#raven is weird and has some freaky stuff about him but he's mostly just super tragic backstory along with his fucked up stuff

[lucifer-kane]

The idea of seeing like. Lloydven on the streets just walking around and you look at Raven and you're like. Oh that's a campy weird guy. You look at Lloyd Allen and you're like. That's the most Normal man to ever exist. When in reality yeah Raven is weird as hell he has his quirks. Lloyd, honestly, I would say is objectively more of weird motherfucker

[forceyourway]

Tree of Life Shadow Work Challenge

Day Three: “What aspect of my home life might I benefit from taking into consideration?”

(Using Loki’s tarot deck, “The Raven’s Prophecy Tarot”)

I’m loathe to take a picture of the entire tree again, because it’s a pain to assemble. I totally took one and then realized I set it up wrong and sigh. I might edit this with the tree picture later.

Six of Cups - I thought this was a weird card to be here, because it’s literally about considering your childhood. Like he’s just saying the question back at me, y’know? It might be that I need to acknowledge positive memories, because I’m so overwhelmed by negative ones. It might just be talking about evaluating my childhood self, and who I was then. There is a sort of implication of innocence? I think with this. Like, all of this stuff happened, and I was a child.

Home Life - Security, Belonging, Self-Worth

Reflect on what your home life was like growing up. Consider things like household income, inter-family relationship dynamics, overall lifestyle, etc. Was financial stability a source of stress? Was the relationship between your parents conflicted? Did you feel accepted by your family? Did you feel safe at home? Did you live a life in a suburban setting, in the boonies, in an orphanage?

Security My childhood was comfortable, financially-speaking. My dad has a very high-paying job. We moved out of our townhouse, and into a house-house when I was in 3rd-ish grade, and we rented out the townhouse. Every now and then, my dad would need to go there to fix something or what have you, as the owner, and my sister and I were always very excited to tag along. We wanted to go back and see where we grew up, and see if our old babysitter was available to play with, or go to the park. The park behind our house was pretty much always changing, so that was neat. One time, my sister and I were wandering around the Big Park. We heard they had a splash pad, but when we went there, the water was off, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. Some other kids were there, older kids, probably 16+. About 5 of them, I think. We followed them through a path in the woods that led to a park we’d never been to before. Along the way, I picked up a big stick and was using it like a walking staff, as kids do. I kept trying to talk to the other kids, oblivious that they did not want to play with me, and they took offense to being followed around by an annoying white girl with a big stick. It came to a point where they were demanding I put the stick down, and I stood my ground, because wtf this is my stick, I found it, I’m keeping it. I didn’t understand the connotation. They beat the shit out of me. All of them. I remember hitting the ground hard, and pain. My sister ran. I was in middle school at the time, and she was even younger, but it stuck with me that she ran. When I told my dad what happened, he at first acted like he didn’t believe me, and then said he’d go investigate and tell the other kids off. That was a lie. I really thought he was gonna do it, and was really hurt when he didn’t. He ended up hardly acknowledging what happened to me at all. This is why I have abandonment issues. I grew up feeling like I couldn’t rely on my family to protect me when I needed it. Later, toward the end of middle school, I got into a fight with a girl at her sleepover party. She’d been pushing me around all night, and when she tried to pour body spray down my back, that was the last straw. I grabbed the closest thing and chucked it at her. I think I meant to grab my pillow - it was right there - but ended up grabbing a tiny (as in, could fit in your hand) wire earring-case or whatever. I remember being shocked when I saw what I did. It hit her in the head/face. She started screaming “You hurt me!” and started kicking me repeatedly in the stomach. Pain. Chaos. I couldn’t so much breathe. Her mother looked at me like I was dirt after that, because I must have deserved it. Her father wasn’t so sure, but I still needed to get out of their house immediately. My dad picked me up. He remembered what happened at the park, and said I must have deserved it. I didn’t tell him what happened. None of the girls stood up for me, either. They were kind of complicit, in that they let her - or joined in on - pushing me around the whole night, before the fight...

