh.

Is that why you wanna make cartoons?

Oh yeah – it’s always been a big motivation for me. My biggest goal in life all through growing up, and even now, is to make my sister laugh. It isn’t too hard, she’s thinks I’m a riot. She ended up becoming a research scientist, while I’m an adult entertained by Yo Gabba Gabba.

I respect that. So then what inspired “The Summoning”?

Certainly my maniac cats [see Winston below]. And actually, a lot of experiences with my sister. Voices we’d use, stupid things we’d do. And some gross stuff. Like, the whole bit with the dandruff in “The Summoning” was based on a time that I picked a big flake of the stuff off her head. I remember it now, a nice, sunny day…

Aha, gross! Gotcha. What mattered to you while developing your own short?

I thought about what I wanted to see in a cartoon—I’m drawn to the macabre, odd stuff, like my taxidermy. I’m very crafty, always making things, which lends itself to a witch character. And tone-wise, I wanted to keep it real, even have nuggets of education. Like in “The Summoning,” I tucked in a great factoid about poo consumption in the animal kingdom.

Sounds about as educational as a Frederator show gets!

I still can’t believe I have a project with Frederator. It was my childhood dream to make a cartoon, and I’m a huge fan of Pendleton Ward and Natasha Allegri. I even got to work with Natasha, who directed “The Summoning”! I was fangirling, it was so hard to act cool.

What’re your favorite cartoons?

Definitely Daria, Ren and Stimpy, South Park, and Adventure Time.

So about the witchcraft stuff – dabble in witchcraft yourself?

Not really, but I’m very interested in paganism and witchcraft. I study it, love the history behind it. My friends and I mess around with tarot cards sometimes, but I haven’t gone farther than that… yet.

– Cooper

Watch Elyse’s “The Summoning” on Cartoon Hangover!

For the 1 year anniversary of “The Summoning” and Go! Cartoons, bumping @elysecastro‘s interview non-US fans link here!

(this was also my first interview! We’re at ~50 a year later, with video and probs audio ones too on the way. Anthology post forthcoming! ?)

– stillcooper

[always-andromeda]

i am very curious as to how you quite exactly feel about holden worther from the good girl for the character bingo. like tell me. how do you feel about this poor, messed up child? i need specifics

send a character for an unhinged bingo ask!

Oh goodness gracious, Soph. Under the cut I'm gonna leave possibly an entire essay on how I feel about Holden because whoop dee doo I feel a lot of things about his character!!

First of all, I don't think him directly comparing himself to Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye is just some fluke; it's 100% intentional. Now I've never read Catcher in the Rye but based on the reading I've done of the main character, he is so similar to how Holden (or Thomas lol) composes himself. Both characters heavily judge others around them based on superficial traits and tend to see themselves as superior in some way. I think Holden (Thomas) found a lot of solace in this character and takes it as a thing of pride to imitate him, especially on matters of morality. It's partly why he gets so personally offended when Justine sleeps with Bubba (because lol it seems that book Holden feels the same way with just the concept of casual sex existing). It's also how he can so easily look down on almost everyone around him.

I think Holden's issues with his parents can't go unstated either. Like I haven't watched the movie since we watched it a few weeks ago bUT DO YOU REMEMBER A SINGLE TIME WHEN THIS GUY'S PARENTS GAVE A SHIT ABOUT HIM? NOOOO. It really is that parental neglect that both fuels his wild thought processes but also allows them to go unchecked.

AND ANOTHER THING. Even just knowing a sliver about Catcher in the Rye has really helped my interpretation of his character. Because The Good Girl is primarily about the monotony in the lives of these two people. Everyone else seems to have found their little niche in their lives and they're content with that living. Corny is cool with being the church guy, Cheryl manages to have fun working the makeup counter and annoying everyone over the loudspeaker, Phil is cool with getting high and doing his job and watching TV every day, Bubba is also cool with just watching his friend live out a "perfect" relationship. Everyone except for Justine and Holden are fine with all of this.

Holden, just like the character he admires so much, is a symbol of rebellion. Rebellion against the slow, mundane, cyclical lives that they live. But it's a rebellion that Justine ultimately can't go along with. Because picking up and running away with him would be the "easy" option. That's the great divide between them; Holden is young enough to believe that he is invincible and that they can do anything and be anything and they don't have to face the consequences. Justine has enough maturity to see the bigger picture and accept her life for what it is and decides to work with what she has in order to spare the people around her.

I genuinely love this movie so so so much and like...I'm genuinely debating reading Catcher in the Rye just so I can see if I can find more parallels between it and the movie. Because, GOD, The Good Girl embodies like. Almost everything I fear in my life. And I love Holden with all of my heart; wish I could cart him off to a good therapist. <3

Thank you for asking, soph 🥺 hope you enjoy the essay lol

[anotherhellchild]

📁❤️ I really like your head canons and wanted to see if you had any about Bakugou’s home life

oh boy okay well, tbh im in camp 'mitsuki and masaru bakugou are assholes' so disclaimer right away: This is not a mitsuki/masaru friendly post.

also, i got most my inspiration/ideas from Sif, her hc's and fics are amazing.

This is gonna be very general probably and also pretty messy/ all over the place but if anyone wants me to elaborate or clarify then just lmk. 

ALRIGHT SO, first and foremost, i think the bakugou’s r really neglectful. Theyve always worked very busy jobs together in the fashion industry and they go on lots of work trips and stuff. i think that from the moment they deemed it possible, mitsuki and masaru have been letting katsuki stay home alone for long periods of time. as katsuki kept getting older and more independent (which he had to be) I imagine theyd gradually start leaving for longer and longer. 

also, i think that the communication in the house is TERRIBLE. like, often times mitsuki and masaru would just not inform katsuki of their whereabouts and katsuki wouldnt inform them of his either cause,, nobody ever asked/cared. So most of the time katsuki’d just find out his parents are gone whenever theyre literally not there and then its just like, ‘shit, nobody made dinner’. or smth. 

and, obviously, the bad communication does not stop there. I feel like especially when he was younger, mitsuki would contradict herself on lots of things (as lots of parents do) like ”you are the child and i am the adult, therefore you must listen to me” but then she’s also like “You are not a child, stop acting like one and get your shit together”. Little katsuki would get so frustrated at this and so confused. I imagine that eventually he’d realize he can never be in the right with her, and thats when he starts resenting her a lot which builds up.

oh btw, I should mention; i dont think katsuki was planned at all. I dont think that mitsuku or masaru wanted to have a kid but then they did and it kinda threw their life around (obviously). mostly for mitsuki i think this effected her career quite heavily for a time and she’s blamed that on katsuki ever since. so she’s always resented him on a level.

But yeah, as i was saying, i think mitsuki and masaru r those types of people that were just never fit to be parents. they dont have the patience or care that u need for a child and it shows. I think masaru is the type to ignore and mitsuki is the type to get frustated too easily and lose her cool. So whenever katsuki was being ‘annoying’ or ‘bad’ he’d immediately be shut up or ignored. No time for explanations or reasoning.

Now, if we go back a step,, katsuki is a super independent kid. a consequence to this is that he’s had to teach himself a lot of things and sometimes those things just arent right. He doesnt know that though because he’s had to collect his knowledge from all over the place, which he thinks is normal. so then for example: maybe he’s fought with a kid at school and the bakugou’s are called. They’re both extremely mad at him but he doesnt understand why. If he gets hit, why would he not be allowed to hit too? Is that not how it works? WOuldn’t that be unfair?

but yeah, because he’s basically had to figure the world out himself, with mostly bad influences to look up to. he’s got a pretty messed up worldview. 

Now, i ALSO think that despite mitsuki and masaru not really caring about katuski in general, they DO want to have that ‘we have a good kid’ status, yknow? like, they cant have katsuki embarrassing them or something. I think he’d be dragged along to a lot of places he never wanted to go (dinners, fashion shows, whatever) and forced to wear all fancy clothes and act all neat with no reward. consequences for ‘being a little bitch’ as his mom puts it, are not pretty.

he’s a smart and talented kid too though, and it seems, even to masaru and mitsuki, like he doesnt have to do much for it. which makes them think he’s lazy and stuff and thats not good. so they expect him to work for everything he does at 100% . again, consequences are not pretty.

generally as well, i think there are so many fights in the house. katuski speaks up whenever he disagrees with bullshit and even though he’s never won an argument, he’s always wanted to. so he’s not going to stop. 

so yeah, basically theyre strict, neglectful and abusive. There are extreme’s they go to, and because katsuki is just the type to disobey shit he doesnt agree with, those are often used.

It’s been said by Sif before, but i really like the idea that todoroki and bakugou both had bad childhoods but in opposite directions. Thats probably the best way to describe it.

Actually, Ive had a fic in my head for a long time that would partly focus on katsuki’s entire childhood and kinda explain my thoughts on it

But anyway, this is getting ridiculously long and i probably have more i could say plus i can definitely go into more detail. as you can see though, my thoughts are a fucking mess. hopefully this made some sense. again, let me know if u wanna know more! :)

[theyonegurl]

(TW at the end, mentions of cutting, suicide, abusive parents.)

Ah yes, Trauma!

I've really wanted to talk about trauma recently – I've been going through some family bs – and haven't really had the chance to word vomit anywhere. So Tumblr it is... the end is just my experience but I wanted to make sure everyone was up to speed.

What is Trauma?

So I'm just gonna start with what the definition of trauma is. I found a couple things so I will just list them out.

Trauma is a response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event.

This event overwhelms a person and can cause them to feel physically threatened or extremely frightened.

A traumatic incident can cause physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual harm.

Some examples.

So we've covered what it is basically now about what a traumatic event could be. These can range from a multitude of things.

Natural disasters (Tornado, flood, tsunami, etc.)

Physical assault

Sexual assault

Death of a parent or caregiver

Hospitalization

Emotional Abuse

Neglect (or the opposite side of the spectrum Golden Child Syndrome.)

There are many more than just these. I found when looking up what some examples could be.

Percentage of trauma.

About 70% of people have gone through a traumatic event in their life. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they will be affected by it long term or at all.

Some people only have symptoms that resolve in a couple weeks.

Some people don't have any symptoms.

