#peoples especially online infantalize dogs to such a degree that IS bad or they make it all about training them which turns itself to be

[javiersprincess]

i love dogs but like. idk not in the same way that people who are dog lovers say they do. dogs are my companion my soulmate the one who fills the missing gaps of my heart. who else greets me like its the first time every time? who sleeps besides me and is there when i wake up? who else gives me a thousand kisses and a thousand goodnights? my dog does, my special boy who i love more than anything

[bloojayoolie]

Alive, Being Alone, and Bad: Follow April 25 A MOTHER'S WORST FEAR The Door to Freedom.. The last thing I remember telling the police before they took me away was where Arabella's diapers were and how to take care of her. I felt confused scared and in shock at the thought of not being with my daughter all the time....having to uphold some ideal image of what a mother should be For those who don't know my story it probably feels like I just dropped a bomb on you so let's start at the very beginning... When I first found out I was pregnant the first emotion I remember feeling was anger At that time in my life I wasn't ready for a child. I was busy chasing guys, having sex, and working 11 hour 'dream job' shifts, and contemplating going to vet school. I thought I was 'connected and living the life but I wasn't. I was connected to a deeper drive. A drive to be good' at all costs...a drive to subscribe to what I thought on some level would award me love. You know? THE AMERICAN DREAM... Go to college get a degree build a family etc. None of it felt easy. It often felt like trying to swim against a strong current...the current being my heart. I subscribed to the american dream for a while and even now, as I look back, I wouldn't change the lessons I learned and how it inevitably led me to where I am today but before we get there back to the story.. When I got pregnant I was technically adult (26) but in many ways I was stll a child inside...I hadn't broken free from the constraints of expectations I had taken on from my parents and society. I was dead inside and using sex, work, social media, and food to cope with it. After I found out I was pregnant I considered abortion. Iremember my mom had told me she had one before yet something in me told me no. I wanted to go through with it even though I had no clue who I was or what I was doing. Time passed and my pregnancy didn't get any easier. Work was a struggle. I remember going to farmers markets selling dog treats at 30 weeks after my soul cat suddenly died in my arms. I was at an was shot. I felt alone more thanI ever had and relied heavily on my partner I time low. My self esteem to be there when he wasn't 'home' either I soon got a job as a secretary and found myself following the footsteps of my mother. She was a secretary when she was pregnant with me... Working for 'the man' while her dreams desires passions were put on hold to make a living to make a life for me. She wanted to give me the freedom she never had and the security that she never felt. Being the oldest female she became a mom before she was ready. She had to grow up before she was ready to help her mom who was crumbling as a mostly single mother of 5. I remember hearing stories about grandma lashing out in anger at all 5 kids and imagined that she must've felt trapped too..in this dynamic that has been going on for a LONG time. The cycle came here to break. If I knew what it would take to break this cycle I wouldn't have chosen the path I've walked. I would've told myself it would be too painful and wrong and yet my soul set everything up perfectly and whether I liked it or not. I had signed up for the death of the mother image whether I liked it or not. I chose my path. МОTHERHOOD... I've never been one to pretend to like something I don't and motherhood was one of those dislikes for me. The expectations of motherhood my brain downloaded for the sake of inclusion and connection (as a mother) fucking sucked. I bucked kicked and screamed at them the whole way. My anger was always bubbling beneath the surface ready to come out and react at every 'little" thing. Yet, thing is it WASNT little." It was never about the spilled milk, the poopy messes, or the loud toys. It was about how deprived of love, passion, and turn on I was. My cup was more than empty so the little things always came out BIG. didn't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with myself much less another human being. I remember it getting so bad that I ended up screaming in my Arabella's face when she was