#ocd discussion

[madetolooklikeus]

To get a little bit real on my fanart tumblr, i'm feeling kind of weird abt my FatT tarot card project.

I joked a couple months back that I was getting into mysticism via researching tarot for my fanart at a time of vulnerability, which yeah, but maybe a more useful way to frame it is that i developed/deepened magical ocd type thought patterns (alongside other stuff abt contamination and checking) because of some intense life stress and anxiety. Not that I believed in divination in any real way but i did get scared of numbers and the tarot interest feels like another facet of the same thing. Scrambling for control and assurence type behaviors.

I've realized it early enough i feel like (caught myself doing sth pretty unhinged and life-disrupting) and have been fairly successful at breaking myself of the thought patterns, but now i feel uncomfortable engaging with concepts of divination at all. Which, being scared of ideas bc they are tainted is not not the same kind of behavior i'm trying to recover from, just transferred onto a different type of correct thought to think in order to keep myself safe and in control.

So perhaps i do need to get back to it. Like being ok with tarot cards is not a huge priority for me, but otoh these types of fears spread and infect other areas of your life super easily so it's better to deal with them. Tagging my painting of Tender in Anticipation as queen of cups felt super bad but i pushed through and it does get easier the more you do it.

[butchspace]

I guess I kind of just use this account for PSAs now, and this has been on my mind a lot lately.

I figured out that I have OCD a few years ago, and recently I’ve seen a lot of bad advice around dealing with intrusive thoughts and obsessions.

There’s that post that goes around occasionally about “taking pictures of your oven knobs before you leave” or other things I’ve seen that say to “make a weird face when you lock your door.” THESE ARE COMPULSIONS. If you have/suspect you have OCD or you often struggle with things like that, please do not follow this advice. Instead, try to accept your intrusive thoughts and move on, not argue with them. Over time, they will get easier and easier to deal with. Ruminating, stressing, or arguing with them just makes them worse in the long run.

If you think you might have OCD and want to seek a specialist, the IOCDF’s home page has a lot of resources under the “find help” tab, including a locator.

I’m going to put the rest under a read-more because I’m going to talk a bit more in depth about intrusive thoughts and compulsions. This mostly because good OCD info is so sparse on line, and I’ve spent many hours compulsively researching OCD lmao.

Content warning:

discussion of unreality/doubting one’s own perception

discussion of specific compulsions

I’m not going to push this point too hard or shame anyone who doesn’t want to follow it, because OCD doesn’t really just go away. It’s a constant struggle. I give in to compulsions regularly, even though I am medicated and have seen a specialist to learn actual coping skills. It’s hard to resist sometimes and you don’t always have the energy, the awareness, or the power to ignore them. You do what you have to do to get through your day. The main difference is that the right medication and the right therapist make it easier to stay out of the spiral and to leave a spiral when you’re in one. They still happen. You still kind of have to play everything by ear.

Similarly, it is super fucking hard to get help or even get diagnosed. No regular therapist actually knows what the fuck it looks like, and specialists are few and far between and often don’t take insurance. It’s not fair or easy or necessarily productive to try and do exposure response prevention on yourself. Your “good coping skills” can even turn into an obsession or compulsion, where you’re constantly worried about what is an intrusive thought and what is not, or if you’re responding to them properly.

What I want to do is try to give at least some useful advice to people who are struggling with intrusive thoughts.

The best way to respond to them is not at all. This is especially true with OCD, because the response to them is sort of the root of this disorder. Sometimes, it’s recommended that with depression or anxiety you challenge your thoughts. In OCD, it’s the opposite. Challenging them can so easily lead you down a compulsion spiral. (More about that cycle from a professional.)

Compulsions can be entirely mental, but I’ll use a common behavioral one to look at how engaging with compulsions can go:

You start by taking a picture of the your stove knobs to make sure they’re all off. That works for a few hours or days, but then you start wondering if the knob is ever-so-slightly in the “on” position. You wonder if the picture proves they’re off enough. You forget to take the picture at all, and have to go back in to check anyways. You check your phone a few times before leaving to ensure that the picture is still there. You take several pictures because you can’t tell if you actually took any at all. You start to wonder if you can even trust what you see before your very eyes. What if you’re just imagining that the knobs are set to off? What if you’re just imagining the whole picture to begin with? The picture allows you to engage with your checking compulsion throughout the day, strengthening the connection between the intrusive thought and the urgency to do something about it. That means it gets worse. That means you find new ways to doubt your perception or your memory or whatever.