Some people have long term effects from said trauma.

Childhood trauma.

22% - 48% of youth are exposed to trauma. That's way too high in my book. As a person who realized how much childhood trauma could affect someone, I sincerely wished this number would be lower.

People who have childhood trauma may develop what is called, " a heightened stress response."

This can affect their ability to regulate their emotions.

They may have troubles sleeping. Have problems with emotional health or physical health.

Troubles with relationships and etc.

It just sucks in general.

TW ⚠️This next part is my own trauma. This is me venting/sharing my experience TW ⚠️

I have really wanted to talk about my own experience – partly to vent – I want it out there so I can relieve some of this weight I carry. If I could help enlighten someone or help someone going through similar experiences then I would be putting my trauma to use.

Parents suck...

Well at least mine did. All of my trauma was from them. I'm glad they don't know my Tumblr because I'm about to spit some facts.

Them.

My parents are fucked up. My dad was in the military – already some trauma there – and wasn't even supposed to live because his brain was messed up.

His parents weren't great. My dad seems to have adopted a lot of traits from his dad – who is abusive to my grandma. My dad most likely abused my mom and vise versa. They were a match made in hell.

My mom is an alcoholic that won't admit she's an alcoholic. She grew up with an alcoholic of a mother that probably killed my mom's brother because she was drunk – this is all based off what my mom has told me.

She was exposed to trauma at a young age. She got in fights – did stupid shit – almost didn't finish highschool. Met my dad and had children.

I never understood why.

They screwed us over.

It's okay to have trauma.

But then push it on your children?

It's sad that the person you're supposed to rely on the most just throws you away when you're not necessary. That when you mess up they get to tell you it's all your fault – when you're just a child.

I was forced to play a sport competively when I didn't want to for three years (four of those months I had mono, I was so tired.)

I was berated when I made any mistake. I dropped a glass plate that was in the microwave. (My dad cared more about the plate than me stepping on glass. I was eight.)

My mom always talks about how much we cost her. Groceries, clothes, doctor appointments, braces, glasses. (I didn't ask to be born. You had a child, why is that my fault?)

I was always mentally abused by my father – as was my sister. He was always right. He got to raise his voice; you had to sit and take it. When he was in a pissy mood we had to walk on eggshells around him. He decided when a fight ended. We were always wrong. We were too young and didn't know what we were talking about. (Why do you get to decide what's right and wrong? I'm only a child, I believed you were amazing...)

My dad was diagnosed with dementia. Now I have to live with him longer because we feel bad for him. (He makes me feel like trash, why do I have to deal with this?)

I always thought my dad was "real." He didn't fake liking things for us like other people's parents. He told me straight up what he thought. (He wasn't real, he was a narcissist. He didn't care about us.)

My mom wasn't in the picture much. She treats us – her children – as competition. If we like something she starts doing it. She makes us uncomfortable, tells her friends things we don't want her to tell, if she feels threatened.

I never got to be girly. My dad believed in purity culture – even if we didn't realize it. Dresses are ugly, and feminine. If it's feminine it's bad. I thought I was cool because I was a tomboy. I was only molded into believing that. (When I saw girls at school wearing leggings or short shorts I was envious. I would only look ugly in those.)

I thought I had social anxiety because my head was screwed. I was just made different. (My sister told me how much my dad would overexagerate my mistakes. Everyone said I was so friendly and bright as a child. Why would my parents damage me like this?)

Hearing foot steps makes me anxious. My dad would always come upstairs when taking me to practice. (I never wanted to go. I would rather get hit by a car. I wanted it to happen.)

I cut myself when my dad was gone, only once. I wanted to believe I would never do something like that. Cutting was edgy and something people do when they want attention. (Not when you're faced with the choice to make the hurt go away. Not when it's threatening to swallow you whole. It hurt. A lot. It was a only small nick. I felt so good, my anxiety just went away. I felt amazing. I felt so guilty though, I ended up calling my sister. She drove an hour and a half for me. She genuinely loves me.)

I finally got out. I live with my sister. I still feel guilty for leaving them. For when my mom would come home drunk, cry on me, plead with me not to leave. For my dad being all alone with no one to be there for him. Sometimes the guilt consumes me. I feel like a shitty child. (It's not my problem though. They are adults. Why do they get to act like children. Why did they have to break me?)

There's so much more. But I don't remember it. I don't remember my childhood at all. I have horrible memory. "It's the trauma." I joke. (But it's true. I always coped by forgetting. Sometimes I'll bring something up and my sister will be confused. It's a fake memory. It never happened. I forget days as they're happening. I don't remember what I did yesterday. Why can't I remember?)

All these things contribute to the trauma I have endured. Trauma other have also had to endure. I wished people never hurt their kids. Not just for my sake but many others. Friends and family that have had to deal with this.

I don't know how to end this off. So have a gif of an adorable cat.

Help is always near. Even if it's a stranger.

If you want to read up on childhood trauma.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

I agree with your point about a more creative idea needing to be thought up, and yeah getting people out of these conditions in the first place should be a priority. Obviously poverty shouldn't exist. (there's really no reason for people to go homeless or live in bad housing in the UK, we have so much space and empty houses) However that point doesn't suddenly mean poor housing isn't a problem. Yeah kids shouldn't be in the situation where they have shit living conditions, but they are, which means we need to consider the impact of school lockdown on them. I get that you don't want people who don't actually care defending these kids rights, but at the end of the day someone needs to represent them. Personally I'd rather have a person do good things for selfish reasons then have nothing happen at all.

I get the sense you’re not super familiar with my blog, because I’ve made the point about empty houses on a fairly regular basis. I don’t normally mind people sending me asks when they don’t know the blog well, but I have talked about my ideas for school opening in depth in the past- so it’s a bit annoying to be jumped on for things I don’t actually think...

I think all the points I’m going to make now, I’ve made previously, but probably not in one place, and hopefully this will coherently explain my current position on schools.

The problem with your argument is that schools haven’t been open as normal throughout the autumn term. Levels of absence have been really high (even in the school where I work, which was in tier one, let alone in more severely affected areas). Every time you’re in contact with a positive case, you have to self isolate (it was for 2 weeks, now for 10 days). The majority of students in English schools have had to self isolate at least once in the autumn term. Lots have had to self isolate more than once, some three times!

Six weeks of not being able to leave the house is shit for anyone- it’s exponentially shitter when you live in inadequate housing, or your parents are abusive or neglectful. Unplanned self isolation is also rubbish for students who don’t cope with sudden change well for whatever reason (e.g. mental health issues, SEN, past trauma etc).

You also have to take into account the fact that a lot of students were very nervous/anxious about being in school, because of their own health, or because of the health of family members, or just because we are in a global pandemic!

It’s also bloody difficult for parents of primary aged children, because if your child is self isolating, you’re not meant to use anyone outside the household to care for them- so you have to take the time off work if you can’t work from home. This can sometimes be as unpaid leave- which is an absolute disaster if you’re already struggling for money.

In areas with high levels of self isolation, it was also starting to impact essential services. At one stage, Hull asked to shut schools for a “circuit breaker” because school cases were causing too many NHS staff to need to self isolate or need time off work to care for self isolating kids.

And eventually, you get schools closing anyway due to lack of staff. And it’s worth bearing in mind that teachers do have a right to a safe working environment.

“Open as normal” wasn’t working.

So what’s better? In my opinion, the thing to try would have been a planned rota system- sort of similar to how schools partly reopened in the summer, but with all year groups getting some “face to face” time. We could prioritise students who struggle to get work done at home for whatever reason in getting more time in school.

By reducing the number of students in school at any one time, we enable social distancing and a proper bubble system. This reduces the risk of outbreaks, and also means if there is a positive case, then a smaller number of students and staff have to isolate.

We could find a balance between having students in school, and having lots of cases/outbreaks in school.

I don’t think it’s a perfect answer, but I think it’s a decent compromise. And I truly believe if we’d done this from September, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

What we’re possibly getting is a load of 50% accurate tests- with no real plan of how to administer them. We’re supposed to test all students in a week, which will be genuinely impossible, and then reopen as normal.

Instead of self isolation, students (or their parents) can opt to be tested daily in school for the 10 days they would isolate. Obviously if they test positive at any time, they have to go home. If the tests had a higher accuracy rate, this would be a good thing- but because of their low accuracy in detecting positives, it means you’ll have more positive cases walking around school, and infecting other people.

The knock on effect is likely to be more school closures when too many staff get ill- and sudden, unplanned closures are way worse than a planned closure would be, educationally and from a mental health point of view.

There’s a complete lack of clarity about who should be doing this testing, or where it should be done. I also reckon it’s very likely that most schools won’t be provided with enough tests, so self isolation will still have to happen.

And that doesn’t take into account the new strain- which does seem to spread more effectively in young people.

It’s a horrible thing to consider, but one of the things that really messes up a child’s life chances/educational attainment is the death of a parent. And if we allow things to continue as they are, lots more children will unfortunately end up facing that.

[worstlynch]

Hey for the headcanon thing (if you’re accepting!) HC + parental situation (like the whole Mór Ó Corra thing and how it affects relationship with his bros, if it does)

Send me “HC” + a word and I’ll write a headcanon about it.

>>>  The Mór Ó Corra secret and how it affects Declan’s relationship with his family.

This got long. Spoilers for Call Down the Hawk.

Note: my thoughts might change when I get the chance to reread The Raven King.

“ Ronan was allowed to invoke Aurora because they all knew Ronan loved her as much as Matthew had. Declan, whose skeptical love was imperfect, could not. ”

Declan has known all his life that Aurora wasn’t his biological mother. Niall only explicitly told Declan about it much later ( two or three years before his death ), but the clues have always been there. It’s the little things like his father making a weird comment about Declan at the dinner table, the looks he sometimes gives Aurora when she’s affectionate towards Declan, the things he whispers to her when he thought Declan couldn’t hear them. At one point, Declan was being difficult and Niall was frustrated enough to blurt out something along the lines of “she’s not your real mother”. Niall didn’t explain further and Declan didn’t ask. It confirmed all his suspicions. Declan went to his room and cried for hours. No one said anything about it until years later when Niall’s straight out told him that Aurora wasn’t the woman who gave birth to him.

