#shoutout to my period for being regular enough that i timed it perfectly also.
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i was grumbling a few days ago about the sisyphean task of cleaning for 7 hours to prepare for an impending flare but actually it turned out to be worth it because 1) it was easy for my partners to cook and serve food while i was laid up, and 2) when i woke up today in my post-flare era, it only took an hour to do dishes + take out trash + clean the kitchen & return it to my pre-flare state. perhaps marathon cleaning is not sisyphean after all!
#my day is so bright and filled with the potential to do shit that Isn't Cleaning The House#autoimmune tag#shoutout to my period for being regular enough that i timed it perfectly also.
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ego timaeus
this was also posted on my pillowfort.
this is an essay about ego death, selfshaping, and taboo mental illnesses. itâs not really a direct response to any of the voluntary identity discourses flying around on tumblr right now, but mention of âego alterationâ did make me think iâve never really talked about this all in one place. so i hope itâs a useful exploration of both voluntary identity and the idea of becoming someone that you werenât always.
in march of 2019, something happened to me.
iâd like to think that Iâve never been actively malicious. i never burned ants with a magnifying glass or any of that stereotypical shit. but in high school i was completely insensitive, i was beyond arrogant, i was incessantly critical. i didnât have friends and i didnât speak to anyone and i liked it that way. i would lie in bed at night and fume about how life was so unfair and everyone else was stupid. i was never intentionally cruel, but i had an incredibly poor understanding of how easily i could hurt people and not a single care about changing that. i was starting to develop what i only just this year figured out was antisocial personality disorder.
in the years immediately prior to 2019, when i started doing the whole median thing, for whatever reason, all the asshole traits got compacted into one specific facet. and i think it was the contrast between that and other facets that werenât complete shitwads that put the first cracks in the foundation.
the second thing was alt+h. if thereâs one thing Iâve learned from alt+h and from the general interest in activism and anarchism itâs propelled me towards, itâs that forming real, meaningful connections with people is the single most necessary thing for achieving personal freedom. thatâs been a hard pill to swallow. iâm still working on it (and on figuring out to what extent i just have strong boundaries and how itâs âacceptableâ to hold those).
the third was that i met people who consistently showed up for me. who looked at me, warts and all, and said âi love youâ but also âyou really need to stop acting like thisâ. and stood with me, over and over again, on that hard line of real acceptance, between apologia and abjuration, no matter how many times i fucked up and hurt them. i probably deserved less chances than they gave me. but they really cared about me, and i really cared about them. and when you have ASPD, itâs really, really hard to care about literally anything. this was a critical hit straight to the heart.
(if youâre reading this, you know who you are. i love you.)
in march of 2019, i suddenly wasnât that person any more. i had been moved enough that i didnât consider being an asshole my entire fucking personality. but all the bad traits didnât magically vanish. it doesnât work like that. they just became unmoored, floating around the mordspace. and when wei werenât strongly phased to a specific facet who actually had a personality to stand on, i felt like a ghost.
i felt like that for weeks to months. i don't really remember. the thing that mystics donât tell you about ego death is that most of the time, if you donât have a new and improved something else to move onto, you either have to swim back to the shore or drown. i also donât remember how it made its way to me, but my life ring was reading detective pony.
death of the author? check. excessive rumination about the nature of meaning? check. author-cum-protagonist who feels burdened with glorious purpose, craves control and struggles with hurting the people who care about him? check, check and check. itâs a tough, emotionally draining read. but itâs cathartic, in all the worst ways possible.