It can eventually get really bad. It’s hard and awful to try and deal with this on your own, but sometimes you have to.

It’s so shit. It’s so fucking shit how long many people suffer with mental illness without even knowing what’s going on. I didn’t know that my constant, overwhelming guilt over almost everything I’d ever thought or said or done or maybe did and couldn’t remember was the result of a disorder. It was so freeing to realize there was actually something that might help me, and I could learn to just live with myself and my weird ass thoughts that don’t necessarily mean anything at all. It’s so shit that OCD-awareness is so low among therapists. I was never going to get diagnosed until I found an OCD SPECIALIST (bold, italicized, all caps. Don’t trust people on psychology today who just put OCD in the list of what they treat.) and went over the Y-BOCS with her. It’s all so shit that several therapists I came to with textbook examples of OCD either ignored me or didn’t have the tools to help. I told one of them I “didn’t feel connected to reality” and he kind just went 🤷.

I just want everyone who is in that/a similar situation to at least have this information available to them.

If you want to learn more, these blogs from Sheppard Pratt were the best discussion of OCD I found online that really described what I was going through. They’re written by licensed therapists, several (all?) of whom live with OCD. They’re very healing to read if this is something you’re struggling with, or something you think you might be struggling with, and great in general if you want to learn more about OCD.

Whatever’s going on, OCD or not, have some grace with yourself. Take a few minutes today and do something kind for yourself, even just think one nice thing about yourself. You’re doing the best you can.

[ruegarding]

anyway here's my rant:

despite her comment in son, hazel doesn't have much adhd/dyslexia coding. her treatment at st agnes has more to do w being a black girl in the 1930's and her powers/curse than her possible adhd/dyslexia, considering she never mentions any symptoms specific to adhd or dyslexia in her backstory. the closest things are her interest in horses, which could be considered a hyper-fixation, and her flashbacks, which could be argued as daydreaming associated w inattentive adhd. furthermore, her powers could easily be used as a commentary on masking similar to the general attitude towards her vs other dead ppl (she looks alive, so she deserves to be alive, unlike all these other ppl who went thru the doors of death). overall, interesting set up, not expanded upon in canon.

similarly, the only time piper is ever implied to have adhd is in that boo scene, which doesn't hold much weight bc it's a general statement in an impersonal pov (as opposed to "piper was only able to keep track bc of her adhd/demigod abilities," still in third person pov, but a more personalized statement). this post began as a quest to answer the question "how does piper's adhd manifest," and the answer is "uhhhhhhhhhhh."

continuing w the trend, jason is never implied to have adhd or dyslexia at all. would have been interesting to see, considering jason has the whole gifted-kid-burn-out thing going on, but alas.

i'm not including the statement annabeth makes abt demigods typically having one or both and hazel's statement abt "just being a demigod," bc it's also established that it's not a requirement. the fandom wiki claims frank is the only demigod to not have adhd: if "just being a demigod" means that every demigod has adhd/dyslexia, then frank, inarguably, has adhd/dyslexia, as well.

more importantly, in a story where adhd and dyslexia are explicitly addressed and considered the cornerstone of the world building, i need it to be explicitly said that a character has adhd/dyslexia in order to give credit to canon (my personal hcs are a different story).

so, it seems like leo is the only one out of the lost trio w adhd or dyslexia, and it's only adhd. he frequently references things he's reading and shows no issue doing so, given that it's in a language he understands.

interestingly, leo claims "he couldn’t read ancient greek" in hoh, so it could be that the ease w learning ancient greek (and potentially latin) is exclusive to those w dyslexia. however, this has been as inconsistent as the actual dedication to giving demigods adhd and/or dyslexia. for example, chiron says the ability is "in their blood" in tlh w no mention of dyslexia, but in tlt annabeth says percy has dyslexia bc "[his] mind is hardwired for ancient greek."

the only character to bring up how dyslexia affects them in hoo is percy, making it seem like his dyslexia is much worse than annabeth's, the only other character who we know is dyslexic (from pjo, it's never mentioned in hoo). if leo is "seriously adhd," then percy is seriously dyslexic. something to be said how they're both treated as comic relief in fandom, considering.

frank not being diagnosed despite his dyspraxia coding could be used as a commentary on medical racism and the model minority stereotype. since frank is exclusively listed as the only demigod to not have either diagnosis and his dyspraxia coding eventually disappears, it doesn't appear that that was the intention.