Niall was an absent and emotionally neglectful father to Declan. It’s partly because of what went down with him and Mor O Corra and partly because he’s simply a flawed person.

I think we’re supposed to believe that Mor O Corra didn’t want anything to do with Declan. There seems to be a lot more to that, though. We’ll probably find out more in book two. My headcanon for her right now is that she was a dreamer. She left Niall and Declan when Declan was a few months old. The mother and son didn’t met again until the fairy market incident.

Does it affect his relationship with his brothers?

It does. It’s not them being born of the different mothers that’s the problem though. It’s Niall and his lies. The lies were supposed to keep the brothers close, but instead it drove Declan to feel isolated and different from them.

At first, Declan kept Matthew being a dream a secret from Ronan because Aurora asked him to. Later on, Declan chose not to tell Ronan because he knew Ronan would tell Matthew or wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret. Declan wanted Matthew to grow up like a 'real' boy and not a 'fake' boy. He didn’t want Matthew to grow up feeling like a ‘fake’ brother, because Declan knew what it was like to feel like you don't belong. He didn’t want Matthew to feel like he did growing up.

He’s making the same mistake his parents did, but they basically put him there by choosing to keep it a secret from Ronan and Matthew in the first place.

It doesn’t affect his and Ronan’s relationship much. What’s keeping them apart is the dreaming and the mess that comes with it, not them being “half” brothers. Declan fears that Ronan would consider less of him once he finds out about Mor O Corra, but he would rather have Ronan know than continue on living that lie.

[alias-b]

NSFW ALPHABET with Billy and Camille pretty please bc I love them and how you write their relationship! 🍒

AHHHH YEAH  😍 OKAY HERE GOES ❤️ 

Smutty Smut Alphabet ~ under the cut for Billy Hargrove and Camille Harper from my fic, Without the Lights. (((Thanks for asking and also anyone can ask me anything about my fic bc I will TALK all day)))

NSFW ALPHABET: Billy & Camille :)))

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

   LISTEN Billy and Camille are touched starved as hellll. They both were into flings where there wasn’t really a whole lot happening after besides getting the fuck outta there. Camille is a rich girl with loving at times but also distant parents. Billy especially is conditioned for aggressive touch in either the form of abuse or lust. So, cuddling was new to him. Camille loves to nestle in and hold him. Tricking Billy into playing little spoon is her fav hobby and he’ll always fall for it. Lazy kisses and lots of tracing her fingertips along his skin and into his hair. Oh, how that boy purrs. Sometimes, he’ll light up and share a quick cigarette with her. If the sex was especially intense or rough, they curl around each other and come down from the high. He loves to massage her when she’s extra sensitive post-coitus bc he’s a little tease. Sometimes that leads to another round. But these two tangle together like they’re caught in a spider’s web and they LOVE the aftercare.

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)  

   Billy knows he’s a good looking dude, so he’s feeling all of himself most of the time. Boy can flex. Can I also say oral fixation?? He can appreciate a good set of titties but man does he adore the curve of Camille’s ass and hips. Being trapped by her thighs is a win for him any time of day. He’s a muscly fucker and Camille loves the hard weight of him against her. Looooves it. His arms rly do it for her but, she’s happy covering his neck and jaw with kisses bc the boy is sensitive there. Eye contact is also a must annnd can I just say that any time she can appreciate the little dusting of freckles he has….is a good day. ;D

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically… I’m a disgusting person)

   Dirty Birdies. Billy Hargrove will come on anything. You could throw a plate across the room and this boy already fucked and came on it before it hit the ground. Seeing his spunk drip from her swelled lips after a round drives him wild though. They always always always kiss as dirty as they can after any kind of oral sex. Tongues and spit, the whole mess. Unwritten rule. Camille is big on protection, the girl had an abortion at fifteen with a guy who refused to use condoms. Luckily, Billy has them to spare and is fine coming into them when he’s inside her. She eventually starts birth control and they’re both nervous so he uses the pull out method which is great because he jerks himself onto her ass, tits, or stomach. Until one night, they get into it and he comes inside her and seeing it spill out while she’s twitching post orgasm was unspeakably hot. He’s possessive.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

  The first time Camille undresses him and spends time just running her hands along his body def ruined him. He’s never been worshiped like that after being lusted after and used by other women young and old. She rubs along his thighs and gives him head. Doesn’t neglect his balls which he appreciates. He thinks about all the ways he wants to fuck her most of the time. Day dreams a lot about fucking her on his workout bench or eating her out while he’s lying down with her sitting on his face. Camille also relishes how strong he is. Billy will pick her up, position her however, pin her, or tug her across the bed. She goes mad. Finally, you can also bet that if Camille is wearing a skirt on the shorter side, his hand’s going up it. Public places be damned.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

    Billy Hargrove and Camille Harper both wrote books and sequels on the art of fucking. Uh, yES. They know what they’re doing. These two melt together when they get into it. I like to think they bicker about control during the act which leads to a game of submit where they’re both trying to make the other weak in the knees until they give up control. She rolls over him and rubs herself against his dick while she’s kissing his neck. But, he turns her back and slips fingers inside her panties. Tugs her thighs open to eat her out. Scoreboard is pretty even.

F = Favourite Position (This goes without saying. Will probably include a visual)

  He’s a hot shot who loves to be on top and she goes nuts when he covers her so missionary is standard but maaaaan when Billy lets her into his lap to play. It’s over. He could watch her bounce for hours and that’s after she’s given him great head. Another dirty trick he plays is fucking her from behind on the couch in his room so he can face the mirror and make her watch him undo her completely. ((He likes to watch himself make his gf feel fucking amazing too, the boy is a narcissist what can I say, he good.))

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

   More so serious, they have intent fuck sessions. Usually looking to let out some steam too. Camille is more likely to soften him up with a laugh or joke. They’re vocal fucks.

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

  Ha. Carpet matches drapes for both. Billy takes care of himself and trims just a bit. Kissing down his happy trail is something she loves to do. Camille grooms some but her nasty ex made her shave everything down there so she doesn’t do that anymore being free of his gross ass. They shower often and like being clean but Billy fills his hair with more products than she does so he always smells of them and his hairspray. Camille loves his cologne & aftershave, esp how he dots some above his dick. Billy spends time running his lips and nose along her skin because all her lil lotions and perfumes are to die for.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

     They loveee just touching and caressing, esp during foreplay. Both huge teases too! Almost more than hard kisses because they get to watch each other’s faces and he thrives off seeing what he can do to poor Camille. So they take time appreciating each other’s bodies. Billy takes Good care of her sexually, often bringing her to orgasm before he comes. Partly a pride thing. She doesn’t mind it when he comes first even if she doesn’t, they have great sex. Frankly, it turns him on more to watch her unhinge when he plays with her so they both win.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

   Ahhhh the answer is just yes. They’re horny 17-18 year old teens. Billy jerks it anytime of day and can still go on to have great sex later. Frankly, they learn early that they love watching each other masturbate as foreplay so they can have sessions of just That when they’re worked up and trying failing to study for a test coming up.

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

   CALLOUT POST: Billy Hargrove has the biggest praise kink in history. If Camille is telling him how gr8 he is and begging, he’s getting off big time. Reason he teases is just to get pleas out of her so he’ll rub his tip along her entrance until she’s wild. Camille telling him how she wants to be fucked, whewww, he’s about it. He plays a dominate bf in bed and pretends he doesn’t like being ordered about by his gf like okay boy u tried. Also, if Camille is wearing tights or panties and not getting them off fast enough, you bet he’s ripping them. Her little cry and the sound of fabric tearing is a major turn on.

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

  Cliche bed bugs when the house is empty bc then they can be loud. Back of his Camaro is a big place up top some cliff over Hawkins where teens go to make out. But, Billy is Billy and will try it in any public place. Pool after dark. Dressing rooms in Starcourt. Hidden spot in library. Hands under the table kind of boy. Likes to fuck her up against the wall/shelves/dressers in her room to see how much shit he can knock down. Camille is game most days. However, she isn’t into shower sex at all, shower time is for private thought. He can pout about it.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

  These two are eye fucking champs. Consider them both worked up most of the time, esp when Camille’s life starts to go sideways. Billy can tease but maaan does Camille own it. A quick smirk in one look, a flash of thigh, or her hand grazing him. Billy already has a Semi. Camille blushing is also a big turn on bc it’s hard to make Queen Bee blush and Billy is the only one who can do it. He also likes to see her wearing his jacket or shirt, again it’s a possessive bf pride thing.

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

   Spanking is as far as they’ll go and even that isn’t much. NO BELTS. She also refuses to get into things like taking dirty pics or anal bc her ex made her do that. Not rly consensual about it either. Restraints are also a no like they’ll get rough and hold each other down but bsdm is not for either of them. Billy was also freaked out to let her be on top after what happened to him in CA but trusted her and now he’s into it. They experiment but read each other’s limits well.

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

   OHHH MAN. OH BOY. Yes. Another huge yes. Billy, Oral Fixation, Hargrove does more with his tongue than most boys do with their whole body. He loves to go down on her. Loves to make her come with his mouth and he’s obscene and messy about it. Makes sounds and moans and spits into her pussy. Fingers her too. Fastest way to make Camille his was with that tongue. Camille, likewise, gives great head. Loves to choke, lap, and suck on his cock. Balls too. Always tries to swallow. There’s a sweet spot just under his tip that she teases and he loses it. Billy comes undone. She’ll do it at the movies or in the car and he’s a goner.

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

   Rough and intense, they both don’t pull any punches when going at it. Billy slams into her and relishes how her legs wobble when she gets up after to go pee. The only reason he’s slowing it is to tease her or draw it out, thus working up his poor gf until she’s squirming.

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

  They both built sex lives on quickies but prefer now to have a proper session where they can go a few rounds. He drags it out and makes her come multiple times if he can. Quickies happen when they’re sneaking around Neil for sure. Lot of them occur during the summer when they have different jobs and schedules!

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

       Billy will try to get her off in just about any public setting. Just bc of pride and bc he Can. Nuff said.

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

       They’re active teens with a healthy sex life. My mans can and will last a while. If the time is right and they persist, usually Camille can have her orgasm and then a few smaller ones but she def gets fucked out before him.