an infant because I felt sleep deprived and poweriess to what she needed. Her dad was asleep on the couch pretending to stay asleep because he had work. I felt utterly alone and enslaved to the needs of another human being. It was the perfect recipe for anger and resentment. aPSUa I was selling my soul for money and 'cookies' following the footsteps of a civilized American mom while my wild heart cried out in pain so deep that not even I could hear her. I had pushed her down so far that the only ways I knew how to deal with the grief of that separation at the time was reactivity sex and work. I felt trapped in a world I didn't want to live in. I felt enslaved to an image wanted to shatter. I wanted more for my life and Arabella and felt powerless to creating it especially under the belief that a mother MUST ALWAYS be with her children. I mean if that was true then I was fucked and so was she. When Arabella was about 1 I started going on Tinder. I felt a hunger rising in me. I wanted to feel wanted again and sex seemed like the next best thing. A quick and easy fix to patch over the gaping grief l couldn't bare to look at. After I started meeting quys for quick fucks it became clear how much I wanted to escape my reality as a mother. It became clear that I wanted to feel pleasure...that I wanted to feel ALIVE and even though sex seemed like the answer it wasn't. Time passed and I got bored with Tinder. I started focusing on my career and ended up meeting a guy at an intuitive arts fair. There was IMMEDIATE sexual chemistry. We started dating and my sex drive went through the roof. Not only was he better than the shotty tinder material he was well seasoned in his sexual ity. He gave me permission to express my sexuality in new and exciting ways that I had been longing for. I felt alive again and I attributed it to him. I spent as much time with him as possible and would have Baby sitters and family to watch Arabella just about every weekend. I was addicted to feeling alive thinking it came from HIM. I had no idea that he was pointing to something that I had long forgotten within me. I often felt wrong for having so much fun (without Arabella) when we were apart I never thought of her enough to text to see how she was. I felt guilty thinking that I should be like every other mom and sacrifice myself for her but deep down I knew that that wouldn't help me OR her. I started to see that the more I was happy the more she was happy. It was this fleeting happiness that had become dependent on whether or not I was with my bf or not. The less time I spent with him the more I went into feeling angry and powerless. I was relying on him to BE my source of pleasure. I still had no idea what it felt like to feel turned on in my own light. I spent a lot of time online sharing emotional videos of how motherhood was wearing on me. I eventually started talking about sex. I was having so much fun with my bf and my online followers that I made a sex group wherel encouraged us all to share sex stories in a safe space. As the posts trickled in a mom had mentioned how she rarely has sex because her kids are always around. Wanting to push the boundaries of society and not really thinking responded saying "Oh I've had sex in the same room hlla before I was bouncing on his cock while she was bouncing on his chest. as So of course, given that no context was shared around this statement, I started receiving messages telling me "you're going to rot in jail." This is still the hardest part of my story to share because of how shocking it is and how much it shuts people down and kicks their judgements into overdrive. The only thing that keeps me from NOT sharing it is my commitment to the bigger message behind all of this So context wise (if you're still coherently listening and curious)is: A was 2.5 at the time asleep in her bed next to mine. My bf and I woke up before her and started having sex and she woke up seeing me bouncing thinking I was playing so she started bouncing on her bed and came over to where we were I didn't want to shame her so I didn't just jump up and freak out. I allowed the situation to dissipate by focusing on the play aspect INSTEAD of the sexual. At the time I didn't know what the term sex positive meant.. All I knew was that I didn't want her to experience the sexual shame and shut down I experienced...that I didn't want her to feel a sense of 'wrong when it came sex And what gets twisted is that a sex positive approach is seen as grooming on INVOLVING children in sexual acts which is the direction CPS and the cops took my situation. My post was turned in a