moving to a more theoretical discussion, it's hard to say what is/is not definitively adhd/dyslexia symptoms, specifically using canon, considering we rarely see any of the demigods acting "normal." the majority of the time, they're on a quest/in an extreme situation. contrast w pjo, where we learn things abt percy's adhd and dyslexia while he's at school, a relatively normal situation, and then can apply it to the rest of the series. w hoo, it's almost all guesswork.

leo mentions that his adhd affects his memory, so we know that similar moments can be attributed to his adhd. but is hazel forgetting part of sciron's story a symptom of adhd or just a normal thing that happens bc forgetting things in stressful situations is normal? is jason's seemingly permanent amnesia a symptom of the memory wipe or is it exacerbated by adhd? is piper's aversion to feminine clothing and make up caused by sensory issues? we'll never know, bc they're never said to have adhd.

[goosologist]

[the-bar-sinister]

If you are a person who:

Has violent, abusive, harmful, or destructive thoughts

Enjoys having violent, abusive, harmful, or destructive thoughts

Enjoys fiction with violent, abusive, harmful, or destructive characters

Creates fiction with violent, abusive, harmful, or destructive characters

And you do not actually do any violent, abusive, harmful or destructive actions

You are not a bad person.

You are a good person.

Thoughts and fiction do not define morality.

Actions define morality.

Having or enjoying bad thoughts or bad fiction doesn’t mean you will act on those feelings.

Liking negative themes in fiction or having daydreams about harmful actions will not cause you to do harm.

Thoughts and fiction aren’t harmful.

[ohnoitsnuance]

It’s been really weird to see this website go from “trigger warnings are important to avoid mental health attacks from those with PTSD or OCD” to “trigger warnings are just an excuse to avoid the horrors of reality by the well off.”

I understand entirely what the second argument is getting at, because people absolutely use the phrase incorrectly to block out ideas or events that might upset them just a little (and should upset them!) but at the same time, now when I use this site, not only can I not brace myself for content that triggers my OCD but I also get double triggered by being told my want of triggers is a moral failing.

[keshetchai]

As someone who enjoys religion blogging/discussions, I've come to realize that it's a good practice to be aware of the general signs/symptoms of religious-OCD thinking (aka scrupulosity), because if the conversation is taking on all the hallmarks of scrupulosity, it's actually a definitive sign that we cannot meaningfully and compassionately engage in a conversation about religion in a healthy way. I've actually had this play out a significant number of times online, and when I realized what it was, I also began to realize that the intrusive thoughts/obsessive and compulsive thinking are only ever fed by continuing the discussion with that person.

[[ Important edit to clarify why I am saying it's not healthy — made after I went back to look for more concrete facts about OCD or anxiety (I have GAD, not OCD, but many resources overlap since they're both anxiety disorders):

When Reassurance is Harmful — this explains how/why reassurance-seeking specifically about an OCD fear is a compulsive behavior, and engaging with reassurance-seeking interferes with recovery/management/treatment.

This table from the Anxiety Disorders Center lists key differences between Information Seeking and Reassurance Seeking.

This IOCDF page on Scrupulosity info for Faith Leaders identifies "symptom accommodation" as enabling. Two of the examples of doing this by participating in the OCD behavior are: "Engage in excessive conversation focused on if-then scenarios (e.g., "If I did this, then would X or Y happen? And what if Z was involved? How about W?")" And, "Repeatedly answering questions about ‘correct’ religious or faith practices."

That page also goes on to outline more info about reassurance seeking. "Although providing answers to (often simple!) questions may seem harmless, providing reassurance serves to maintain the anxiety disorder cycle." (This BMC psychiatry article cites a lot of related studies establishing this.)

The IOCDF page on What is OCD and Scrupulosity? ]]

Imo, the responsible thing to do is to recognize that (even if the other person hasn't outright stated it/isn't diagnosed)* the conversation is not about religion, it is about needing mental health support from professionals and experts. Talking to me, the layperson who enjoys chatting theology and my religion — is not only not helping, but is actively harmful. I'm not just talking about the person who I replied to today, either. Like I've said, I've seen this happen dozens of times in various online forums.