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

      See, hard one, bc I feel like Camille would have one and CLICHE but Billy would find it and be jealous and teasing but then use it for real on her and oh……oh my…..does he like That.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

    Not sure I can make this anymore clearer. Too much! These dummies try so hard at times to prolong teasing and heavy petting during the foreplay but it always turns to hard fucking. They playfully tease because they’re both sensitive so he’ll linger to play with her breasts or slip fingers against her clit while she’ll kiss along his body until he can’t take it. She gets a little giggly/smug and he always has to do something about That Noise in turn.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

   Billy is vocal to the point of sounding truly pornographic. He will coax every cry, plea, and moan he can out of her. He loves attention. Loves to make people rebel against their usual ways. Again, praise kink, so there is a lot of him asking her to speak up and telling him how she wants him to play with her. Camille makes him feel like a fucking god when they’re doing the deed, girl can hit notes. Both huge on dirty talking.

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

   Camille loves lipstick. Her signature pinks and red are known. So she will cover her boyfriend in as many lipstick kisses as she can. Face, neck, chest, and cock. He usually has a smear of it on his jean jacket or shirt collar. Billy always smiles when he sees them in the mirror bc he loves her and she’s lowkey possessive too.

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words)

    Y’all remember that gif of New York saying “oh I know his dick is big.” Yeah that. Billy his hung. He knows it. He has that “oh shit I got to get used to this for a moment” girth. Something to choke on. Side note, if he really wants to make Camille blush, he’ll tell her how wet and pink she is. Spread her folds and just look at how pretty she is and that drives her insane.

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

   Self explanatory. Higher than high. They wake in the middle of the night and can start a heavy petting session easily. Both always going to be down for some sex if that mood hits. And it usually does. :)))

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

  Camille definitely is more likely to curl up and catch up on some sleep. Billy stays awake and caresses her until she slips away. Loves to watch her snooze. It’s a comfort thing when his gf looks safe and sound then he feels alright curling into her to sleep after contemplating that he’s one lucky guy and thanking every star above Hawkins, Indiana.

[empressofevil]

I'm fucking sick of this bullshit. I'm absolutely and utterly done hearing people say "its happening for you, not to you." Yeah, its happening FOR me? Here's some behind-the-scenes: I'm fucking miserable.

I've had depression my entire life. The first time I thought about killing myself, I was 2 and it was Halloween. My entire life has been a fucking mess. My parents were abusive and neglectful. I've never once felt loved in my entire 26 years of life. My parents used to remind me often that no one could or would ever love me. I spent my childhood directly in the middle of my parents' fights, trying to protect and defend my mom. I'm the youngest, and I've been hit for defending my older siblings. My siblings have never defended me.

I didn't date in high school, mostly because tbh I never once met a guy who wasn't borderline psychotic, racist, or in some other way not datable. I did get stalked though, and a friend I had had since I was 10 tried to sexually assault me at a party. That was my gift for trying to talk him out if suicide, I guess. I dated for the first time at 19 and wound up in a supremely emotionally and financially abusive relationship. I remember knowing it was bad 2 years before I left: partly because I was terrified of him - he never hit me, but boy did he talk about murdering people a lot - and partly because I felt like, because I was so strong and he was so weak, I owed him something. I only decided to leave after he found me crying under the coffee table and told me I was making things awkward and he had stuff to do. I thought about all the times I held him when he cried and realized I've never once been held while I cried. I've never once had someone see my emotions and not reject me, tell me I'm inconvenient or scary. They usually don't even have the guts to tell me I'm WRONG and, given some of the genuine assholes I've dealt with in my life, that really suggests to me I probably wasn't. They just didn't want to deal with it.

And that's the thing... I can be as good and kind and smart or whatever as anyone, but no one ever wants to deal with me. No one ever wants to hold me when I cry, but everyone wants me to hold them all the goddamn time.

I'm alone. I've always been alone. I've been waiting 26 years to not be alone, and I can't hear "this is all for your highest good" anymore. I really can't see how isolating someone for 26 years and filling their life with abuse is for their highest good. I've been drowning in this misery for as long as I have memories, and whenever I ask for a life raft or for someone to just acknowledge I'm sinking, they tell me to get fucked. Sometimes literally! I've literally been told to go fuck myself and die after saying I felt suicidal! By my own family, of course! I've had "friends" tell me it's straight up not true! And when I cut away all of the people who are straight up toxic or I just don't feel connected to anymore, there's no one left. I did it and there's no one left. I've never minded more time to myself, but 26 years is a long fucking time for no one to hold you when you cry. 26 years is a long time for people to tell you you're too much, annoying, not worth their time, etc. It's even worse when they tell you you're amazing, the best, everything they want in a friend, lover, wife, whatever, but that they just... Honestly don't know how to not treat you like shit? I've had people tell me that! "I just don't remember to ask how you are for some reason" when they do it for others. People who pride themselves on being good listeners turn around and completely ignore what I'm saying and talk over me.

I've always felt like an oddball. I am a fucking weirdo, I'm not unaware of it. I talk to animals and believe in magic and I went through a phase of digging holes when I was 8. I've had rough years. I'm not perfect and I've never been perfect, but goddamn do I try. Fuck me if I don't straight up ask people "why are you treating me like this when you don't treat others like this" and they go "gosh gee idk, I really enjoyed having you as a friend, you were always there for me and so supportive." Fuck me if I'm not just the universes punching bag and no amount of positivity or optimism ever changes that. Nothing matters.

I'm fucking done.

[battlestar-royco]

What makes you name Ned or Cat morally-grey characters? 😯😯 I am really curious as I think it is the first time I see someone labelling them as such...

Hi Marta, thanks for a great ask! So, to preface, I’ll say that in my opinion Ned and Cat are on the much lighter side of gray, especially for ASOIAF. That said, I think there’s a lot to their dynamic that completely compels me and kind of fractures the Stark family. As for Ned (and a lot of people have said this better than I have before, but here goes), his paternalism is overwhelming to the point that it causes rifts between him and the people he loves. Everything he does is to protect his men, his wife, his children. He does a decent job, but he clearly has a very patriarchal, independent air about his choices. He doesn’t explain things that dearly need explaining, leading to Cat’s resentment of Jon, to Sansa romanticizing the queen, to Jon being clueless and bitter about his heritage. He underestimates people he shouldn’t (Cersei), he defers to authority when he shouldn’t (Robert), and he judges scenarios without the full context (Jaime). Sometimes, his honor and protectiveness are great character traits, but because they’re also his fatal flaws, they lead to disastrous consequences.

Ned and Cat are basically the only healthy ship in ASOIAF, but the way he treats her in regards to Jon–bringing a random little human home with zero explanation and expecting her to raise it unquestioned–is pretty shitty. It’s of course understandable why he did it, but after fourteen years of Jon’s life and fifteen years of marriage he should have known he could trust her and/or not give her the silent treatment about it. He knows she essentially has no choice but to accept, given the precarious state of the war and their marriage and the patriarchy, but it completely messes with Cat’s self-image and makes her obsess over how to satisfy him for the rest of her life. Ned was also a wise and beloved warden and trusted friend of Robert’s, so he evidently could have greatly influenced the fuckery that was going on in KL long before Robert and Cersei beggared the realm. He did no such thing. It’s not necessarily his responsibility to keep an idiot like Robert in check, especially with a whole seventh of the realm to govern leagues away, but seeing as Ned and Robert unseated a whole dynasty to avoid corruption, cruelty, and incompetency in their leaders, IDK man. He could have suggested a better king at least.

As for Cat, I think the case for her grayness is a little more obvious, what with the way she treats Jon. Even though, yes, it was unfair of Ned to foist a second child on an unsuspecting early-20something lady with deeply internalized misogyny in the middle of a war, that doesn’t mean she should have emotionally and mentally neglected a blameless child for fourteen years. Jon’s presence was Ned’s decision and his birth was R/L’s; Jon doesn’t deserve the suspicion and alienation he gets from Cat. And then there’s the matter of the other Stark children, namely Sansa and Arya. I don’t necessarily think Ned favors Arya between his two daughters, but he does seem to relate to her more and be more comfortable around her. Thus, he informs her a lot more about the politics of KL than he does Sansa, which partly explains the way Sansa acts at the end of AGOT. The inverse can be said of Cat and Sansa’s relationship. Of course Arya and Sansa both have strong connections to both of their parents, especially to their mother, but Arya feels very much like Ned’s daughter in the way that Sansa feels like Cat’s daughter. This identity divide exacerbates the rift not only between Cat and Ned, but also certainly between Arya and Sansa. They’re both way too young to reasonably know or be expected to know what the hell is going on or that they’re actually like carbon copies of each other in all the ways that count, but so many things (not least of fucking all Ned and Cat’s parenting!!!) circumstantially drive them apart and thus fuel the conflict that leads to the War of Five Kings. Anyway, this was a really long answer that I didn’t know I had in me, and I just fucking love the Starks and their emo tomfoolery.

[ftgage]

*stumbles into the room w shades on & a margarita in one hand* beezus again...fair warning i just got back from chili’s & i’m tipsy cause my roommate spent like $100 on alcohol for me...a fcking king ! 

「 herman tommerass. cis male. 」have you seen gage rowland around yet? i hear he decided to be in AUDAX for their SOPHOMORE year as a CRIMINAL JUSTICE major. the 21 year old SHEEP is known to be kindhearted, resourceful, dull witted and irresponsible. ➨ the muse is written by beezus. she is 21+, in est.