long with a picture of me and A in the bathtub where she was pouring water on my leg which was made to be perverted by a woman who had her chief of police husband and news reporter file a police report On the afternoon of August 1st I got a call from CPS and set up a visit with seize them. Later that night the police broke down my door with a warrant my electronics. They found a picture I had taken of A playing naked in a tub in my bfs backyard while he was sitting naked on the couch in the background. That was, as you can imagine, enough for the conservative county of Montgomery TX to take me in under the charge 'indecent exposure with a child At that point I was in pure shock. I couldn't feel a thing or smile for months and even though my story is dramatic my hope is that you don't get SO caught up in the drama that you miss the bittersweet beauty of the journey itself. Shock was the beginning of the mom image shattering for me....Resistance was the second. I didn't know how to let go so the first thing I went to to cope was work. (self development and hustling). I was determined to make everything right. I clung even more to the image of a 'good mom and what that would mean. Thoughts would run through my head like... What kind of mom doesn't have her shit together for her daughter? What kind of mom doesn't work and take care of everything? What kind of mom loses' her daughter? What kind of mom doesn't have a nice place and a school set up for her daughter? and whether I was aware of these thoughts or not they were driving me. The hard truth underneath it all was that I was grieving. I had been grieving most of my life. I thought I was grieving Arabella but through lots of retreats therapy tears and shifts I came to realize that what I was REALLY grieving was my heart (that Arabella so beautifully reflected back to me). I was grieving my dreams desires and passions that I had pushed down rejected and shamed. I was grieving my love. I had become so shut down afraid and walled off from the world that the big beautiful bold sensual radiant parts of me had become dormant. What first felt like a loss turned out to be the biggest miracle of my life. A miracle of love rising in in the 'impossible' Learning to dance through the biggest storm of my life was a miracle. To be as open loving and happy as I am now is a miracle (pain and beauty included). It was not easy to face my sexual shame, grief, and choices that led to an unfulfilled life. I was not easy to see that I was the one who created my life down to every last detail all the way from my childhood to now. The separation with Arabella being a huge part of that. And the joy and the sensual aliveness that has come from that (mess and all) is everything I've always wanted AND it is a path I would've never consciously chosen for myself. I have been reborn and as dramatic as my path has been I wouldn't change it for the world because know if I did I wouldn't be here speaking to it and delivering a message that has the power to create new worlds where women are free from the role of 'mother. If you're a mom still reading this I want to tell you something from my heart to yours from the depths of my soul to yours...as much as you may believe your role to be your children there is more love and purpose for you here. The world needs your light. I had no idea what the world was missing from me until started to come back to life laughing playing dreaming and creating. The color flooded back through the tears and the willingness to love again...I began to remember my innocence my DESIRE, my essence, and my wild heart that never burned out...my love that knows no bounds. Living my pleasure is the greatest gift I can possibly give myself and the children that choose me as their vessel to experience theirs. I'm traveling, dancing, and living in the city of my choice with incredible supportive friends. It seems like it wasn't that long ago when I was looking out through a glass wall wondering when it would be my turn to play and have fun. I sat on the sidelines pouting. I forgot who I was and that, with every cell of my being, I have the power to make my dreams come true. LOVE created the miracle that is now my life and when you say "But what about your daughter?" My response is this...she is not mine to claim. She is on her path and l am on mine. We are forever connected. I choose to trust that every decision I make simply because it feels good is a love letter I write not only to her but to every child woman and man on this planet One of the most brain dead, irresponsible “mothers” in existence. TD:LR in comments