*[while I am against diagnosing strangers on the internet, it's important to realize A) lots of people don't know what Scrupulosity is, so it's possible they've never considered this is a mental health concern that could be treated, and that B) for the purposes of my concern, it doesn't matter if they actually have diagnosed OCD. The only thing that matters is that their thought-process causes them genuine distress/fear, and every response given to them seems to only incite new/additional distressing questions/thoughts, or further entrenches the original distress.]

Ultimately, any discussion aside from "you might want to speak to a mental health professional about scrupulosity OCD" seemingly puts me in the position of feeling as if I am being used for their self-harm. I hate that feeling. I do not want to be leverage for fear and pain. I have GAD, I despise the idea that I am making things worse.

No matter how much I love religious discussion, the answer in these cases is always "please reach out to an OCD specialist/mental health professional. I am not qualified to discuss this." And then to stop there. I have never once seen anyone stuck in this compulsive thought spiral be reassured or feel any better by hearing from someone else's approach to theology handled with things like empathy, compassion, logic, or even atheism. It doesn't matter what we say, how we say it, or how we relate to our own religion. The urge to engage in this kind of conversation in order to chat about religion is a sign that we are not equipped to help.

You can't have a conversation here, because intentionally or not, ten times out of ten, you are adding fuel to the fire. Just like people can't simply tell me something that would erase/talk me out of my ADHD/depression/anxiety disorder, you also cannot simply argue/reassure/persuade people out of scrupulosity. We should not try. We have a responsibility to consider that it's outright harmful to do so, and to disengage.

[lord-squiggletits]

Had a long voice chat about Pen Pals AU last night in which some really nice clarifications/revelations were had such as:

It's a post-war/rebuilding society fic where I want to get into the actual rebuilding and not solely focus on the romance. How to do that? Use Pharma's position as CMO who's basically functioning as a public health administrator dealing with the public health issues that come from reestablishing infrastructure and making sure a whole city(ies) of people stays healthy

Ex: energon shortages/rationing, part and transplant shortages, disease/epidemic management ("the C in COVID stands for Cybertron"), medical personnel/hospital shortage in comparison to the increasing population, substance abuse among the veteran population, discrimination in treatment of medical professionals (CC/forged, Bot/Con, etc)

Tarn and Pharma interact at work not knowing they're each other's pen pal, and it happens in the context of Tarn (as newly minted Decepticon activist/political figure) coming to Pharma with equity-related issues in public healthcare. They like each other as coworkers bc they're actually of similar minds when it comes to dealing with these problems. Tarn is pleasantly surprised by an Autobot willing to admit fault with the system. Pharma is happy to have someone competent on his side who also happens to be very imposing. Also they're supposed to be promoting cross-faction cooperation so this coworker relationship makes them feel like they're upholding their promises to their faction

Pharma deals with a lot of social bullshit and interpersonal expectations as CMO because people keep comparing him to Ratchet, or in the case of neutrals, their impression of him is based on his pre-war "famous for being forged" thing.

Realizing that without even intending to, the way I'm writing Tarn in this AU is a dead ringer for post-traumatic OCD/trauma-related OCD. Doesn't really change how I'm going to write him, but having an actual name/label and knowledge that this is an Actual Thing does help a lot (I didn't know you could develop OCD from trauma, I thought it was just an innate disorder that triggered due to genes/environment/etc and Tarn as I'm writing him in PPAU only had PTSD)

[slingerapen]

Like why was triple threat Gay OCD and Latin uncle bruno such a threat to meaningful encanto discussions

[balladofthewhitehorse]

''-And that's how I finally got my diagnosis.'' Scotland finished, sighing as he leaned back in his chair; A kingfisher rushed past, bringing a smile to the man's grim face. ''It...I dunno. It's weird.'' England snorted faintly, a strange buzz in his chest as he watched the reeds sway. ''I...uh, so do I say congratulations or my condolences?'' He asked quietly, smiling sheepishly at Scotland. ''Naw, you don't have to say anything. I suppose it's a relief to know there's help out there.'' Scotland looked at him - and England felt a pang of suspicion. What's that look mean? ''Maybe you should consider therapy. They might be able to he-'' ''-Help me get carted off to Bedlam?'' England scoffed. ''No way. I'm fine.'' ''England...'' ''I'm fine!'' His voice was a knife in the silence. ''Now shut the fuck up!'' ''You're not fine! I'm just trying to help! It'd be a good idea for you-'' ''-I'm fine. Scotland. I'm not...I'm not messed up like you.'' ''Oh, that's a load of rubbish. You're fucked in the head.'' England's eyes went wide, his face pale as he slowly stood up with a vicious snarl. ''I am fucking fine, or do I need to prove it to you?!'' His hand curled into a fist.