(this intro might be a mess but gage is an old muse of mine so i know him like the back of my hand i swear....& i haven’t fixed my theme yet so forgive me eep i’ll do that when i’m sober later)

trigger warning mentions of neglect, alcoholism, drugs, violence, homophobia 

stats: 

full name: gage michael rowland 

nicknames: none (someone give him one)

date of birth: march 16th, 1999 

age: 21 

sexuality: homosexual 

religion: agnostic 

occupation: student/escort 

likes: black eyeliner, socks w slides 

dislikes: watching movies 

tattoos: none 

piercings: ears, nose, cartilage

backstory: 

gage was born & raised in new york by a single mother. they didn’t really stay in one place they kinda lived everywhere in the area. hopping from home to home for a majority of his life. his mother has never had a stable career. she can go from being a waitress to a babysitter in like three days because she’s so quick to give up. she’s an irresponsible, lazy, struggling alcoholic and that’s all gage has ever known her as. he never met his dad but the man wasn’t any better. the two of them just weren’t fit to be parent’s and his mom unfortunately never stepped up after his dad walked out

before going to college he never had his own bedroom. they could only ever afford shitty, run down, one bedroom apartments and his mom would shove him onto the couch so she could have men over whenever she wanted. he didn’t mind much because he had a really old xbox that he’d play until he was so exhausted he just passed out. that was his nightly routine throughout middle & high school  

his mom wasn’t abusive...she’s a very loving women & cares about gage when she really needs to but for the most part he was on his own growing up. sometimes when they were in between homes he’d have to hunt down friends & sleep on their couches. he was only nine the first time they were homeless. she hardly spent money on him so he had the same wardrobe all through out elementary school despite growing out of it. they also never had food in the house so he’d work for free at local deli’s...like sweeping their floors & stuff & they would throw him some food ! if it weren’t for kind neighbors he wouldn’t have eaten 

when he was a kid he got bullied pretty harshly for being poor. like...these kids would steal the shirt off his back & laugh because they knew he didn’t have another one. he grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood :/ when he got a little older...probably around thirteen he started to come to terms with his sexuality & he didn’t feel the need to hide it at all ? he was a happy, bubbly kid that was comfortable in his skin. but there was a lot of homophobia in his neighborhood & they didn’t take too kindly to him. he got beat up pretty severely & it happened often. partly because he had a big mouth but mostly because they didn’t like how flamboyant he was. 

flash forward to when he was fifteen & he started experimenting with sex. he met this older guy in his neighborhood that took a liking to him (this guy was like forty-five ew) & they started hanging out a lot. after knowing each other for a few months the guy asked gage if he would meet up with one of his friends & gage being the innocent babe he was just said ok ! so he meets up w this guy & long story short this guy got him into being an escort...at only fifteen :/ 

he’s been working as an escort ever since & it’s done a lot of good for him ! he was v v popular & was getting paid like 10k for dates back in new york. he saved up money for a few years while he was in high school & eventually made enough to buy his mom a house (not that she deserved it). even though his childhood was shitty he’ll always love her...he’s away at school now but still sends her as much money as he can so that she doesn’t have to work. he’s such a giver & takes care of the people he loves...even when they don’t take care of him *cries*. business is slower while he’s at school but he still makes enough money to pay his tuition & support his mom. he doesn’t spend much money on himself because he already feels like he’s kinda selfish just for going to school

he’s a criminal justice major because he wants to be a probation officer one day ! he wants to be the nicest most lenient probation officer he can be...& he wants to be able to get his homies off the hook that’s his mentality w it. he’s a sheep as well because....he’s not smart enough for that app 

personality:

such a sweet fucking boy i swear. not only does he take care of his not so great mother but he’s also big on taking care of his friends. the type of guy to give a drunk girl his shoes, pay for everyone’s hangover meals, pay for all the ubers....he really milks himself dry for other people honestly 

he’s really gullible & kinda dumb. will say yes to just about anything, doesn’t know how to use a microwave without burning something, can’t follow instructions for shit either 

i’m sure he has to go through A LOT of tutoring to keep his grades up to par but he really does try his best *gives him a gold star* 

he has a really bad habit of letting people use & abuse him. like there’s been plenty of times where he’s gone to meetup with someone that was suppose to pay him but instead they just...had their way with him & hauled ass & yea it makes him feel like shit but he tries not to let it get to him :/

when he was six yrs old he told his mom that one day he would own all the legos in the world & she called it stupid so now he has a collection of legos ! i’m proud of him :) he has a lego house that he built when he was twelve & he keeps a couple grand stashed in it for a rainy day...& if someone were to steal it he wouldn’t care about the money he’d just be sad that they broke his lego house :( 

appearance wise he always looks pretty disheveled, might smell a little bad because he’ll buy a shirt from the thrift store & not wash it, he never spends a lot of money on stuff for himself. the nicest clothing items he owns are things that sugar daddies have bought him & he only wears them on dates 

he does a lot of expensive drugs & drinks a lot of expensive alcohol because it’s given to him & he doesn’t know how to say no 

he looks tired & worn out all the time because he 100% is but tries to keep a smile on his face anyway...if you ask him how he’s doing he’ll always say he’s doing well because tbh compared to how his life was as a child he kinda is ? he’s not hungry anymore, not struggling financially, putting himself through school...i love him 

he’s gay but doesn’t exclusively sleep w men. he has just as many sugar mamas as he does daddies. older women really love him ! he’s young, pretty & dumb...again he’s a giver so he’ll give head to just about anyone  

he does an unhealthy amount of cocaine which explains why he’s so awake & talkative all the time. it’s offered to him so he takes it ? someone stop him. he see’s a lot of men that will pump him w drugs just to take advantage of him & he knows it the back of his mind that it’s happening but the money & the buzz is too good 

ending this like an essay because i’m drunk at this point omfg so in conclusion gage is a sweet boy w a big heart that get’s kicked around for no good reason love him  

[theeleganceofthehedgehog]

Lately I've been thinking about what a beautiful thing the sacrament of Confession is. And I kind of wish I had learned that earlier, because I don't remember being taught to love it much when I was a child. I learned, by the book, what it did, but the idea I first got of it, I think, was that you went to Confession when you did something bad and you didn't want to get punished for it in the next life. And you were supposed to do it often enough because if you didn't, you might go from doing little bad things to doing big bad things. So I routinely went about as often my parents told me to, but I feel like it never really meant a whole lot to me? And half the time I would just guess at what I thought I probably did wrong since the last time, without thinking terribly hard about what I was really struggling with and what my real problems might be that I wanted to change. I think that was in great part due to the way I was initially taught to think about confession, and the fact that I wasn't really given much of anything to love about it... And maybe I felt like I had more to fear--i.e., divulging the bad things you did and feeling like you were going to get shamed for them, even if technically, in this case, you weren't.

Anyway my perspective has changed in the last few years... Or maybe it's been a slower change that's been happening since highschool (where I did gain a better, more positive understanding of the sacrament, in my Catholic Doctrine classes). But it has taken me awhile to realize it. Perhaps in recent years it's due to having fewer opportunities to go to Confession conveniently on a regular basis -- I had to realize I needed to make the choice and the effort to do so, and maybe that made me care more. But also I've been dredging up a lot of the messy areas of my life in the last couple years, like my really-not-so-great-relationship with my emotionally neglectful mom, among other things. And sometimes I just feel like crap, and I keep thinking everything's my fault, even when there are a lot of things that aren't, too. It makes me very aware of the effects of Original Sin on humankind...to realize that a lot of my problems have been caused, or exacerbated, by my mom's problems, but then perhaps her problems are partly her mom's fault too. Which leaves the question, how do you get out of the cycle, if it's even possible? And I suppose the only answer is: grace.

Anyway, at times like that, when I keep thinking about how much of a mess I am, and even if it's not all my fault, some of it certainly is, and how I kind of hate myself for it, but I don't really know how to fix anything.... I've begun to find it refreshing to go to confession, actually. For one thing it lets me pinpoint the things that really are my fault, and that I really do need to work on fixing. But at the same time I feel like it's an opportunity to obtain grace to deal a little better with the things that aren't my fault that are involved in the mess too, the things I can't legitimately blame myself for but suffer from anyway.

In a way I feel like the fact that God left us that sort of sacrament was his way of saying, "It's ok, I know you're a mess; that's human nature; that's why I ended up on earth, after all. I know you hate it, and you hate yourself for it, so tell me what you hate so much about yourself, and I'll help you fix it. And while I'm at it, I'll give you a bit of strength to deal with that other issue that's troubling you that's not your fault and that you can't do much to fix. It won't happen all at once, because human beings are all a mess and it's not easy to fix all these these problems quickly, but you can come back as often as you like to get more help from me when you need it." And I dunno, there's something that just makes WAY more sense, and is so much more consoling and helpful about seeing Confession that way, rather than the way I initially learned to see it. And I really wish that my mom, and whoever else was teaching me about Confession when I was 6 years old, instead of taking it as a routine requirement that you had to do to stay a decent Catholic, had put it more like that, and taught to me love and appreciate the sacrament as a help, and as God's way of being there for me in a special way when I was a mess. Because I think it would have helped me a lot sometimes back then, but instead it took me years to work it out.

(And if I ever have kids I would want to teach it to them differently than I learned it from the beginning.)

[dontcallmecarrie]

So what’s up with Howard in the multi period time travel scenario? You mentioned he’s still alive, but he doesn’t seem to be around in any of the three endings.

For context: in By Myself But Not Alone, the butterfly effect cuts both ways. Also, it’s Tony-centric and I was hammering it out at 3 am [so if there’s stuff I missed, that’s why]. That being said, for something that’s a fic idea and not an official WIP, it’s…kinda growing on me. In this case, the Howard Stark thing. 

Stepping back a bit: Howard Stark is a pretty complex character. We never really see him in the MCU even if his presence is felt long after his death […I’ve done some meta on him before on my take on him, and it’s key to this AU]. While the main plot’s Tony-centric, Howard’s also another case of the butterfly effect kicking in. And not necessarily in a good way.

See, while Howard and Maria’s deaths in canon were tragic, everyone who remembers that universe at least knew what followed afterwards. Everyone knew Obadiah Stane’d step in until Tony turned 21 and inherited his father’s company. Even if they didn’t know Howard personally, they knew his son and thought they could extrapolate from there, thought they could predict his actions. 

…unfortunately, however, people change, and human memory is a fickle thing.

Since Steve Rogers went into the ice, Howard Stark’s had several decades to grow colder, harsher, more bitter. He was part of the Manhattan Project, helped found SHIELD, supplied weapons to the US military throughout various conflicts, from Korea to Vietnam to Operation Desert Storm. He got married, had a wife and kid […both of whom he neglected in his search for Steve, but that’s an issue for another day].