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey you, during the course of this season i Have seen more and more people leave the fandom or grow disinterested in spn, and im confused why that it. I get why maybe s12 wouldnt be a fave season but if I look at the wank and bads of the previous ones (destiel fiasco in/out the show s9, charlies death Dean cruelty to Cas in s10, Dean/baby love interest s11) s12 didnt really do much that would drive people away en masse I feel? Yet it seems like more people left it :(

Heya! :D

Idk, maybe it was that more vocal people drifted off? I always feel like people’s attention spans are usually only a few years or so. I mean, I feel like I’ve been in the fandom a Long Time and I’ve only been here since the end of season 9, so really this is only my 3rd hiatus, and coming up to 4th year watching with fandom, on a 12 year show I’ve been watching for nearly 10 years, for the most part as a moderately casual viewer… I think I clock up about 5 years major interest and then drift, based on me vs several other things like how invested I was in LotR or Harry Potter or Animorphs, or whatever (to go back in time to my pre-teen interests :P) and it’s not a bad thing and I still love 2 of those franchises and have engagement in them but back to being a casual fan (if “religiously watches LotR at Christmas” is casual allowing for cultural/social stuff, but I’m not composing Legolas/Aragon smut in my teenage journal in secret code any more :P)��

Anyway the season 8 bubble of fandom could be deflating about now - that’s long enough for people to feel they’ve given the show their full attention and it’s still going so it’s getting tiring. That’s the major feeling I get - people are exhausted and we had a baby boomer fandom around season 8 so that ~generation~ of fans is now reaching the natural end of its attention span in a very human natural way. But there’s a ton of new or newer fans who are still enjoying the heck out of it, and the fandom’s still huge and full of people with a commitment to the show or ships. And some people don’t work like that and are loyal from start to finish or commit to TV shows fully to see them to their end. I would dump a show I was getting bored of but come back to watch the end later in a big marathon to find out what happened, but Supernatural hasn’t given me a reason to get totally un-invested until that time… I suspect a lot of people will watch the entire show ONE DAY but don’t want to do fandom and give it all their leisure time any more either.

[under a cut for meandering rambling]

But yeah I think you’ve named some pretty big mass exodus moments (I would like to clarify “Dean/baby” is “Dean/Amara-as-an-infant” right? Because Dean/Baby totally was a thing in 11x04 and it was GLORIOUS :P) and I feel like I DID lose people from my dash all through the time I’ve been watching. Heck, I hit up fandom right after 9x18, and started following people, and that was the JIB of “we don’t play it that way” so I immediately was following several abandoned blogs and I’d barely even started to get to know the landscape :P I feel like people HAVE been jumping ship the entire time and I remember most of those instances as sadly clearing several favourite people off my dash or turning them into different fandom blogs that I eventually unfollowed out of confusion… 

I don’t know, I think people leave when they want to leave because as long as you like the core of a thing and it holds your interest, you can forgive or ignore or scowl at but hold out for better the bad bits and problematic parts. I’m sort of weary of them killing all the women and PoC but I’m still at the stage where I identify it sucks, but I still care too much about the main characters that I’m sort of stuck on this ride with them. 

(I have 2x21 paused on the screen next to me right as Sam meets all the special children, aka introducing Lily the lesbian who dies horribly as a disposable red shirt to show how awful this situation is, and Jake, a black guy whose power is being super strong and to fall to Azazel’s manipulation, kill Sam, and then get killed with extreme overkill by Sam. In the same season he set the cops on Gordon, also a black man who was really aggro and cruel, but in the next season becomes a monster and Sam kills him also one of the most brutal kills he has up there with Jake. Basically, the show’s always had some issues and if we carried on watching all the way to season 12, well, apply self-reflection, but at this point if you’ve been watching as long as I have, you just kind of accept the show sucks at certain things, and for ME personally it’s not kicking off the sort of weariness that others felt about Billie and Alicia and Eileen being killed off this season)

… I don’t really have a point, expect about the demographics of fandom during season 8 getting to the end of their interest now. I don’t think EVERYONE who did will leave, and we’re getting fresh blood all the time, but I think that’s just part of the nature of being in fandom. I don’t think season 12 is particularly bad from my experience, although some pretty high profile bloggers have gotten exhausted - again, they’ve been maintaining blogs and producing content since single digit seasons so they’ve contributed a LOT to the fandom and there’s a fatigue about contribution as well… 

That’s partially why I meta and gif and write fic and occasionally make random shitposts… I don’t want to burn out because any one of those things on its own can get pretty boring, even writing fic. Or especially, idk, as a writer I tend to bounce around projects, so this is keeping me weirdly focused on writing my original fiction on one side of my brain and fan fic on the other and it seems to be a better way of splitting my attention… But I digress. :P 

I know how to manage my own brain to some degree but I have a lot of time to contemplate and self-reflect on why I’m in fandom and what I get out of it, and mostly I just conclude I’m bored and house-bound and I’ve found a few tried and tested things that get me some positive attention in a non-weird rat with a pleasure button way like people running hate blogs or something… But I know my own head and that I can get bored of stuff so I marathon a lot of other shows and think about other things than fandom stuff as much as possible and just let this be the gutter my brain drains into when my attention span is too shot to hell to do anything else and I just want to slump over a keyboard and do the easiest activity I know bar playing Animal Crossing for hours. 