(without a shred of irony, detective pony is one of the most fantastic pieces of metafiction that exists. you don't have to have read homestuck to a appreciate it. i canât recommend it enough.)
i had the perfect template for my new self. or should i say i was the perfect template? who âiâ is gets difficult here even putting the median shit aside. iâve described myself as a walk-in, which is confusing, because that means something different in plural circles, but iâm talking about the new age sense of the word:
â[...] souls are said to "walk in" during a period of intense personal problems on the part of the departing soul, or during or because of an accident or trauma. [âŠ] The walk-in being/individual retains the memories of the original personality, but does not have emotions associated with the memories. As they integrate they bring their own mental, emotional, spiritual consciousness and evolve the life to resonate with their purpose and intentions.â - x
for me itâs not as⊠well, new-age-y as that. i donât believe i came âfromâ anywhere, i donât have a past. i am a weird bundle of arcs and tropes and ideas that somehow became sentient. i am, yâknow, a fictional character. and i feel like i mean that in a very different way than most fictionfolk (that could be its own post, honestly).
so that didnât magically solve the problem either. it just provided a trajectory. dirk strider is a person who starts bad, and gets better, kind of (epilogues and hs^2 do not @ me). i still needed to take ownership of all the shitty traits my predecessor had left behind and Do The Work on them, too.
and i have worked my ass off over the past year-and-a-bit on improving myself. a lot of it has been with plain old CBT and self-help workbooks (shoutout to pretty much everything by dr faith harper), but a lot of it has also been narrative identity and personal mythology kinds of stuff. itâs been communing with gods and magic ritual kinds of stuff. iâve been doing ABC exercises right along with binging tvtropes and researching comparative indo-european mythology and designing worldbuilding and lore that tells a highly metaphorical story about how i get from A to B, emotionally speaking.
it runs into the same problem a lot of selfshaping stuff does in that a lot of it is so intensely personal that itâs difficult to talk about. also in my case a good handful of this work has been done under a magical apprenticeship that iâm literally sworn to secrecy about so ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ but i think these broad strokes are sufficient for telling my story at this level right now. the point being, i am not the kind of person who can get all the way with just regular secular materialist mental health shit.
which is to say, the work is still far from over! in fact, i feel like the selfshapey parts are only just picking up for me, now iâve run the course of what the aforementioned secular materialist mental health shit is actually capable of doing. i have made massive strides in my mental health and interpersonal functioning already, but iâm not a perfectly healthy person. iâm not going to be dis-identifying with the ASPD label any time soon (or ever? that could be its own post too). and, even so, selfshaping could provide a pathway not just for survival, but excellence.
i am going to be my best self, and at some point in the past i decided that self is going to be dirk motherfucking strider.
#alterhuman#otherlink#copinglink#selfshaping#voluntary identity#ego alteration#fictionfolk#squawking#đ
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Hello! Iâm excited to do this as I donât rec much, reccing things terrifies me because I hate feeling like Iâm picking/playing favourites and leaving people out, and I also am just generally bad at picking my favourites of anything because I like too many things too much. I also am very bad at bookmarking, keeping track of fics I read, and generally being able to recall the names of fics to be able to rec them. So, with all that in mind I thought Iâd start with something easy, on the understanding that this isnât by any means an exhaustive list and Iâd be more comfortable with this being âten fics I likeâ rather than a top ten because there are far far too many fics I love in this fandom to ever do a list of favourites. So, in no particular order:Â
Ten fics under ten thousand words (that I love):
Hypocrite by Lynds [@gold-from-strawâ] - Rating: G, WC: 1.6k, Pairing: N/A
Summary: How can Todd possibly expect to be forgiven if he still can't forgive everyone who hurt him? Why I love it: This is one of my favourite explorations of a very specific part of Toddâs character, and itâs worth noting that the characteristics are spot on. I come back to this fic over and over again, and while in many ways itâs painful itâs also real and honest and just a beautiful bit of writing concerning Todd and his guilt.
Dork Greatly's Holistic Laundry Service by obscureenthusiast - Rating: G, WC: 2.8k, Pairing: Brotzly (kind of)
Summary: Dirk very generously offers to help Todd with his household chores... an offer which Todd eventually takes him up on. The laundry gets a little out of hand when Todd remembers a game he and Amanda used to play and Dirk enthusiastically joins.