He also picked up vices along the way, with the alcoholism being the most notable one as evidenced by the car accident [an actual one, this time] caused by his drunk driving. The accident that killed his wife, because as it turns out, the safest part of the car’s the driver’s seat. 

Here’s where things diverge, because in this life, Howard survives.

also there’s no serum here because keeping track of the other divergences. thanks to the butterfly effect is a mess and no I’m not going have another WIP at this rate, nope, brain work with me here gdi

So. Howard Stark’s still alive. That’s a good thing, right?

Right?

[under the cut because RIP mobile users otherwise]

Of those who remember a different world, Fury was the one who knew him best, save for Tony, and so he’s the only one who’s unsurprised by what followed. Dismayed, perhaps, but not surprised.

See, this isn’t Steve’s Howard, bright and hopeful and eagerly showing off his flying car prototypes. This is a Howard who’s cold and bitter, who’s seen the war so often it’s the only thing he knows, now. This is a Howard whose motto was “Peace is having a bigger stick than the other guy”, whose son grew up to be the Merchant of Death.  

Natasha had thought the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, when she’d met Tony; Steve had wondered how Tony could be so different to his father. Here, however, they both share an incredulous look, when they see the latest interview featuring an unapologetic Howard showing off their latest line, and,  when the question comes up, being almost painfully dismissive of the idea of shifting his company’s focus away from building weapons. 

Well, almost. But first, let’s backtrack a bit, shall we?

See, Maria Stark died during the car crash, back in 1991. When she died, so did any chance of Tony and Howard getting along, because Tony’s relationship with his dad may not have been the best before, but now? He blames Howard for his mom’s death, and has yet to forgive him for it. 

Here, the world knows Howard and Tony don’t get along, knows there’s bad blood. There were rumors of Tony creating his own company a while back, but they petered out fairly fast after the announcement that Tony would be the head of R&D once he turned 21, and that he’d step in as CEO once his father retired. 

Howard, meanwhile, is known the world over for being a war hawk, and he uses it as a badge of pride. Tony, meanwhile, isn’t as brash about it; when it comes up for him, he’ll just smile and say something about keeping their boys safe, making sure they come back home. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t pull his punches, though; here, the Merchant of Death is even more ruthless than canon, thanks to Howard pushing him to greater and greater heights […if only out of spite].

That being said, even with all this going on, their relationship isn’t the greatest. I cannot reiterate this enough, because it’s key for what’s going on later. See, here, Tony’s not an orphan. Here, it’s Howard who controls the Stark fortune, and…um. 

Howard’s not cut out to be a parent, okay? Not the way his wife was, anyway. Add in the complete lack of respect Tony has, and what you get is Howard’s main [only, really] way of attempting to discipline his son is via cutting him off, threatening to disinherit him. Which, granted, may not sound like much, but seeing as how the other option for inherting’s his business partner, Obadiah Stane? 

Obadiah Stane, who, while still nice to Tony, is more of a yes-man than in canon. Obadiah, who Howard trusts because he’s worked with him about as long as he had with Nick Fury. Tonys pretty sure Howard’s bluffing, but…he doesn’t want to risk it. 

So Tony plays ball. And manages to eke out a few concessions, from time to time—such as the creation of the Maria Stark Foundation, looking at Howard in the eye the entire time he was proposing it to the board—thanks in no small part to his being able to work PR with the same mastery his mom had.

 For the most part, though, it’s just example after example of how dysfunctional the Stark family […of two, now] is, with Tony lashing out however he can and Howard’s oscillating between wondering how his wife did it, and threatening to cut him off yet again. [Plus passive-aggression. Lots of passive-aggression.] 

For the most part, it’s a working system: Tony doesn’t speak to his father outside of work-related concerns, Howard mostly keeps out of his business unless Tony’s messing around in the press is getting too much on his nerves and he needs to dial it back, etc. Nobody’s really happy, but then, when’s the last time they were? 

It was a working system, one they were both okay with. 

…then Tony came out as bi. […or pan, in retrospect; whatever, the tabloids got a picture of him kissing a guy, same difference to Howard, okay?]

Which, as it turns out, is something Howard disapproves of. Greatly. 

Only thing is, this is his only son we’re talking about, his heir, who’s his spitting image and just about the only thing he has left of his wife, and while he’s threatened to disinherit him, he’d never meant it, okay? He’s not cut out to be a parent, he’ll be the first to admit it, but…fuck. And it’s not like he can’t do nothing, his son’s basically the face of the company at this point, as well as half the brains, but…

In the end, Howard decides to punish his son for dragging the company’s name through mud by moving him to the dustiest, worst-funded section of Stark Industries, and putting him in charge of it. Who even cares about green energy these days, anyway?

However, this is Tony we’re talking about. Tony, who, in another life, built a suit of armor of the same weapons used against him, almost entirely out spite. Here, Tony sees what he’s got, cracks his knuckles, and sets to work. 

Revenues go up by 300% in roughly two months, and steadily climb from there—right up until Howard noticed how much R&D’s progress had slowed to a crawl, and had him transfer back. 

That spike of progress in regards to green energy, however, didn’t go unnoticed. Oh well, at least it made for good fodder for the press, right alongside the intellicrops. 

…suffice it is to say, almost everyone who remembered a different life is in for quite the nasty shock because Howard is a piece of work.

It doesn’t help that he takes his time in retiring, either. Those who remember know Obadiah’s a traitor, know that he’s using Howard the same way he used Tony, but good luck proving it when accusing the right-hand man of a guy who once co-founded a vague yet menacing government agency. 

All in all, the situation with Howard’s complicated. 

Everyone knows that if Steve were to ask, he’d rain hell on their behalf [just like his son had, in another life], but at the same time…he’s not the type of ally they want to have. He’s very much like Tony, yet could not be more different if he’d tried. 

He’s stalwart and unrelenting, driven to a fault—but where Tony’s been working hard to make the world a better place, Howard’s demons have been haunting him for far too long for him to do the same. And the sticking point: where Tony hadn’t hesitated in stopping the company from making weapons, Howard wouldn’t. [Not even if Steve asked.]

To sum up: in many ways, the effect he has on the timeline isn’t stellar. This is something nobody expected to need to fix, and is part of why everyone’s really looking forward to Tony remembering—Stark Industries is being led by a war hawk, and in no universe is that a good thing. Kinda ironic, really; they’d expected HYDRA would be the biggest hurdle, when instead it was Howard Stark. 

Also, they’re having a hard time deciding whether or not to go and approach him, since he’s a wild card and the timeline’s been twisted enough as is. […let’s just go with Fury being hella secretive about finding Steve, okay? To keep things simple, for now.] 

That being said, I was kind of picturing Howard leaving the picture after his retirement. Partly because I was thinking that since Tony only ever talks to him about work, there’s nothing else he has left to say to the man who got his mom killed, and partly because I was figuring that at his age, he’s at the risk of having a heart attack or something offscreen. [According to the wiki, he’d have been 91 during Afghanistan, for instance.] 

Ending-wise:

Like I said, wouldn’t be surprised if he died after hearing his son was killed in Afghanistan. 

Heart attack, or from grief [and/or combined with alcohol poisioning as he hits the bottle one last time]—because no matter how hardened he’s been, or how bitter, that was his son. His only child, and he’d outlived countless other people over the years, but…this was his son, all that he had left of his wife. His greatest creation, gone from a world that’s passed him by, and he’s so, so tired…

Obadiah’d be gleeful; he’s the only left to inherit, now, after all—right up until JARVIS remembered, anyway. Then it’s only a matter of minutes for him to find every single instance of his double-dealing, and forwarding a file to every branch of law enforcement in the country, as well as the world. [Or Natasha stepped in, or Bucky finds an exception to his ‘no assassinations’ rule, or something.] 

No chance for reconciliation, here,  between father and son—then again, any chance of it died with Maria, back in 1991. 

As for if Tony came back as Iron Man?

He might very well get a heart attack from the surprise, tbh. Or from the rage, because did his son really just make an announcement about Stark Industries not making weapons—

“I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them—”

Oh. Still. The idea of shutting down the weapons manufacturing is unthinkable to Howard, what was Tony thinking?! 

The more time goes on, the more of a mess it all is, and suddenly Howard’s very glad he’s retired because as is, the discovery that his business partner had been double dealing for years was a bitter pill to swallow. Almost as bitter as the discovery that this was a whole new world, because his son is Iron Man— [and didn’t that dredge up old memories? How was Hank doing these days, anyway?]

The more time goes on, the more it feels like the world’s passed him by, because he’d only ever seen war and yet everyone’s saying his son helped privatize world peace, and…

The more time goes on, the more proud he is of his son, his greatest creation.  

Not that Howard will ever say it out loud, of course; where do you think Tony got his abysmal communication skills and emotional awkwardness from? Tony, in turn, almost never speaks to his father again, and when he does, it’s with an incredibly defensive edge because he’s expecting nothing but disappointment from that corner [as always].

Just…in this one, Howard’s in the back, seeing all this go down, and he’s actually pretty damn proud of his son. Also, there’s several meetings off-camera going on, including Howard meeting Steve at least once and Bucky having an incredibly awkward conversation with the guy over a cup of coffee. 

fun fact: in this AU, when he made press conference he was 100% ready to be disinherited because he knows just how Howard is about the weapons manufacturing thing. Even if he’d been bluffing about it before, Tony was like 95% sure Howard’d actually do it this time, simply because of the nature of the press conference.

Hopefully Howard doesn’t come across as much of an ass here. He’s human, he fucks up, and he dropped the ball big time when it came to his family. 

Off-screen, there’s plenty of guilt over the ‘my drunk driving killed my wife’ thing, and trying to go sober afterwards. [Kinda hard to do it, when self-medicating due to mental health issues a la the shit he’s seen over the years.]

Also, his reaction to Tony’s being not-straight? Bear in mind he’s from a pretty damn conservative era, and isn’t used to the parenting thing. Add in the fact that coming out’s a pretty big deal, and was a way bigger one not too long ago; just check out the reactions to Ellen’s coming out, back in the ‘90s. It was a Very Big Deal, when Tony did it, and to be fair SI had to do a lot of fast talking in the days that followed because of it. Plus, again, Howard’s parenting skills aren’t exactly anything to write home about. 