[shiveringsoldier]

The discourse surrounding M. Night Shyamalan’s films frustrates me to no end. Almost all of his films demonize mental illness and/or psychosis by having mentally ill and/or psychotic people commit violent acts, and it goes without saying that such depictions are harmful to a population that is already stigmatized. So that is a fair and justified criticism to make. But I feel like literally nobody brings that up. Instead, his biggest naysayers make fun of his plot twists and make racist jokes about his name.

[carriehobbs]

i would love to talk about juno 💕💕 !!

(these are probably not the best screenshots of juno but they are also my favourites. the first one because it shows the colour of her eyes and her little under-eye mole (the most important thing in the world) and the second one because i like how her armour looks and the shine on her hair)

juno is my other (and first) redemption durge! she's a wood half-elf ranger (hunter subclass, urban tracker/bounty hunter specs) who romanced gale! she fits very well into the selfless hero archetype she gets cast as during the adventure, but her only talking-to-people stat is intimidation, which i choose to represent as her having an off-putting and kind of threatening energy with strangers. anyone who knows her knows that she's a caring person, but she always reads as just a little bit dangerous to others. i miss playing her so much because she was completely unstoppable in combat (with 3 attacks (two main hand and one offhand that dealt almost as much damage), a cape that turns her invisible, 16m/approx 52 feet of movement speed, and an ac of 23).

juno's post-game breakdown (which is what i said i wanted to talk about the other day) is kind of a two-hander. firstly, it lets me play with one of my favourite tropes of all time: when an amnesiac character is immediately given a new (and often important) job upon entering a community, builds their entire identity around being the person who does that job, and then loses the ability to do the job (either permanently or temporarily). imagine that your entire sense of identity, self, value, purpose, etc., was all tied to one particular thing. the only person you have ever known yourself to be is the person who does this thing, but now you don't have that thing anymore. so who the fuck are you?

in juno's case, she doesn't remember her life leading the bhaalist cult. i know in act 3 you get some memories back, but i prefer to think of it more like she is able to remember some key details of her life that were previously lost to her and can remember some things that happened, but not everything, and that those memories don't really feel like they're hers. she knows objectively who she was and what she did, but it feels more like seeing someone else's memories rather than her own. she feels like her life started with the nautiloid crash.

this means that her entire life (that she remembers) involves solving everyone's problems, saving the day, and stopping the cult of the absolute. it's the only purpose she's ever had. it's the only context for her life that she's ever been given. she's always been needed. she doesn't see herself as "a person who happens to be doing this important quest" but as "the person who does this important quest", which is a subtle but significant difference.

and then she achieves her goal. she realizes her life's purpose. and she's still here, existing, except now she's directionless. she leaves one of the only cities she's ever known for a city she's only ever seen part of in one of gale's illusions. all of her friends (the only people she remembers being close to, the only family she remembers having) go their different directions and find new ways to give their lives meaning. and juno goes with gale to waterdeep.

and juno is genuinely thrilled to go to waterdeep and to marry gale. and at first things are going well, when they're in that honeymoon period as they first settle in. i think things start going south after gale starts working at blackstaff. because now she has empty hours to fill with her day while he's at work. she has no purpose anymore, she's in a brand new city, and her social circle has been reduced to her boyfriend, his mom, and his flying cat (who doesn't seem to like her that much). wedding planning can only occupy her so much. she doesn't even have a job to just fill her time. and given that the last two jobs listed on her resume are "ex-bhaalist cult leader" and "saviour of baldur's gate" and her professional skills are "murder", she's not exactly in a great position to get a job at waterdeep's fantasy walmart.

and, as much as i love gale, he gives me the impression of someone who can get a little too absorbed in their work. considering he's just returned from a year-long self-imposed seclusion followed by a quest to stop the illithid grand design, this is the first time he's been back in a wizardly and academic environment in a while. he's also not had a mortal partner for quite some time and thus not had to balance his professional life with his personal life the way he does now. so as much as he loves juno and wants to be a good partner to her, i don't think it's unrealistic to imagine him getting a little too caught up in his work and having some late nights at blackstaff.

which would be fine, except juno's now the partner who waits all day for him to come home, only for him to be late. which isn't a position she could ever be happy being in. she needs something to do, something to drive her. she's never been idle (or relaxed) before.

all of this (the directionlessness, the lack of purpose and meaning, the almost nonexistent social life, the idle time) is compounded by the second major component of juno's post-game breakdown: redemption durge kind of has harm ocd? it's not a perfect 1:1 representation of what ocd is like, but there are enough similarities that i had to stop as i was playing and go, "does durge have harm ocd? why did no one ever mention that durge kind of has harm ocd?"