Why I love it:Â Cute!! Itâs cute silly fun of these two bonding over laundry and sock puppets, gentle ribbing and acting like children. It gets even better when Farah joins in, Iâm a sucker for those three being dorks together.Â
My Mind Is My Own Worst Enemy; It Keeps Trying To Convince Me That You Are by DontOffendTheBees [@dont-offend-the-beesâââ] Â - Â Rating: T, WC: 1.6k, Pairing: Brotzly
Summary: His voice is so familiar and yet also just so⊠wrong. Thereâs something missing in it. Some vital aspect of Todd that Dirk didnât even notice until it was gone.
Why I love it: ANGST! This appeals to every single one of my angst tendencies, and as Iâm using this rec list to rec things I love I have to give a shoutout to the most wonderfully angsty fic Iâve read. I love this fic. I love the premise, I love the tension, I love the way itâs written, I love how awful the situation is. I love the way this fic is resolved, I love that itâs plausible, realistic in that. Itâs incredibly emotional in all the worst ways and that makes it one of my favourite short fics ever.
Cut To The Feeling by zaphodthebb - Â Rating: G, WC: 2.1k, Pairing: BrotzlyÂ
Summary: Post Blackwing rescue, Todd is awake and on guard duty. He's had too much coffee. Also, Dirk can't sleep.
Why I love it: Iâm such a sucker for post-big-things fic and this one nails the feeling perfectly. You can feel the exhaustion, the way smaller things they didnât have time to worry about before catching up to them now they can stop for a moment. Both Dirk and Todd feel tired and real and itâs just a lovely read.Â
split the secret up by piggy09 [@sharkodactyl] - Â Rating: T, WC: 5.1k, Pairing: N/A
Summary: He asks if Dirk can hear it and Dirk just laughs, the sound reassuringly human.Well, not reassuringly. Reassuringly would mean Todd had to be reassured.Itâs just â it sounds human. Which is good. Because Dirk is human. Definitely
Why I love it: Why donât I love it? The idea of the Blackwing subjects being Eldritch in some way is a concept Iâve explored numerous times because it appeals to me so much, and if it appeals to you then you want to read this fic. Itâs eerie and unsettling, the ability to hit the tone of not-quite-right is perfect, the pacing is astounding and itâs so hard to write a fic like this and keep the idea together as well as itâs done here. I love experimental styles of writing and when they turn out like this itâs not hard to see why. I love this fic a lot. (I would also recommend reading on desktop not mobile because the formatting of this fic adds so much to it!)
Catharsis by ben8615 Â - Â Rating: T, WC: 1.3k, Pairing: Brotzly
Summary: Dirk is broken as heck, so why not have him cry it out? That's it. That's the whole story. You can all go home now.
Why I love it: The title and summary say it all really! This is such a lovely little fic about Dirk getting some catharsis in a way we all know he desperately needs, and paired with Todd taking care of him so gently? Itâs such a perfect, wonderful little fic that just feels quiet and safe and wonderful.
objects in mirror may be closer than they appear by sharlook [@aceabed] -  Rating: T, WC: 8.8k, Pairing: Brotzly
Summary: Youâre alone, with your arms wrapped tight around a pillow at god knows what time in the night, and there are tears running down your face because you canât seem to stop thinking about it, not even in your dreams. And then clutching your covers you get an idea. (In which Dirk has nightmares about Blackwing, goes to Todd for help, and is really, really, really in love.)
Why I love it: This fic aches in such a beautiful way. It doesnât shy away from the ramifications of what Dirk went through and how that plays out for him, his fears and paranoias feel real and present in a way I really appreciate. The choice to use second person is a really good one, itâs a tricky pov to pull off but this definitely gets it right and is better for it. The development of Dirk and Toddâs relationship, particularly looking at Toddâs reactions to Dirkâs worries through Dirkâs eyes is just wonderful and itâs well worth a read.Â
Those Grey Days by TheRoyalPrussianArmy [@theroyalprussianarmyâ] Â - Â Rating: G, WC: 2.4k, Pairing: Brotzly
Summary: The bad days weren't always days. They could creep up, like some small, silent predator and deliver a swift bite that poisoned its victim's outlook. A blue sky could turn into grey one heartbeat after a laugh. The gentle sound of the wind in the trees would suddenly become overwhelmingly irritating. Even so much as a door closing or footsteps across the floor could lead to a strong desire to cry and scream, to rage and throw things. They would always pass, of course, but in the moment they were devastating.