Dysfunctional families come in all ways, shapes, and forms. Here, the really messed up dynamic + shitty communication skills constitutes the bulk of it, though. Incidentally, that was pretty much Not Cool on Howard’s part, and the main reason I don’t consider it abuse is because it’s not so much a power imbalance thing [both Tony and Howard knew he wasn’t going to go through with it] so much as…well, dysfunctional family stuff in general. 

In this case, their dynamic’s really messed up thanks to Maria’s death, combined with years of Howard’s neglect and alcoholism and Tony’s resentment. 

btw:  if anything looks familiar, it’s because I have several headcanons that tend to be recurring elements in my fics, such as JARVIS’ secretly being closer to Skynet than most would be comfortable with, Howard being a complex character, Maria Carbonell née Stark being awesome, and the list just goes on.

 ..and now the more I think of it the more Howard’s starting to shift from a subplot character to a main one but that’d derail canon even more because of how Tony’d react and brain, no, this is just an AU fic idea not a WIP damn it

[pri5cillasanchez]

3/24/17

Thoughts:

-I attended a group therapy session of some sort at Metropolitan State Hospital last night. I had no intention of going, however, my supervisor recommended I try it out and see if I gain anything from it. So I figured, why not? If it gets him to shut up about it, sure. A lot of deep emotional talks and conversations were exchanged at this session, but one of the saddest conclusions of what I got out from it.. was how alone and emotional detached I am from things that should affect me. And how terrible it is how far along I’ve let myself get messed up inside, without consulting help or reaching out to anyone about how I constantly feel inside. The session began by going around the group, introducing ourselves and stating something we do that makes us feel better. Everyone was mostly saying listen to music, hangout with friends and family, be around people etc. When it had reached my turn, I simply stated that I enjoy being alone with a pen and a journal in order to feel (and maybe some alcohol as well, I thought to myself). I can’t be around people during times I feel down, which is a lot of the time actually. I told them that I’d always felt like the outcast of my family growing up, the neglected one, was never close to my parents and barely talk to them to this day. And so when you’ve been as lonely as I have felt throughout my entire life, writing in a journal almost everyday (something I still do today) makes me feel sane. It makes me feel less alone knowing that theres something that is taking the time to listen to the things going on in my head. Writing releases this hurting built up inside of me, you’ll know the real me and everything I feel through writing. As opposed to me attempting to verbally express myself, you’ll be lucky if you get one word out of me. They applauded and welcomed me after that. Then as people began to talk about something that was bothering them and whatnot, there was one that almost made me emotionally breakdown because I started to think about my own relations with my family. There were these parents that were at the session, talking about their kid with mental illness, I assumed generalized anxiety disorder and an attachment disorder? But they were explaining how when their son was first diagnosed, the father didn’t believe him and thought he was making it up. Then they found out it was real after the doctor confirmed it. The parents used to fight a lot over it because they blamed each other for why their son developed a mental illness. But later, they chose to work it out, educate themselves about mental illness, and attend groups like these to gain a better understanding on how to connect with their son and whatnot. And at the end of their story, the father said they go through all this trouble to understand him better because they love their son that much, regardless of mental illness. And I remember hearing this story and something in me broke. Or more so, my heart deeply ached. Because I am so happy that the parents developed patience and understanding for their son and so extremely thankful that the son has loving parents that will do anything for him. And this other part of the ache, came from the fact that I have absolutely no idea how it feels like to be loved by your parents to that extent. I can’t remember the last time I hugged my parents or told them I loved them or vice versa, it must’ve been maybe when I was around 5 years old or so. I remember watching the way this father talked about his son in such admiration and partly tearing up simultaneously, and thinking to myself how heartwarming it must feel to have family members talk about you like this. Because I have no idea. I don’t have a family like that to turn to in times of need, i don’t have parents I can talk to about things going on in my life. I remember being in high school and my parents finding out I needed a therapist for severe depression self harming and suicidal thoughts, and I got laughed at and dismissed for having the strength to finally voice what I was feeling only to be mocked at. They generalized my negative feelings as a phase every teenager goes through, but the depression was real and they failed as parents to recognize that. To this day, no one has any idea how jealous I get seeing happy families, seeing my friends being close with their mothers and fathers and siblings. You have no idea how lucky you are to feel loved by people who are supposed to love you. That’s why this moment in the therapy session killed me. And I remember feeling empty inside in that moment, because I don’t really have a family like that for me and being alone and depending on myself is something I was forced into my entire life. Another thing I got out of this session, I think it’s time to finally start seeing a therapist because this sadness isn’t going away.

-I’m second guessing my career path again. I’ve been set on being a psychiatric nurse practitioner for years now. However, interning at metro state hospital and consulting with nurses at st jo’s hospital, I see and hear the same thing about psych nurses. They simply give medication to their patient, maybe a bit of interaction, then that’s it.. I don’t want to study psychology and nursing for years only to give these patients medication and not even interact with them. I’m not sure what I want anymore. I enjoy the nursing aspect of what I do. I do enjoy knowing medication, handling patient care, interacting with patients every now and then. But then I miss the psychology aspect, what my college education has consisted of, being able to speak with clients and gaining their trusts and getting to know their stories, hearing about their problems, developing ways in which life improvements could be implemented. So I don’t know. Part of me wants to be the psych nurse. The other part of me wants to be a therapist for adolescents/adults going through depression anxiety bipolar or other mood disorders. Knowing myself.. I have a feeling I will end up pursing and excelling in both.

-Lately, I’ve been feeling lonely again. But I’m doing okay being with myself. I told myself i’m no longer using people as medicine or one night stands out of loneliness and whatnot. And i’m doing well! I’m keeping my word and I feel a lot better about myself in doing so. I’ve been extremely productive as well lately now that I have no distractions holding me back. I plan on keeping it this way until someone proves to me that they are a good one worth putting my time and effort towards. Other than that, i’m going to continue focusing on school and my future and being enough for myself.

-I am so excited for my roadtrip to Utah Nevada Arizona next week. Nature is one of the few things that relaxes me. I can’t wait to get away from everyone and everything for a little while.

[petrichorate]

The Course of Love: Thoughts

The Course of Love (Alain de Botton)

The Course of Love was one of those books where almost every line spoke to me in some way—I was adding notes on almost every page, thinking, “Yes! This is so true!” Much like the other books I’ve really enjoyed recently (like Elena Ferrante’s novels), The Course of Love revealed a lot to me that deeply resonated with me, but that I hadn’t been able to fully express or reflect upon before. It cast an examining and forgiving light on my past experiences, arguments, relationships—all I hope is to carry some of what I’ve learned from this book with me, so that I might learn to cherish and become more charitable.

The book follows a couple from their first meeting, beyond their wedding, through the actual course of love—including children, arguments, and all the infinitely small and large features that compose the journey of a relationship over two people’s lifetimes. It’s an exploration of and a challenge to the Romantic myth, told through an intertwining narrative about Rabih and Kirsten with the author’s own musings (in italics).

Here are some particularly notable parts of the book that I wanted to share (but really, read the whole book—all of it is notable):

This reminds me of a quote from Pride and Prejudice, “A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”: “For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence.”

On finding individuality in small details: “Despite her apparel (or in truth partly because of it), Rabih at once notes in Kirsten a range of traits, psychological and physical, to whose appeal he is susceptible. He observes her unruffled, amused way of responding to the patronizing attitudes of the muscular twelve-man construction crew; the diligence with which she checks off the various items on the schedule; her confident disregard for the norms of fashion and the individuality implied by the slight irregularity in her upper front teeth.”

On weakness in the strong: “They meet again the following week. As they walk back towards the Taj Mahal for a budget and progress report, Rabih asks if he might give her a hand with the bag of files she is carrying, in response to which she laughs and tells him not to be so sexist. It doesn’t seem the right moment to reveal that he would no less gladly help her to move house—or nurse her through malaria. Then again, it only amplifies Rabih’s enthusiasm that Kirsten doesn’t appear to need much help with anything at all—weakness being, in the end, a charming prospect chiefly in the strong.”

On Romantic versus real love stories: “At the gates to the Botanic Garden, Kirsten tells Rabih to call her and admits, with a smile in which he suddenly sees what she must have looked like when she was ten years old, that she’ll be free any evening the following week. On his walk home to Quartermile, wending through the Saturday crowds, Rabih is thrilled enough to want to stop random strangers and share his good fortune with them. He has, without knowing how, richly succeeded at the three central challenges underpinning the Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person, he has opened his heart to her and he has been accepted.  And yet he is, of course, nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.”

On the appeal of weakness when we are not responsible for it: “Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when (as happens in the early days) we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible.”

Again, on the attractiveness of weakness in someone strong: “Kirsten lies in the Rabih’s arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.”

On love being a form of acceptance: “There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple—all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.”

On nicknames in love: “They must normally answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes ‘Teckle’, the Scottish colloquialism for ‘great’, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes ‘Sfouf’, after the dry Lebanese cake flavoured with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square—and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.”

On the awkwardness of starting up intimacy on a second date: “The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.”

On fantasies versus outward behavior: “That respectable-looking people might be inwardly harbouring some beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies, while outwardly seeming to care only about friendly banter—this still strikes Rabih as somehow an entirely surprising and deeply delightful concept, with the immediate power to soothe a raft of his own underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten’s late-night fantasies might have been about him, when she had seemed so reserved at the time, and that she was now so eager and so direct—these revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih’s life.”

On the careful balance of equality in desire: “Rabih runs his fingers roughly through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect, to hold the two genders as equal and to believe that neither person in a relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner appears to have scant interest in equality, nor much concern from the ordinary rules of gender balance, either.”

On the fallacies created by living by yourself: “He proposes with such confidence and certainty because he believes himself to be a really rather straightforward person to live alongside—another tricky circumstantial result of having been on his own for a very long time. The single state has a habit of promoting a mistaken self-image of normalcy. Rabih’s tendency to tidy obsessively when he feels chaotic inside, his habit of using work to ward off his anxieties, the difficulty he has in articulating what’s on his mind when he’s worried, his fury when he can’t find a favourite T-shirt—these eccentricities are all neatly obscured so long as there is no one else around to see him, let alone to create a mess, request that he come and eat his dinner, comment sceptically on his habit of cleaning the TV remote control or ask him to explain what he’s fretting about. Without witnesses, he can operate under the benign illusion that he may just, with the right person, prove no particular challenge to be around.”