(this entire description is going to be somewhat of an oversimplification of what ocd is like but) as redemption durge, you experience intense, ego-dystonic and unwanted thoughts (and sometimes images) that urge you to harm others throughout your daily life. furthermore, you literally have a guy (sceleritas fel) who follows you around, deliberately voicing these unwanted thoughts and trying to convince you that they are real and inevitable (a physical manifestation of intrusive thoughts). these thoughts may target the people or things you care about most, such as your friends or your partner. you may find yourself confessing these thoughts to people around you and seeking reassurance that these thoughts are not real, have not really happened, or that you are a good person.

the only place where this doesn't really fit is in the compulsions themselves: (again, this is an oversimplification, but) with ocd, your intrusive thoughts say "xyz thing is happening/is going to happen" and, in response, you perform a compulsion that ocd says will prevent the intrusive thought from coming true (ex. ocd tells you that, if you handle knives while cooking, you will use those knives to hurt someone in your home. the compulsion could be something like avoiding using knives or performing a particular ritual/habitual behaviour before or after you use knives. ocd tells you that in some way this repetitive, compulsive behaviour prevents your fear/intrusive thoughts (that you could hurt someone) from being realized). in the case of redemption durge, the compulsion kind of is the fear? you fear that you will hurt someone as a result of your urges, and so the compulsive behaviour that results is... for you to hurt people? it kind of falls apart here.

but after juno rejects bhaal and has her dark urges taken from her, there's so much space left over for actual ocd. a lot of her intrusive thoughts involve her urges coming back and causing her to hurt people. she avoids cooking (especially meats) because she fears working with meat will cause her urges to rise again (flesh is flesh, after all). she's terrified that she will kill gale without noticing it, particularly during the night (after all, she killed alfira in her sleep, and tried to kill gale in her sleep once), and so she compulsively checks on gale when he's home with her (things like leaving a room, having an intrusive thought about having killed him while she was in the room with him and having forgotten that she did it, and having to go back into the room she's just left to see that he's safe). things like that. and the thing about ocd is that it can get worse when you're idle, and so juno's empty time during the day exacerbates the symptoms of her ocd, making them much more acute.

but juno doesn't tell gale about these struggles (both to find a sense of purpose and a reason for her own existence after the defeat of the absolute and a resurgence of fears around her dark urges) because she doesn't want him to think she's not happy with him in waterdeep. she's decidedly not happy there (she's lonely, scared, aimless), but she wants to be happy there, and she hates the idea that she could ever make gale think she regrets coming to waterdeep with him or agreeing to marry him (which she doesn't, she does want those things, it's just hard right now). and she feels shame, too, i think, for struggling. everyone else seems to have settled so easily either back into their old lives or into new lives, and she seems to be the only one having trouble.

and so i think she kind of carries on with things getting progressively worse until everything becomes so unmanageable that it comes to a head. i don't know specifically the catalyst for it, but eventually juno has to tell gale about all of the things she's been struggling with. it's explosive, there are a lot of tears (and at least one wail about how tara doesn't even like her. juno has not been taking this well), and ultimately their relationship comes out stronger for having weathered this storm together. because now juno has expressed her needs and, while gale can't fix either of these problems for her, he can support her as her partner when he didn't know she needed his support before.

and eventually juno does find a new purpose: she decides to start doing whatever research she can into bhaal and bhaalspawn. she seeks to understand the information about herself and her legacy that she's been missing since the amnesia, and to be prepared in case bhaal or his other spawn rear their ugly heads again (and, though she and gale are not decided on if they want children, she has determined that she would not have biological children before she knows what happens to the children of bhaalspawn who have been disowned and stripped of their urges - she wouldn't want to pass her urges on, or give bhaal the chance to turn a child of hers into his new chosen).