We grew up in a small town in a suburb-ish area. No crime to speak of. There were a couple of kids our age on the street, most notably two sisters who were me and my sister’s best friends. Their mother hated us and was very vocal about it with our parents, telling them we had “A Serious Problem.” All the damn time. She and her friend (another neighbor) kept calling me a Smartass. I...didn’t know what that meant. Ever oblivious and ever self-incriminating, I took it as a compliment and said thank you. That hardly helped matters. It took me a long time to realize that the girls pretty much didn’t give a shit about us; they played with us when it was convenient, but not when others were around. The younger one and my sister got physical a lot. They made fun of us all the time, and mostly it went over our heads. My mom was very irresponsible with money, eating out all the time, shopping all the time, etc. And frequently she was out of work; most of her jobs were as a temp, and there was a lot of in-between time. This was a huge point of tension with her and my dad, and eventually we ended up very deep in debt, though it hardly showed. My dad started gambling to compensate; sometimes he won big, but mostly it was just a huge money drain, and it became an addiction for him. When my mom finally left my dad for good, he got stuck with the debt, and essentially went bankrupt. He’s now living in my decrepit childhood home, eating ramen noodles, and god only knows how far behind he is on the bills. He’s still got that good job, but it’s not enough, and he's still gambling. My parents were always fighting, and my dad got so loud that I was always expecting something physical to go down. Always expecting I was gonna get hit. My mom got physical with me. My sister got physical with me. My dad got physical with me (after I provoked him). Home was not a safe place for me. I didn’t feel I could rely on my family. My mother was always late, very late, when picking me up from school, like I was an afterthought. They abandoned me when I needed them, and they sure as hell didn’t protect me. I used to pretend that maybe I wasn’t really their child, maybe I was secretly adopted. I’d convince myself that to help me get by. Unfortunately, I saw too much of them in me - and me in them - to keep acting as if they weren’t my “real” parents.

Belonging My parents really, really wanted me to be someone else. I hated shopping with my mom, because she was always trying to play dress up with me. Put stuff on me I didn’t like, because that’s how she wanted me to be. And she’d get aggressive if I refused to go with her, or told her I didn’t like the clothes. To this day, she thinks I’m still in some “goth” phase, despite constantly wearing varied and multicolored outfits around her for many years. A few years ago, when I was looking for a job, she told me she found an opening at whatever-store-or-other...which she immediately followed with “as if you could ever work there; you have no fashion sense!” I have excellent fashion sense, thank you. My dad actually forced me to go to a tanning booth when I was...14? 15? because I was pale and I had acne, and he was trying to “fix” it. I was super, super opposed to this, but he forced me into it, telling me I should be grateful and all that shit. I was supposed to get naked and lay in this freaky light machine. I remember being super uncomfortable, and I refused to strip all the way down. He was so, so angry with me. We didn’t go again.

To this day, my dad constantly remarks on what a weird kid I am. How it’s not “normal” that I don’t drink or smoke (or that I never have), and he started smoking when he was 12, or whatever, and used to steal beer all the time. It seemed like he wanted me to do all that stuff, because it was “part of growing up???” I am wondering now if this might be one of his weird as hell attempts at humor; the problem with that is, no one ever knows when he’s kidding...

Self-worth I suck at math. I have dyscalclia. I just don’t brain it right. My dad is obsessed with math. I went through workbook after workbook as a child, in some attempt to make me good at it. I hated them. I snuck calculators when calculators weren’t allowed. Never learned my times tables; to this day, he’ll throw a random multiplication question at me every now and then. I was forced to go to Math Camp, which I hated. I think I might have cried one day, on the way. Nothing helped. When I went to the second Catholic school, the one with the Hive Mentality, my math teacher did a thing where we had to do warm-up problems before we could do anything else. Everyone brought up their notebooks and she’d check them, and then they’d go on to the next thing. I spent the whole class going up. I had no idea what I was doing wrong, and she refused to help me. I was in tears by the end, just writing down random answers after going through every possible way I could have gotten it wrong.

I was really good at school, once I hit public school. Always on Honor Roll. In high school, I came close to having straight A’s a few times, but math always held me back. It was pretty solidly at a C. I had one geometry teacher who refused to help me - or anyone - when we were struggling. I think I got a D. First time ever. Of course, a huge deal was made about this. The next semester, I got a new geometry teacher, and instantly shot up to an A. He was very kind and helpful, and he used colored chalk so you could see the different elements of a problem. I had like a 103%, and was super, super proud that I shot from a D to an A, and I had straight A’s. My dad just said “We’ll see how long that lasts.” When my sister got straight A’s, he gave her $100, because she was the “dumb” one, and I was the “smart” one, and I should have had straight A’s all the time???