On love versus familiarity: “We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood—and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.  How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearned. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”

On our neglect of the “ordinary relationship”: “The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.”

On books knowing about our own lives, and our overestimation of unhappiness: “Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we unhappy; we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.”

On the characteristics of sulking: “At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”

Kirsten sounding distant while secretly feeling despair: “‘Teckle,’ he greets her. ‘Another day of mind-numbing meetings and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so much. I’d pay a lot for a hug from you right now.’ There’s a pause (he feels that he can hear the miles that separate them), then she replies in a flat voice that he has to get his name added to the car insurance before 1 March, adding that their neighbour also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one end, ‘his’ end, of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice of toast on her lap. She pauses again, but when she responds to Rabih, it is with a curt and administrative-sounding ‘Yes’. It’s a pity that he can’t see that she is fighting back tears.”

On taking out our frustrations on the people we care about the most: “The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavours, overlooks us for promotions, reward idiots and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shores. And almost invariably, we can’t complain about any of it. It’s too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame; and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed at).  There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.”

On the Romantic ideal that to love someone means you cannot try to change them: “The very concept of trying to ‘teach’ a lover things feels patronizing, incongruous and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner’s whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complaint; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion. From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging, and even reckless, conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is.”

On how we contrast spouses with people in our lives who don’t have any similar level of responsibility for us, and an alternative perspective on changing our loved ones: “Sentimentally, we contrast the spousal negativity with the encouraging tone of our friends and family, on whom no remotely comparable set of demands has ever been made. There are other ways to look at love. In their philosophy, the ancient Greeks offered a usefully unfashionable perspective on the relationship between love and teaching. In their eyes, love was first and foremost a feeling of admiration for the better sides of another human being. Love was the excitement of coming face to face with virtuous characteristics. It followed that the deepening of love would always involve the desire to teach and in turn to be taught ways to become more virtuous: how to be less angry or less unforgiving, more curious or braver. Sincere lovers could never be content to accept one another just as they were; this would constitute a lazy and cowardly betrayal of the whole purpose of relationships.”

On how children teach us to love, rather than to be loved: “Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.”

Rabih, on changing his presentation of the world for his daughter: “Although cynical by nature, he is now utterly on the side of hope in presenting the world to her. Thus the politicians are trying their best; scientists are right now working on curing diseases; and this would be a very good time to turn off the radio. In some of the more run-down neighborhoods they drive through, he feels like an apologetic official giving a tour to a foreign dignitary. The graffiti will soon be cleaned up, those hooded figures are shouting because they’re happy, the trees are beautiful at this time of year... In the company of his small passenger, he is reliably ashamed of his fellow adults.  As for his own nature, it too has been sanitized and simplified. At home he is ‘Dada’, a man untroubled by career or financial worries, a lover of ice cream, a goofy figure who likes nothing more than to spin his wee girl around and lift her on to his shoulders. He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely himself.”

On the sweetness of children: “Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness, as seen through the prism of adult experience, which is to say from the far side of a substantial amount of suffering, renunciation and discipline. We label as ‘sweet’ children’s open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder and simplicity—qualities which are under severe threat, but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life. The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves—in exile.”

On William’s art and sweetness: “His drawings add to the sweetness. Partly it’s their exuberant optimism. The sun is always out, people are smiling. There’s no attempt to peer below the surface and discover compromises and evasions. In his parents’ eyes, there’s nothing trivial whatsoever about such cheer: hope is an achievement and their little boy is a champion at it. There’s charm in his utter indifference to getting scenes ‘right’. Later, when art classes begin at school, he will be taught the rules of drawing and advised to pay precise attention to what is before his eyes. But for now, he doesn’t have to concern himself with how exactly a branch is attached to a tree trunk or what people’s legs and hands look like. He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe. He cares only about what he feels and what seems like fun at this precise moment; he reminds his parents that there can be a good side to uninhibited egoism.”

On children’s tantrums and why they are a sign of love and comfort: “The boy’s behavior is appalling, of course, and a little surprising (Dada meant so well!), but on this occasion, as on more than a few others, it also stands as a perverse sort of tribute to Rabih as a father. A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult. Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be profoundly benevolent. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—‘I will always be on your side’, ‘You can tell us whatever you’re feeling’—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signalled that they can, and will, take the heat.”

On the difficulty of passing down wisdom to children: “The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. But the progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in re-exploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of our life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.”

On our special admiration of our own children: “At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.”

On how children may measure their future spouses against the love of their parents, and how differently parents act with their children versus with their spouses: “The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don’t come close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted and severe manner why he can’t be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like Rabih, just not the version of him that she ever got to see.”

On the constant need to close the distance between two people: “We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once: at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children and naming each other in their wills. Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break—a day away, a busy period, an evening at work—for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted. It’s therefore a pity how hard it is to find a stigma-free and winning way of admitting to the intensity of our need for reassurance. Even after years together, there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t legitimately exist.”

On fantasies: “From one perspective, it can seem pathetic to have to concoct fantasies—rather than to try to build a life in which daydreams can reliably become realities. But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges. It is, in its own way, an achievement, an emblem of civilization—and an act of kindness.”

On how difficult it is to balance responsibility and empathize in a relationship: “The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple, which means, at heart, an equality of suffering. But calibrating grief to ensure an equal dosage is no easy task; misery is experienced subjectively, and there is always a temptation for each party to form a sincere yet competitive conviction that, in truth, his or her life really is more cursed—in ways that the partner seems uninclined to acknowledge or atone for. It takes a superhuman wisdom to avoid the consoling conclusion that one has the harder life.”

Kirsten, on the responsibilities of a mother and a woman: “‘Yes, women do in fact have needs of their own, and sometimes, even if they have husbands they love and are good mothers, they would like someone new and unknown to notice them and want them desperately. Which doesn’t mean they won’t also be the picture of sensible concern every day and think about what kinds of healthy snacks to pack inside their children’s lunch boxes. Sometimes you seem to believe you’re the only one around here who has an inner life. But all of your very subtle feelings are in the end very normal, and no sign of genius.’”

On jealousy: “However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.”

On infatuations, and on the “cure for love”: “Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way a person has of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry and sensitive; they really may have the humour and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings. The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.”

On different kinds of attachments: “1. ‘I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean with out good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others. I don’t mind spending time on my own.’ (Avoidant Attachment) 2. ‘I want to be emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that they are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them. It can make me feel very upset and annoyed.’ (Anxious Attachment) 3. ‘It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I feel comfortable depending on others and having them depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or not being accepted by others.’ (Secure Attachment)”

On therapy: “It is a pity, therefore, that the insights on offer in the consulting room are so negligible in the wider culture. Their conversations feel like a small laboratory of maturity in a world besotted by the idea of love as an instinct and a feeling beyond examination. That Mrs Fairbairn’s room is tucked up some tenement stairs seems symbolic of the marginalized nature of her occupation. She is the champion of a truth that Rabih and Kirsten are now intimate with, but which they know is woefully prone to get lost in the surrounding noise: that love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”

Rabih, on our immaturity and anxiety: “During his sleepless nights, he occasionally thinks about and misses his mother. He wishes with embarrassing intensity that he might be eight again and curled up under a blanket, with a slight fever, and that she could bring him food and read to him. He longs for her to reassure him about the future, absolve him of his sins and comb his hair neatly into a left-side parting. He is at least mature enough to know there is something important which ought to resist immediate censorship in these regressive states. He can see that he hasn’t, despite the outward signs, come very far. He realizes that anxiety will always dog him. It may appear that each new wave of it is about this or that particular thing—the party where he won’t know many people, the complicated journey he has to make to an unfamiliar country, a dilemma at work—but considered from a broader perspective, the problem is always larger, more damning and more fundamental. He once fantasized that his worries would be stilled if he lived elsewhere, if he attained a few professional goals, if he had a family. But nothing has ever made a difference.”

On only being able to treasure moments after they are over: “There is a photograph he loves in the kitchen, of Kirsten, William, Esther and himself in a park on an autumn day, throwing leaves at one another from a pile blown together by the wind. Joy and abandon are evident in all their faces, a delight in being able to make a mess without consequence. But he recalls, also, how inwardly troubled he was on that day; there was something at work with an engineering company, he was keen to get home and make some calls to an English client, his credit card was far above its limit. Only when events are over is there really any chance for Rabih to enjoy them.”

On having a ‘good enough’ marriage: “Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure, rather than of imagining we have found a way to skirt round the rules of emotional existence. We will all by definition end up with that stock character of our nightmares, ‘the wrong person’.  This needn’t be a disaster, however. Enlightened Romantic pessimism simply assumes that one person can’t be everything to another. We should look for ways to accommodate ourselves as gently and as kindly as we can to the awkward realities of living alongside another fallen creature. There can only ever be a ‘good enough’ marriage. For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a few lovers before settling down, not in order to have had a chance to locate ‘the right person, but in order to have had an ample opportunity to discover at first hand, and in many different contexts, the truth that there isn’t any such person; and that everyone really is a bit wrong when considered from close up.”

On maturity, and how it means we are ready to love: “We speak of ‘love’ as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural and dangerous fixation on the former.  We start out knowing only about ‘being loved’. It comes to seem—quite wrongly—the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed and clear up, while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful. We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds ‘romantic’; yet it is a blueprint for disaster.”

On compatibility: “Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the ‘right’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

On capturing moments of joy: “Wanting to capture this moment, Rabih calls them to gather for a photo, then sets the camera on a rock and runs to get into the shot. He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish. Struggles and conflicts will arise again soon enough: one of the children will become unhappy, Kiresten will make a short-tempered remark in response to something careless he has done, he will remember the challenges he’s facing at work, he will feel scared, bored, spoilt and tired... Rabih’s awareness of the uncertainly makes him want to hang on to the light all the more fervently. If only for a moment, it all makes sense. He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children. But it is all desperately fragile. He knows full well that he has no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.  Very little can be made perfect, he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own.”