but it makes the 6 month reunion in the epilogue very bittersweet for juno. though she's doing better by then than she was, she still feels delayed compared to everyone else, and she still feels a lot of shame and embarrassment over the ways she struggled to adjust to life after the absolute when everyone else seemed to manage so easily (especially since everyone keeps asking her what she's been doing and how she is). and just because she's doing better doesn't mean that the spectre of those hard times doesn't linger. at this point, she and gale aren't even married - the game gives you the option to reference your wedding day, but i never choose it because, in my mind, after juno has her big breakdown, she and gale decide to delay the wedding. they've not called off the engagement, but just decided to leave wedding planning until she's feeling better and more settled in their new lives together.

time (and a new direction) helps juno settle in waterdeep. eventually she and gale do marry and she gets used to the city and starts to make friends (and makes regular trips to see the other companions, no matter how far and wide they're spread now). she grows closer with gale's mother morena and finds more family in her. she and tara form an uneasy truce that grows into mutual respect and eventually affection (though juno knows her friendship with tara will never touch what tara has with gale). so, while things are rough for a while, they do get better :)

[six-of-cringe]

Am I the only one that feels super uncomfortable with being placed under the "neurodivergent" umbrella because of OCD? From what I understand, neurodivergence describes people whose minds process information/are wired differently, but is more of a neutral difference rather than all negative. It implies that there are pros and cons to the condition, that it's just another way of being, and that it makes up a part of your identity - who YOU actually are. Please correct me if that's not accurate, but if that's the case, then I hate the idea of OCD being associated with me in that way. I don't care if other people identify with neurodivergence on account of their OCD, but to me the condition is a burden, pure and simple, and I find strength in the idea that my OCD doesn't represent who I am as a person. I have my personality, and OCD is a malignant growth that I have to work to cope with so that it doesn't keep me from being my true and best self. Aligning it with neurodivergence feels to me like fusing it to my identity, implying that OCD is essential to my personality, how I take in the world, responsible for even the good aspects of me. It makes it seem like OCD HAS "pros" to it, which only suggests that if I treat it, the things that make me "good" or "myself" will go away, a fear I've struggled to overcome for a long time. It doesn't represent and is not responsible for what I am like as a person. It's a malfunction of my brain, and treating it as a neutral difference or as inextricable from my personhood spits in the face of all the work I've done to be okay

[nicollekidman]

being in the incest show fandom really changes ones perspective because what do you mean there are people who think tenrose is problematic? the thousand year old alien in love with a 19 year old in my children's sci-fi tv show??

hndhfhsjjasf it's kind of just a choice of how you feel like navigating your personal preferences/feelings + meeting the material where it's at/on it's own terms. like asoiaf exists in a universe where incest is both completely normalized AND traditionally reviled, and presented both erotically and as a way to interrogate ideas of hereditary power, familial abuse, and gendered structures..... if you the viewer/reader don't want to meet those relationships on those terms that's completely fine and normal! incest is very much not something most people are comfortable with, even in fiction. relationships between immortal characters and young characters, often underage girls, is a similar sort of thing. like if you don't enjoy all that that entails, absolutely. i get it! but for me personally...... i do not want to always read/watch a story about two immortal beings falling in love, and anything else is going to have a power imbalance/inherent inequality that is either baked into the premise (in doctor who's case - rose as a standin for humanity, rose as a 19 year old who is equally Old to an audience of children and Young to an audience of adults, rose as everything made impossible by the circumstances and genre trappings of the narrative... but even so....) or critiqued within it....

anyways at this point in my life the only things i deem Problematic are those that cause/enact harm on others, and anything else is a personal choice to engage based on your own comfort/enjoyment so. the worst thing a television pairing can be is boring to me <3 love monsters and aliens and supernatural creatures and their comparatively immature humans <3

[majorshatterandhare]

Thinking to myself “man it’s a good thing there nine mechanisms to project my disabilities onto, wouldn’t want people to think I’m headcanoning them to have an unrealistic amount of issues.” When it’s like, I have all these issues! And some people have way more comorbidities than me!

[crabofthewoods]

it kind of annoys me when someone who isn’t diagnosed with ocd says that they have it in the context of like, being a perfectionist and liking things to be organized

i don’t have ocd and i don’t claim to know what it’s like but im pretty damn sure that ocd isn’t just liking things to look symmetrical

it’s not a silly quirky thing it’s a real mental illness

some girls in one of my classes were talking to each other and one of them mentioned that they knew someone who claimed to have ocd, and then she proceeded to say that he didn’t have ocd because his class notes were messy

???? since when was it your place to decide that??