Why I love it: We all know I love a good Todd characterisation, and I love a good exploration of the shitty realities of bad mental health and letting other people help you with that. I really really love this fic for both of those reasons, itâs unflinching without being gratuitous, and I really love the way it doesnât promise sudden miraculous recovery at the hands of someone else, but ends on a gentler kind of promise of having people be there for you if you let them be. Also Iâm a huge fan of the way this is written, it reads so nicely and itâs more than worth it.Â
Light Work by  juniper_and_lamplight  [@juniper-and-lamplightââââ]  -  Rating: T, WC: 2.8k, Pairing: Farina
Summary: Tina had, with her typical blunt insight, poked at Farahâs motivations for baking the cake herself. âIs it some kind of control-freaky thing? Like you canât trust anyone else to get it right?â And while Farah couldnât honestly say no to that question, her real motivation ran deeper.
Why I love it: This fic is wonderful. I always think we need more Farah insights, and this fic does just that in such a beautiful way, catching on her idiosyncrasies and the character building is to die for. Itâs such a simple idea and yet the story itself manages to be rich and full, the imagery is simply gorgeous and every little snippet of a look into Farahâs life as it was in the past and is right now just delights me. Honestly this fic will leave you with a sweet, warm feeling all the way down to your toes and dwelling in the comfort of knowing Farah is loved by herself and others in all the ways she deserves.
or make a home by reptilianraven [@actualbirdââ] Â - Â Rating: T, WC: 6.6k, Pairing: Brotzly
Summary: âPerhaps,â Dirk says in his best âyes, Iâm bullshitting you, but Iâm your boyfriend and you love me stillâ voice. âThe universe wants it this way.ââThe universe wants you to always forget to put the cap back on the toothpaste,â Todd says, unimpressed, screwing the cap on himself.-Or Toddâs adventures in dating Dirk Gently, the mundanities of which unsurprisingly turning out to not be very mundane at all (featuring, among other things: intergalactic wormholes, regular periods of lying down on the floor, and several annoying habits that concern toothpaste and toothbrushes.)
Why I love it: You know those fics you read that make you want to throw your face into a pillow and scream with emotions? Yeah. This fic is so ridiculously good. The beauty of mundane daily rituals that make up part of a relationship! The way those things grow together, evolving into each others spaces and lives, this fic explores that so well. The portrayal of their relationship is so soft and tender, so happy and bright and silly and sad and everything a relationship should be. Honestly I canât overstate enough how much I love this fic, I canât go on and on here, but Iâm about 99% sure this fic invented love-in-small-spaces kinda way. Also, sidetracking from all my other comments, if you like Mikaâs song Tiny Love and the reprise of it then youâll love this fic because I listened to it and immediately thought of it. Beautiful, emotional, fic. If this fic was a blanket Iâd burrito myself in it and never leave.Â
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There we go! I obviously have far more than ten fics that fall into this category and hopefully more of them will be cropping up over the course of this week if I can find the time to make that happen, but as this is something Iâm lowkey scared of doing Iâm pleased enough to have this much! Thank you so much to @dghdafeedbackfestâ for organising this!
If you read any of these fics and like them please let the author know! Also check out some of their other stuff, because a lot of these authors are writers I love in general!Â
#dghda feedback fest#dghda#fic recs#my posts#this fandom is so talented and I love you all so much#i had to limit myself to ten because otherwise it never would have happened#and I could make ten more of these lists and still not have all my fave fics in it#i love everyone who contributes to this fandom#and I neeeeeeed to work my way through both my fic and commenting backlog because I am so far behind it's not even funny#i also wanted to rec stuff I love but don't see recced as often#esp older stuff that I keep going back to
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