Other people with busier lives and actual jobs and energy and limbs that don’t just randomly stop working when they do anything for more than 5 minutes and so on might not be casual fans but they make a certain space in their life for fandom and get out of it what they need but it’s a high quality demand thing so if their carefully allocated me-time isn’t rewarding them like it should it’s totally their right to go find another OTP to amuse themselves with a fandom producing stuff they want to see and a media source that’s giving them what they want immediately and in a way they don’t have to “look for scraps” as some people were saying about Destiel in season 9, 10 and 11 while things were thinner on the ground.

And as one of the too-much-free-time fandom contributors, I’ve got an enormous luxury to stick out things people who don’t have time for being jerked around or over-analysing to find what they want to see have… Although I’ll try and pass on my thoughts for the people with less time to think them to try and help them enjoy themselves as much as possible :P Anyway I think a whole range of reasons happen that people might get fatigued of the show especially as lives change and people blogging enthusiastically one day might get a job or a new relationship or a dog or SOMETHING and just not spend quite so much time online and then discover they don’t NEED to spend so much time on fandom, and drift naturally… Then try and find some reason on the show they’ve stopped watching, but often it’s just that things look worse after time away when the spark has started to fade because it’s not being nurtured in the same way any more. 

And 12 years is a LONG ASS TIME to be invested in something, so I think in general the fatigue or changing interests is all over the place and we might see it more and more as people drift… People who might watch it all as a catch up one day maybe a year or two after the show ends, but just don’t have the patience to stay in fandom and put in that energy over and over and over. 

Also the show is in a really weird place where it has some of the best writers it’s ever had in Berens and the newbie writers, and Dabb’s doing some fascinating things with the plot, but Buckleming are the executors of the story, in several interpretations of that phrase :P And there are people who skip MotW and find them unimportant or would judge the season on the plot, not the heart of the story… It’s a pretty precarious place, quality-wise. I think season 11 and 12 are a proper like, silver age revival of the MotW (with Nancy Won and Robbie giving last season a massive boost) where I think those episodes are really innovative and interesting, and the writers are being allowed a lot of freedom to play on THOSE canvases, but while the character development and *reasons* for the story have been fascinating and important, obviously 5 of the plot episodes this latest season were Buckleming and crucial to watch to know wtf was going on, even though the writers of those episodes seem to have such a terrible problem with hating the audience (literally, it’s in their scripts and off-screen comments), the genre, second drafts, common human decency towards characters and understanding why they’re important, pacing, you name it… :P So the show literally has 2 faces these days and depending on which one you see when you think of season 12, probably defines how you feel about the show as a whole and all that. I treat the plot episodes these days as a necessary evil between episodes written by people who actually like the show and care about it and its characters (see also: my non-stop sobbing about 12x22 since it aired)… But seeing the other face can really cast a cloud over the show and I’ve seen it make people wonder why the other writers even try. (I mean Perez did an incredible salvage job on Crowley in 12x15 only for it to immediately get yanked away again the next time BL wrote him and I think only they really got to play with him for the rest of the season, meaning all that work to make it seem important and thematically relevant that Perez had set up in 12x12 and messed with in 12x15 ended up being for nothing and Dabb had no time to do anything deep with Crowley, because 12x13 turns out to be the big Crowley & Rowena farewell episode, except for how it flubbed the entire premise of Grand Send Off Episode a la 7x10 or something despite all the ingredients being there…)

I am just rambling now so… Gonna hit post. Hope this makes sense :P This is just my interpretation of how people are feeling/how fandom as an entity seems to work, so it’s pretty subjective and others might feel very differently especially people who have been in negative echo chambers while I’ve built myself a reasonably positive one plus SENSIBLE and CONSTRUCTIVE wanky criticism that doesn’t go off the deep end :P